Posted on April 25, 2013

 

 

 

 

   LEADERSHIP

I’d rather see a sermon

Than hear one any day

I’d rather one walk with me

Than merely show the way

The eye’s a better pupil

And more willing than the ear

Fine counsel is confusing

But example’s always clear

And though I may misunderstand

The fine lessons that you give

There’s no misunderstanding

How you act and how you live.

 

Edgar A. Guest

 

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Lincoln‘s Leadership Principles

• You must seek and require access to reliable and up-to-date information.
• Be the very embodiment of good temper and affability.
• Seek casual contact with your subordinates. It is as meaningful as a formal gathering, if not more so.
• Build strong alliances.
• Wage only one war at a time.
• Invest time and money in better understanding human nature.
• Let your followers learn that you are firm, resolute, and committed in the daily performance of your duty. Doing so will gain their respect and trust.
• Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed.
• When you extinguish hope, you create desperation.
• Persuade rather than coerce.
• Use force only as a last resort.
• Your followers generally want to believe that what they do is their own idea and, more importantly, that it genuinely makes a difference.
• Delegate responsibility and authority by empowering people to act on their own.
• A good leader avoids issuing orders, preferring to request, imply, or make suggestions.
• Honesty and integrity are the best policies.
• Give your subordinates a fair chance with equal freedom and opportunity for success.
• You must be consistently fair and decent, in both the business and the personal side of life.
• Stand with anybody who stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.
• Never crush a man out, thereby making him and his friends permanent enemies of your organization.
• Your organization will take on the personality of its top leader.
• Have malice toward none and charity for all.
• Have the courage to handle unjust criticism.
• Don’t be terrified by an excited populace and hindered from speaking you honest sentiments.
• It’s not entirely safe to allow a misrepresentation to go uncontradicted.
• Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.
• Do the very best you know how – the very best you can – and keep doing so until the end.
• If you yield to even one false charge, you may open yourself up to other unjust attacks.
• The probability that you may fall in the struggle ought not to deter you from the support of a cause you believe to be just.
• Make consistency one of the main cogs in the machinery of your corporation.
• Don’t surrender the game leaving any available card unplayed.
• Try to correct errors when they are shown to be errors; and adopt new views as fast as they appear to be true views.
• Make no explanation to your enemies. What they want is a squabble and a fuss; and that they can have if you explain, and they can not have if you don’t.
• When you are in deep distress and cannot restrain some expression of it, sit down and write out a harsh letter venting your anger. But don’t send it.
• Exercise a strong hand – be decisive.
• An entire organization is never wisely sacrificed to avoid losing one or two small parts.
• Take advantage of confusion, desperation, and urgency to exercise strong leadership.
• Seize the initiative and never relinquish it.
• Never let your immediate subordinate take action upon your responsibility without consulting you first.
• When making a decision, understand the facts, consider various solutions and their consequences make sure that the decision is consistent with your objectives, and effectively communicate your judgment.
• If you are a good leader, when your work is done, your aim fulfilled, your people will say, “We did this ourselves.”
• When your subordinates come up with good ideas, let them go ahead and try. But monitor their progress.
• Your organization does not depend on the life of any one individual.
• The greatest credit should be given to those in your organization who render the hardest work.
• Write letters to your subordinates making the personal acknowledgment that they were right and you were wrong.
• Set goals and be results-oriented.
• Leadership requires aggressive individuals who accept a “take charge” role, self-starting and change-oriented.
• Unite your followers with a “corporate mission.”
• Set specific short-term goals that can be focused on with intent and immediacy by subordinates.
• Some times it is better to plough around obstacles rather than waste time going through them.
• Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.
• Your war will not be won by strategy alone, but more by hard, desperate fighting.
• Your task will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day and hour, and force it.
• Choose as your chief subordinates those people who crave responsibility and take risks.
• Go out into the field with your leaders, and stand or fall with the battle.
• Give your followers all the support you can, and act on the presumption that they will do the best they can with what you give them.
• Provide your managers a three-to-five-month grace period to see if they will take action and perform adequately.
• Encourage innovation.
• Don’t lose confidence in you people when they fail.
• Let your subordinates know that you are always glad to have their suggestions.
• The best leaders never stop learning.
• Surround your self with people who really know their business, and avoid “yes” men.
• Master the art of public speaking.
• Extemporaneous speaking is your avenue to the public. Use a variety of body language when you speak.
• Never consider anything your write to be finished until published or, if a speech, until you deliver it.
• You should often couple written documents with verbal discussions, there by catching the idea with two senses rather than just one. Both you and your subordinates will remember it better.
• Speak in simple and familiar strains with people, without any pretension of superiority. Leave people with the feeling that they’ve know you all their lives.
• Don’t forget that humor is a major component of your ability to persuade people.
• People are more easily influenced through the medium of a broad and humorous illustration than in any other way.
• Loyalty is more often won through private conversation than in any other way.
• Preach a vision and continually reaffirm it; a clear, concise statement of the direction of your organization, and justify the actions you take.
• Everywhere you go, at every conceivable opportunity, reaffirm, reassert, and remind everyone of the basic principles upon which your organization was founded.
• When effecting renewal, call on the past, relate it to the present, and then use them both to provide a link to the future. 

 

Summary from Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips     Warner Business Books

 

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                                    Leadership is in the Eye of the Follower:

         Followers determine the qualities of leadership that they admire, not the leader.

 

Grade yourself against the following qualities of the most admired leaders:

Leaders who welcome change and encourage risk-taking:

Do you? If not – Why not?

• Everyone needs to know and feel he/she is needed.
• Everyone wants to be treated as an individual.
• Everyone needs to hear they have done a good job. The work we do and the recognition we receive contribute to our self-esteem.
• An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility.
  • Help people develop by accepting total responsibility to achieve a specific result.
  • Giving well defined responsibility and trust is an excellent reward for a job well done.
  • The richest reward is being proud of your work.
  • The power behind healthy self-esteem generates the confidence and creativity needed to tackle the new challenges that are constantly around the corner.

 

Are you a result-oriented leader who?  If not – Why not?

• Creates an environment in which employees can accept and execute their responsibility.
• Communicates the organization’s vision and philosophy and listens to what the team members need to make the vision a reality.
• Gives the frontline employees the authority to satisfy the needs and problems of the patient.
• Creates the systems that drive your practice and empower your team with the responsibility to manage the systems for day to day operations.
• Creates a secure working environment that fosters flexibility and innovation by defining clear  goals and strategies and then communicating them to the team and training them to take responsibility for reaching those goals.
• Sets an example of integrity, honesty, continual learning, competence, clear vision and meaningful purpose beyond self-interest.

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Leadership and the New Science

 

The vast space in our universe is now thought not to be empty but to be filled with invisible fields that are the basic substance of the universe. The universe consists of nothing but matter and fields. We only know of them through their effects. We experience the electrical fields that send out currents of electrons and the invisible gravity field every day without giving it a second thought. We see the effects of the magnetic field when iron filings are placed around the ends of a magnetic and the compass needle pointing north. James C. Maxwell’s field law states that electricity and magnetism are not two separate fields but different aspects of a single electromagnetic field. And further, that light was actually an electromagnetic wave of extremely high frequency.       Quantum Reality, Nick Herbert, Anchor Books.

“R. Sheldrake and D. Bohm postulated the existence of morphogenic fields that govern the behavior of species. This type of field possesses very little energy, but it is able to take energy from another source and shape it. The field acts as a geometrical influence, shaping behavior. Morphogenic fields are built up through the accumulated behaviors of species’ members. The form resides in the field, and when another individual energy combines with it.it patterns behavior without the need for laborious learning of the skill.”

Leadership and the New Science, Margaret Wheatley, Berrett-Koehler Pulishers

Scientists accept that the human body is surrounded by an energy field that transmits and receives messages from another person’s energy field. The field reflects each person’s emotional energy created by their internal and external experiences. This energy force influences their behavior and the behavior of others when their energy fields meet.

Anatomy of the Spirit, Caroline Myss PhD.  Three Rivers Press

Imagine your organizational space in terms of fields, with team members as waves of energy, spreading out in all regions of the practice. Unseen fields of energy influence how we manifest the organization’s purpose-driven vision and values through the information transmitted. The values, ethics and purpose are the qualities of an organization’s life that we can observe in the behavior of team members. Clarity and commitment to your values, ethics and the defined purpose forms a powerful field throughout the organization and guarantees certain types of individual behaviors.

We have often thought of vision, in linear fashion, as creating a destination to reach; believing that the clearer the images of the destination, the more influence the future would exert on the present, pulling us into the desired future state. (Newton’s image) But if vision and purpose is a field, all members who bump against that field would be influenced by it. Their behavior could be shaped when their energy would link with the field’s form to create behavior congruent with the vision and purpose.

Think of ideas as fields of energy. In the field view of organizations, clarity about vision, purpose and values is important, and creating the energy field through the dissemination of these ideas is essential.

We must think of ourselves as tall radio beacons if information, pulsing out messages everywhere. We need to involve everyone in the organization discussing, clarifying, and modeling, filling all of the space with messages we care about. Fields develop and bring energy into form. With a coherent, omnipresent field, we can expect congruent behavior. When a patient comes in contact with any team member he experiences the values and purpose of the whole organization. To know any part is to know the whole.

Valuable information is generated every time people join together with a defined purpose. Activities such as work teams and task forces are potential creators of new and useful information if they are free from the confines of strict rules and narrow mandates, instead given all the information they need with autonomy and constrained only by purpose, their potential for generating energy and necessary information is great. Through the constant exchanges of new information and organization will grow in effectiveness and influence.

These ideas speak loudly and clearly to the necessity for visionary leadership and the value of governing principles: values-based and purpose-driven philosophies are the DNA of the organization that influences the behavior of individuals and the motivational spirit of the organization.

As long as we keep focused on our principles, in our private life and in the organization, we are able to wander through chaos and make decisions congruent with our values, purpose, and vision.

 

M. William Lockard, Jr. DDS