One of our frequent contributors to Leadership Excellence is Dr. Ichak Adizes of Adizes Management Resources.  Dr. Adizes has spent over 35 years developing his methodology to help organizations identify and address problems and opportunities faster and more effectively than their competition.  Leadership expert, Ken Blanchard has said this methodology is the best kept secret in America.

In this ever changing economic climate a  business that wants to stay in business, must be on their toes and on the look-out for help in anyway they can get it to stay competitive.

Dr. Adizes has offered the readership of Leadership Excellence the opportunity to receive a FREE copy of his Bottom Line Management Excerpt video.  ‘What is a Leader” Request your copy today.  And if you are going to be in Las Vegas during the First week in July - consider attending the conference hosted Adizes

How to Manage in Times of Crisis,” A one day engagement with Dr. Ichak Adizes. July 1^st in Las Vegas, Nevada. Transform your  thinking

Call for more information 805-565-2901 See what they have to offer you.

Obama. Front page news. June 18, 2009. “Obama Seeks Way to Acknowledge Protesters Without Alienating Ayatollah.” Brilliant leadership move! Why?

What powerful leaders do is create a larger context for interpreting situations and events for the sake of new possibilities to emerge. Context helps us manage a myriad of information by allowing us to determine what information is relevant in a given situation. Much of the news coming from Iran has been targeted on the message that America is meddling in the affairs of Iran. The underlying message to the Iranian people by their leaders has been “don’t blame this upheaval on us or the current Iranian government, blame the unrest on interference by the Americans.” So what did President Barack Obama do in a potent response? He created a much larger context by which to interpret the actions (or inaction’s) of the Obama administration.

The first sentence of the Washington Post article on the front page right at the top of the paper’s crease (for those of you who still like the feel of newsprint in your hands) reads,

“The political unrest in Iran presents the Obama administration with a dilemma: keep quiet to pursue a nuclear deal with Ayotallah Ali Khomeni, the country’s supreme leader, or heed calls to respond more supportively to the protesters there- and risk alienating the Shiite cleric.”

A rich and larger context was created here that allows us to infer many things at once—first, and most obvious, Obama draws our attention to what is relevant in an American response. He tells us he wants to respond to the events in Iran but he is thoughtful in his actions and wishes to make the right response. President Obama is doing here what so many of our leaders in organizations forget to do, he is revealing his thinking—a key leadership move by which a leader engages his audience to think with him.

Secondly, he is broadcasting a message that says to everyone, “look we care about what is going on with the people of Iran AND we also care about a bigger concern, the safety of the planet when it comes to the threat of nuclear weapons.” He is sending a direct message to the supreme leader of Iran letting him know, “we don’t intend to meddle in your internal affairs because something larger is at stake—world security.” Thus, Obama is shifting the context to something much larger and even more important to all of us. Our shared vision of a world at peace and free from the threat of nuclear weapons comes to the forefront while the concern for the Iranian people is also acknowledged.

Whether it be the environment, the economy, poverty, education, health care, or within your family, your work or your community, leadership is about making intentional moves to act for the sake of creating a better future for all. By signaling his intentions, Obama bought some time and deferred responsibility for what is going on in Iran back to the Iranian leaders. What we can learn from this one leadership move of President Obama is how to recognize and shift a context (Principle Number Five of Leadership Alchemy, see Leadership Excellence article April 2009.)

You don’t have to be the designated leader or the positional leader or even think of yourself as a leader to lead. Our breakdown in leadership is that there are too many people telling too many stories about what is wrong and what is not working instead of pointing to the possibilities for what might work. Leadership moves can be small insightful conversational contributions that help others see something they did not see before or they can be big innovations that change the way we all work and live. They are not patterned, habitual and “wing it” kinds of actions but intentional moves that create an opening for a multitude of other interpretations to show up and lead to positive intentional action.

So the next time you are faced with a decision that impacts others, take a good look at the context you are creating and shift up!

Kanu Kogood

Kanu Kogod, PhD, MCC
President and Founder
Bridges in Organizations, Inc.
Ph 301-299-0744

www.leadershipalchemy.com kanu@leadershipalchemy.com –

We welcome Kanu Kogod, a frequent contributor to Leadership Excellence as our guest blogger today.

Andrea Chilcote is featured on the cover of our June issue of Leadership Excellence and has graciously shared her interview with Marshall Goldsmith with us.  You can view that interview on our home page.  On the left side of the page is a blue button that says  Interview with Marshall Goldsmith .  Visit Andrea on her website http://www.morningstarventures.com

And here is a copy of our June issue of Leadership Excellence - I would invite you to become a member of Leadership Excellence and register to receive Leadership Excellence every month

Hello friends of excellence.  Today I just wanted to update you on what is happening here at Leadership Excellence.  We are working hard at becoming “social networking guru’s” and want you to follow us .

How about Twitter.  Follow us.  I post great tips throughout the day and often give away articles and video links, promote new books and highlight our friends and colleagues. Follow us on Twitter

I can’t quite get Facebook right but we do have a growing group on Linkedin called Leadership Excellence.  Join us on Linkedin. We post our articles there, free links to the publications and other invitations and discussion.

Of course there is our BLOG ( that is what you are reading right now ) and it would be great if you added that to your favorites or even submitted a guest blog.  Send it to me on any topic that applies to leadership, personal excellence or sales and service.

I would like to announce here that we also have a new publishing model under our three imprints.  Leadership Excellence, Personal Excellence and the Sales & Service Excellence.  We will publish with our partner Pilot Communications under the parent label Executive Excellence Publishing.  This will give us more freedom to publish small print runs, paperbacks and legacy books.  So if you are working on a book manuscript let’s talk and see if it is right for our imprints.   Our first book off the press to be published under the Sales & Service Excellence imprint will be Pink Slip Proof, by Paul J.Meyer; New York Times best selling author.  Watch for that this August !  We have already pre-sold 10,000 copies.

It’s the beginning of summer and the time for  change is now - not the New Year when it’s cold and depressing.  Now when the trees are green with new leaves and flowers are blooming.   If you have survived to the bottom of this blog and would like to give your life a lift … email me for a Personal Excellence Plan.

It’s FREE, our gift to you for being a Champion of Excellence -

Today is the final of the NCAA Track and Field Championships in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Bob Low is participating in the Pole Vault final. Bob has consistently been ranked in the top 5 in the country as a vaulter for BYU.

The pole vault is an exceptionally difficult event. It takes incredible self-discipline, focus, and a combination of natural ability and technique developed over the years. Bob started as a hurdler when he was just 9 years old, following in the footsteps of other family members. But it was the pole-vault that intrigued him and he participated in his first national championship in the 8^th grade.

In that first championship clearing the bar at 8 feet was a daunting task and after failing to advance, Bob declared he would never jump again and then the tears of disappointment poured out of his young eyes. That was 12 years ago and today his senior year will culminate in his last college championship. He has broken many records along the way and now jumps 10 feet higher than he did in the 8^th grade. He was not a quitter.

We can learn a lot from athletes. They make a choice to win, to be high performers. They choose to overcome all odds to be the best they can be. Sometimes that really hurts. They suffer setbacks, injuries, and blows to a fragile ego, painful failures and broken dreams. They  never give up; they pick themselves up after a loss and work even harder to achieve the ultimate goal.

The beauty of sports, especially track and field is that it has room for participants on every level. It is why jogging and road racing became so popular. The average guy and gal could achieve personal bests every time they ran a race. In the pole vault they ‘raise the bar” when a height has been cleared…setting the bar for a new height and each ¼ inch is a remarkable accomplishment.

At Leadership Excellence we cheer for Bob Low today as he is a part of our excellence family and all the other participants and wish them the very best. We believe in helping people find a wiser, better way to live their life and lead their organizations. Raise your own bar and clear new heights. Advance your personal training to include new goals and dreams. We offer a Personal Excellence Plan that can serve as a guide for your personal development and help you sustain your training.

Once again our dear friend Andy Andrews has shared with us his outstanding blog.

Enjoy

The past few weeks have been dizzying to me.  The
uncertainty of releasing a new book - KNOWING one
cannot control what happens to it - along with the sheer
volume of work and travel that goes with the experience . . .
Well, lets just say it can seem overwhelming.

It is not my intention to bore you with the details of a long
process that in the end might leave you thinking I was
boasting about how hard our team worked.  Instead, my
amazement at what has begun to happen with The Noticer
has sent my thoughts in another direction entirely.

As I mentioned earlier, one simply cannot control what
happens to a book when it is out of the author’s hands.
Neither an author nor publisher can control where it is
placed in the bookstore, how it is placed in the bookstore,
how long it stays in the bookstore, or whether the book
even gets in a bookstore in the first place!  So forget trying
to force a book onto one of the significant best-seller lists . . .
Even Amazon has become wise to the ways of those who
would manipulate its ranking system.

What ultimately happens with a book is simply and purely up
to the readers - word of mouth trumps all.  Therefore it has
been with grateful astonishment that I have watched you begin
to tell others about The Noticer and it’s possible value in their
life. In essence, I have seen a huge team of people do something
that is simply impossible for a small team to accomplish . . .
And I am inspired to think outside this tiny box.

As people who don’t even know each other, who do care and
are willing to work, what might we accomplish that can be so
much greater than a mere book for our community, our nation,
our world, and our God?  And why does our country seem so
disconnected right now?  How firm are we in the actions and
beliefs that have allowed us to become divided along political,
racial, even financial lines?

These are simply questions for us to ponder as we watch this
short video of people who are significantly “apart”, yet have
managed to come together in order to create something incredible.

So I ask you . . . who can we stand by?

Watch this:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.andyandrews.com%2Fblo

Andy

Andy Andrews

View this blog post and make comments here:
http://www.andyandrews.com/blog/stand-by-each-other/

A few weeks ago, we were host to our Leadership Excellence associate publishers from China, Ken and Winnie Han. Ken had been hitting the conference circuit and the hot tourist sites from Florida to Vegas before he was reunited with his wife, Winnie in Salt Lake City. It was their first trip to the Rocky Mountain West and out our office windows, the mountains seem just a few footsteps away. Even at the end of April, the snow capped peaks made a majestic statement to our visitors from across the world.

The Han’s have a very successful consulting firm in Shanghai China, called Visionary Consulting http://www.vcsh.com , where they are committed to bringing vision and growing leadership to their home country.

Growing leaders – effective leadership, does not recognize the boundaries of governments and politics. It doesn’t seem to matter where in the world we go, there is a natural desire that burns within people to grow and improve.

We had a wonderful exchange of ideas and cultures that will make the time between now and their next visit seem short. The Han’s are great people and we are proud to be a part of growing leadership, building people, and creating vision in China.

Leadership Excellence China had an informal launch in August of last year during the summer Olympics and is now ready to have a formal launch in August of this year. We are excited by the demand and look forward to new opportunities in China with Visionary Consulting as our partner.

Currently Leadership Excellence has several active foreign publishing partners;

Turkey, Korea, China, India and Nigeria to mention just a few. India now also publishes Sales & Service and Personal Excellence as well as Leadership Excellence.  Best wishes to Visionary Consulting in China - we wish them every success.

Even before the first issue of Leadership Excellence was published 25 years ago in May 1984, I was working with Stephen R. Covey on articles and white papers that would later appear in chapters of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle-Centered Leadership books.  Indeed, the impetus behind publishing the monthly magazine was to facilitate development of these books and promote the practice of principled leadership-leading people based on a set of “true north” principles and “natural laws.” We defined principles as basic tenets-fairness, justice, honesty, integrity, and trust-and self-evident, self-validating natural laws that are always there, always reliable, like the “true north” on a compass.

Covey and I agree on the point that real leadership development begins with the humble recognition that principles ultimately govern. We avoided using the words ethics and values because those words imply situational behaviors, subjective beliefs, social mores, cultural norms, or relative truths-preferring instead to talk about universal principles and natural laws that are more absolute, impersonal, factual, objective, and self-evident.

You may think that when most people talk about values they mean these universal principles, but they are referring to what they value. As evidenced in the news daily, the lifestyle and practices of most leaders are governed by situational and value-based maps, not a principle-centered compass.

The willingness to subordinate values to universal principles and to align roles, goals, plans, and activities with them often takes a crisis: recession, downsizing, loss of job, divorce, strained relationships, lost accounts, or a health crisis. Otherwise, we tend to be busy doing good, easy, or routine things, never stopping to ask if we are doing what matters most. The good then becomes the enemy of the best.

When you have entrenched personal interests and organizational politics, when you set up your self-generated or socially-validated value systems and then develop missions and goals based on what you value, you tend to become a law unto yourself. You try to impress, not bless. Your paradigms and processes never produce desired results because they are based on illusions, slogans, programs-of-the-month, and personality-based success strategies. To align your life and leadership with “true north” principles, you need to keep in touch with something deeper than your thoughts and more reliable than your values. Conscience connects you with the wisdom of the ages and of the heart. This internal guidance system enables you to sense when you act in ways that are contrary to “true north” principles.

Some leaders say that expediencies require lies, cover-ups, deceit, or game-playing.  And some “trusted advisers” -such as PR agents, accountants, and legal counselors-say, “This will be political suicide,” or “This will be bad for our image or bottom line.” Hence, many leaders take a departmental or compartmental approach rather than an integrated, organic, principled approach to ethics. They favor local politics and charismatic personalities over universal principles. When you operate by internal compass, you find that moral options open up to you.

The Role of Leadership

Great leaders ensure that each person is committed to a shared vision, direction, purpose, principles, and priorities. Everyone is then oriented to “true north,” on the same page, which releases talent and energy. In low-trust cultures, leaders either rely on control or have loose cannons everywhere, all pointing in different directions and saying, “This is north.” They lack a common vision and set of principles. Lighthouse principles never change. They are classic, enduring, universal, timeless. This turbulent economy has dissolved old lines of positional authority and elevated moral authority based on character and competence.

To be highly effective today, leaders need to be clearly focused on purpose, centered on principles, and execute on priorities. Sadly, even when the mission statement is hanging on the wall, people wander in contention and confusion as they rarely agree on what constitutes “true north.” Focusing on principles unleashes talent and energy and creates a culture where each person has an internal compass, shares a common focus, and executes around priorities.

Principle-centered leaders integrate principles into structures and systems.  People who don’t honor these principles don’t stay-they either shape up or ship out. New hires are told: “If you join us, you’ll need to live by these principles-or your work here will be temporary.” People soon realize that the principle-centered mission isn’t just about words and slogans. This is the constitution by which every person is evaluated. When you apply the principles consistently, they become behavioral habits. Making and keeping promises is one way to make deposits in your personal integrity account-and in the emotional bank accounts of others.

Only principle-centered leaders who work from the inside out can create a principle-centered culture. Great leaders are loyal to principles. They put principles at the center of their relationships with others, their agreements and contacts, their management processes, and their mission statements.  Since organizations are organic, great leaders nurture people like plants, creating the right conditions for growth.  We need humility to acknowledge that principles govern, and the wisdom to align with those principles in the face of powerful forces and habits.

All leaders need to ask: “What is this company really about? And what are the principles we’re going to live and work by?” The key to long-term success is learning to align with “true north” principles, working at leadership from the inside out, and being proactive to become an island of excellence-and to leaven the team. Principle-centered leaders align their value system, lifestyle, direction, and habits with timeless principles.

as published in May 2009 Leadership Excellence

send for a complimentary copy  - click here Leadership Excellence

Authentic leadership has been a buzzword for several years and has recently come back into fashion with the near collapse of the American economic system plagued by scandal and companies scrambling to reposition, retain talent or find new talent!

Where are the leaders? Is the outcry from the observation deck. The leaders were there – they just weren’t “authentic” if you will. Many leaders were authentically bad perhaps.

David Peck in his book Beyond Effective Practices in Self-aware Leadership; he talks about authenticity. “ The actions of the most compelling leaders have a distinct authenticity of heart and mind that others can appreciate. It’s based on how consistently their decisions, communication, and responses to adversity reflect their most heartfelt principles. In their relationships and tasks, authentic leaders are apt to be unguardedly themselves, and not what they think others want or expect them to be. They keep a wary eye in the mirror for any temptation to massage the message, or to ignore their inner compass just to keep the wheels of progress turning. How authentic do you allow yourself to be with others? What holds you back from being transparent to others? What actions are you willing to take to be true to yourself in the presence of others? “

While these are great questions asked by Peck, you cannot be authentic to integrity and good character if you are self absorbed and lying to yourself about who you are or who you want to be. A leader who desires to be know for authenticity needs to be aware he/ she cannot have their “own” agenda, nor can they continue to blame others (or past events) for missed opportunities, mistakes, or even failures. With authenticity comes the responsibility to be 100% accountable for where you are in the every moment of the day…whether it is in conversation with other members of your team, writing a memo, planning a media campaign, or building an alliance. That is the ownership of leadership.

At Leadership Excellence, our publishing parent, Executive Excellence Publishing launched a book by David Gill last summer titled “ It’s About Excellence” Gill addresses these very issues of authenticity while building ethically healthy organizations. Order from Amazon today

Nancy Low

Remember that game show ” You are the Weakest Link “?  The host would ask silly questions and the weakest players were eliminated.  That would be an easy way to solve problems in your organization.  When things go bad - mistakes are made, just declare ‘You are the Weakest Link” and then  like Donald Trump; “you’re fired“.

But life isn’t a game show.

Kanu Kogood is President of Bridges in Organizations and co developer of Leadership Alchemy with NASA’s Office of Human Capital Management. Dr. Kogood writes about the Seven Principles of Leadership Development on page 17 of our April issue of Leadership Excellence.

Notice Principle 1: Breakdown to Breakthrough. The place of chaos and uncertainty is the place of most potential because it is in those times that new patterns can be best developed. That is a WOW statement.

It reminds me of the ‘sink or swim” motivation. When times get tough you can either dig deep, pull your socks up and get to work or you sink. You fail. Good times bring complaisance and a false sense of power and authority. The brain goes to mush and you lose a bit of your creative energy that drives you to find solutions and new ideas.

Dr. Kogood says; “People are uncomfortable when things are uncertain, unclear or chaotic. Yet, these times afford opportunity for new ideas, solutions, and possibilities to emerge.”

Most people are resilient and bounce back after hard times. My son, who was a very successful basketball player, said the greatest lessons he learned were from the failures on the court not from their victories. The games they lost showed where they needed to improve and new ideas, strategies and skills were developed.

Good leaders don’t have to do anything extraordinary – except be honest, share the pain and be willing to carry their share of the load. There is never a good time for finger pointing – but it is always a good time for building and growing success.

If you think you are the teams weakest link and can’t take the uncertainty … maybe its time to do some character building exercises and strengthen your commitment or move on to something else.

Here is our April edition of Leadership Excellence