Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made an insightful and wise observation on the nature of progress: “All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”
The reality is that the solution to one problem often brings us face to face with many other problems. That is the price of progress. Understanding, knowing, and accepting that is also what distinguishes quintessential leaders from everyone else. (more…)
The current focus of the majority of humans, including those in leadership positions, is metrics. Metrics, put simply, is numbers. Quantity – how much – is increasingly valued over quality – what kind.
We humans have, in general, bought into an erroneous – with often disastrous results – more, more, more shallow and indefensible mindset that deceives us into thinking that the bottom line of success is determined by a numerical value.
We see this attachment to and preoccupation with metrics, to the total exclusion of quality, everywhere in our lives.
In our personal lives, we focus solely on having a lot of money, having a lot of things, doing a lot of things, and living a lot of years. Because numbers are what we care about, we will – and do – sacrifice quality – and integrity (truth, honesty, and moral excellence) – to get quantity.
In our organizational lives, the endgame is having a lot of money (profits and income, personally and organizationally) and having a lot of customers (who presumably will bring us more money). Again, because numbers are what we care about organizationally , we will – and do – sacrifice quality – and integrity (truth, honesty, and moral excellence) – to get quantity.
Most of what we take for granted as our everyday world is based on metrics.
The internet, for instance, is a numbers game, both on the back side that most of us don’t see (everything’s manipulated using a numerical foundation, from web analytics to search engines to the actual bits – the 0 or 1 structure – that define the code that runs every part of the internet) and the front side that we do see.
Modern project management is another example of a metrics-based system. In the end, numbers are what matter: time and output.
Numbers are not unimportant. However, they are only important in the context of quality, not quantity.
This is what quintessential leaders understand and that is why they realize that the process is the key to real, verifiable, and sustainable successful outcomes.
If our processes are comprehensive, well-defined, and well-implemented, then the quality numbers will follow.
Quantity is just quantity. One of the most maddening things about modern life is this desire to have quantity of life versus quality of life.
It makes no sense. Who in their right mind wants to live extra years if those years have no quality? To me, that would be far worse than death. Yet, that is exactly what modern medicine is designed to and strives to achieve.
We buy lots of stuff – way more than we could ever use or need – simply to have it and to have more than anyone else. Yet most of what we buy now is cheaply made so it doesn’t last and we keep having to buy more because the quality just isn’t there.
It would be far less expensive, in the long run, to buy less but high-quality things that would last over time and to buy only what we absolutely need. But consumerism and materialism, which we’ve, in general, wholeheartedly bought into, is also a numbers game.
In the organizational context, quantity, in general, has become more valuable than quality. Because of this shift in focus, many people in leadership positions overlook or completely ignore the key element of quality: the process. Succumbing to the superficial and, in the long run, meaningless numbers (metrics) game has led to lots of quantity, but very little quality in most organizations.
Quintessential leaders, on the other hand, put the process, which ensures quality (and, in the long term, produces viable, sustainable, and meaningful quantity) first and keep that in focus at all times.
Too often, those in leadership positions blame people when things are not working well or not working at all. The reality is that if things are not working well or working at all, then the problem is really with the process and that is what needs to be reviewed and either revised or redone altogether.
When the process is the key to everything, then the focus is on quality first.
The simple reason that most people, including those in leadership positions, don’t make the process the key factor in successful outcomes is because a good process requires a lot of time, effort, planning, and training up front to implement it successfully.
This means, in practical terms, that numbers (metrics) are slower in materializing. Because we’ve become a metrics-based society, this “slow start” is unacceptable. However, the numbers that come quickly without a process of any kind, with a poorly-defined and poorly-implemented process, or with the wrong process lead to long-term negative and, often, unrecoverable failures as outcomes.
So what does having the process as the key to quality look like for quintessential leaders?
As we strive to be quintessential leaders, we must look at ourselves to see whether we have the process (quality) as the key to every aspect of our lives professionally and personally or we have fallen in the numbers (quantity) trap as a way of being.
We must ask ourselves if we’ve become focused on “how much” instead of “what kind.” We must ask ourselves if we even care about quality anymore. We must ask ourselves if we’re willing to make the intense upfront effort to ensure quality in every aspect of our lives.
In many ways, quintessential leaders now swim against the tide in this area of life. That swim is worth it in the big picture and in the long term. Unfortunately, because of the effort, the diligence, and the commitment – sometimes in the face of fierce opposition – it seems fewer and fewer of us are willing to make that swim consistently and continually.
How are we doing?
After the terrorist attack in Paris on November 13, 2015, Facebook immediately came out with an app that let its users superimpose the French flag over their profile pictures to ostensibly show solidarity with France and Paris. (more…)
Sometimes it’s helpful to take a step back from something and look at the big picture in broad terms. What quintessential leadership looks like is no different.
This blog looks at specific aspects of quintessential – and unquintessential – leadership in detail more often than not because it’s in the details that determine which type of leader we are and how to move toward quintessential leadership if we are not already on that path. (more…)
It seems that it’s much easier for us to give easy and voluminous lip service to committing to do something than it is for us to actually take the actions and efforts to follow through on commitments we’ve made.
Part of the reason is that we don’t take our verbal commitments very seriously. They’re easy to say and take so little time and they temporarily pacify whomever we are talking to. But the reality is that there is no real intent to follow through behind them.
Another part of the reason is that we tend to over-commit, even though we can’t possibly follow through on everything we commit to, because we want to please people or we don’t want to disappoint them.
And still another part of the reason is that our tendency to commit to doing things that we end up not following through on is to make ourselves look good in the eyes of others as being generous benefactors.
No matter what the reasons are why we don’t follow through on the many commitments we make every day, the fact that we don’t follow through puts us on the path of unquintessential leadership.
Why?
Because quintessential leaders strive to follow through on their commitments, it’s important to go behind the scenes to examine how they do it (what this looks like) in a world where the majority of people, including those in leadership positions, fail to follow through on their commitments.
Quintessential leaders follow through on their commitments by:
Quintessential leaders value quality over quantity. They also value substantive action over superfluous talk.
That is why quintessential leaders carefully choose – and have no problem saying “No” to things and people – what they commit themselves to and follow through with.
Quintessential leaders are also people who do the right things for the right reasons, striving for anonymity and being completely under the radar.
Unlike the many people who say they’ll do something so that they’ll look good to other people, yet they fail to follow through at all, quintessential leaders always ensure that their left hands don’t know what their right hands are doing.
As we look at our own leadership lives – wherever we are in life, we lead at least one team and our lives are living examples to everyone around us to either reject or emulate – we must ask ourselves about our commitments and our follow through.
How are we doing?
The day a human being – other than teenagers, who don’t know any better – decides they know it all and there is nothing else to learn or no reason to continue educating themselves is the day they die from the inside out.
When people in leadership positions do this, they become foolish, ignorant, and irrelevant, fit for nothing more than to go live as a hermit in a cave somewhere.
Because when people in leadership positions stop learning and stop educating themselves, they become useless.
We live in a world where ego breeds ignorance in people in leadership positions. Increasingly, this triumph of ego over knowledge (I’ve discussed this before) is applauded, embraced, and endorsed.
When this egotism and ignorance is in people in leadership positions, two things happen.
For the majority of people impacted by them, an increase in gullibility (engendered by each of these people’s failure to continue to learn and educate themselves, preferring instead to let media and technology appeal to their baser – and ignorant – natures and give them neatly-packaged, but erroneous, talking points they can parrot) leads the majority just to accept whatever they hear as being true. Ignorance, then, perpetuates itself throughout society.
For the minority of people who are continuing to learn and educate themselves, these people in leadership positions lose their respect and their trust. And they lose this minority of people who either internally, first, and physically, eventually, walk away from them for good.
I’ll give a real-life example of this kind of ignorance because I hear and have heard statements about this over and over.
Not long ago, a person in a leadership position was talking to a group of people, which I was among. The person told the group that President George W. Bush didn’t know anything about the threat of attacks on 9/11/01 just like President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t know anything about the threat of attack on Pearl Harbor.
I sat there in disbelief because because both statements were totally false and if this person who is in a leadership position had continued learning and educating themselves, they would have never made those statements.
History has revealed that both presidents were well aware that the respective attacks were not only probable, but imminent. They chose to ignore that information because the attacks would give them the go-ahead to do what they would not be able to do any other way.
In President Roosevelt’s case, the only way the United States could get into World War II officially (it had already been unofficially involved since the late 1930’s) with the support of the American people was if America was attacked. Therefore, the attack on Pearl Harbor was his (and his advisors’) ticket into the global conflict.
In President Bush’s case, one of his objectives was to finish the job in Iraq – killing Saddam Hussein – that had been unfinished when the Gulf War (August 1990 – February 1991) ended.
He couldn’t just go attack, so he had to find a way to be in the Middle East. Al Qaeda’s uptick in activity and increased direct threats to the United States gave President Bush (and his advisors) the promise of an open door to complete his ultimate objective. When the attack came, the door opened.
Perhaps it’s hard to believe that a country would let its own people die in order the meet other objectives.
However, anyone who is continuing to learn and continuing their education – which includes history – will know that’s been the story of humanity.
Ignorance of the truth of our story as a species leads to more ignorance about our story in all its organizational contexts and ignorance about our story as individuals. The net effect is that we have no clue about the big picture and we believe lies and perpetuate them.
Because quintessential leaders keep the big picture in mind all the time, they know they don’t know everything about everything, and they know that ignorance breeds lies (quintessential leaders value and ensure, to the best of their abilities, truth in everything), quintessential leaders never stop learning and they never stop educating themselves.
How?
As anybody whose been through both the K-12 and higher educational systems in the United States knows very little learning and education happens in the process.
Much of what is taught are the propagated lies and sheer memorization of them (there are exceptions to this and I was fortunate enough to have a handful of educators along the way who were exceptions, just as I was fortunate enough to have parents who put a high premium on lifelong learning and education).
We come out of these systems with necessary pieces of paper, but, in most cases, very little real education and knowledge.
And that is when quintessential leaders embark on their lifelong quest for learning and education.
Quintessential leaders read widely. They read the classics (quality fiction), but mostly they read non-fiction on a wide variety of topics of substance.
Quintessential leaders know how to test and prove or disprove what they read. The more a person reads (and I’m talking about spending quiet and focused hours, not skimming something on 
the internet and saying you read it) the better they become at discernment and at being able to determine what is true and what is not.
Quintessential leaders know how to think about and apply what they read because what they’ve learned stays with them and becomes a part of their collective reserve of information and their behavior.
Because quintessential leaders are well-read, they are very attuned to verbal inconsistencies and outright verbal ignorance.
Without that learning and educational process continuing, quintessential leaders would be susceptible to believing everything they hear (or read), because discernment, understanding, and knowledge is absent.
As always, we must, as quintessential leaders, look at our own lives to see whether we are on a journey of lifelong learning and education.
Therefore, we need to ask ourselves some questions:
If we are not committed to and actively pursuing a lifelong commitment to learning and educating ourselves, then we are not quintessential leaders.
How are we doing?
The Quintessential Leader 