The Quintessential Leader Perspective on Practically Lending a Helping Hand

Posted: April 23, 2015 in Giving Back and Paying Forward, Practical Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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The Quintessential Leader Always Lends a Helping HandQuintessential leaders are always looking for ways to practically help other people whose paths intersect with ours. This is part of the integrity of our character and the authenticity of who we are.

What this means practically is that we are conscious and continual observers of all the people we cross paths with, whether it’s just one time, occasionally, frequently, or continually. It also means that we have a heightened awareness of all situations and genuine needs that arise in these relationships.   

In other words, quintessential leaders are always paying attention for opportunities where we can practically lend a helping hand to others.  

Quintessential leaders don’t look at these opportunities as a burden, nor do we look at them as a one-time obligation that we check off a list and move on from. Because quintessential leaders are teambuilders and relationship builders, we stay involved and we keep lending helping hands with the goal of assisting others to be able to stand on their own again, so that they can then lend a helping hand to the people who cross their paths in life.

Quintessential leaders do this all their lives. They prefer to be anonymous, in the background, and quietly providing the practical help that others need. The greatest satisfaction for quintessential leaders is to see those we’ve endeavored to persistently help along the way in practical ways succeed and move into a position where they are able to help others.

What are some ways that quintessential leaders practically lend a helping hand to others?

You more than likely will never know about any of this because quintessential leaders never talk about what they are doing (we don’t take out billboards, literally or virtually, and announce it to the world) for others. Instead, we just do it, freely, modestly, and continuously lending our hands whenever and wherever there’s a genuine need that we can fill.

However, because we are striving to be quintessential leaders all the time, we need to know the what and the how of what practically lending a helping hand to others so that they can get back on their feet and pay it forward looks like in practice.

There are impractical and practical ways to lend a helping hand.

If (and this seems to be an increasingly rarer “if” in our “what’s in it for me?” society, where most people either simply don’t care, are totally oblivious to the needs of others, or they glance at needs and then promptly forget that the needs ever existed) people are inclined to lend a helping hand, the help is often short-term and immediate (impractical in the big scheme of things because it doesn’t address the root cause of the need), instead of long-term and big-picture (practical because it works to lessen or eliminate the root cause of the need).

So we’re going to look at a few practical ways that we can lend a helping hand to others and show how quintessential leaders use all our networks to enhance our help and work to reduce and eliminate the need.

This, by the way, was supposed to be the functional outcome of professional networking and social networking, but both have failed miserably.

Professional network to lend a helping handThese networks, however, have ended up being nothing more than, in the first case, a closed club with a college sorority/fraternity feel involving bar meetups to drink and hook up, and, in the second case, social-networksa closed inner group of select people (the wider group of contacts and friends is off the grid and nobody even notices – it’s as though they were never there) who just hang out with each other all day.

The first way that quintessential leaders practically lend a helping hand is by volunteering their time and expertise whenever and wherever they find people in need. They create opportunities to volunteer by establishing and actively participating in specific groups to meet specific needs.

Throughout their sustained efforts in making these groups a place for information, education, and help, quintessential leaders also invite and respond Quintessential leaders volunteer to lend a helping handto ongoing individual needs within the groups. 

While most people aren’t even aware of it, quintessential leaders always spend a lot of one-on-one time with individuals within the group when the needs arise, with the goal of lessening the burden for those individuals and helping where they are able in a practical and proactive way.

Another area where quintessential leaders are constantly practically lending a helping hand is in the area of helping people who are looking for employment and financial stability. These are tied inextricably together, but it seems that society, in general, doesn’t realize this. 

There are a few people who see the financial aspect of someone looking for employment and they give a little bit of money to the person. While this is appreciated, there is a better and more practical way to lend a helping hand in terms of the long-term and big picture need, which is employment and being financially self-supporting.

There’s an old saying that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life. There’s an parallel in this saying that applies to someone looking for employment and financial stability.

As noble and as kind as the gesture is, the reality is that handing somebody who’s looking for a job a little bit of money doesn’t give them employment or financial stability. In fact, it usually, at least emotionally and mentally, makes things worse for that person.

Why?

There are several reasons:

  1. A one-time small amount of money doesn’t pay the bills;
  2. The person doesn’t want to freeload or mooch, but instead work and earn the money they receive;
  3. The money doesn’t – and can’t – address the long-term and big picture need of employment or financial stability.

So let’s talk about better and more practical ways to lend a helping hand to someone who is looking for employment and financial stability instead.

Anybody who is looking for employment has undertaken a full-time job. It’s a job with no pay, a substantial time investment, mostly silence or rejection as the outcome, and a hiring process that makes Dante’s hell seem like a stroll in the park. 

Quintessential leaders lend a practical helping hand to people looking for employment in the following concrete ways:

  1. Engaging with the people looking for employment to know what their skills and experience are, what areas they are looking for, and what their soft skills are.
  2. Getting resume or website links from people looking for employment and actually reading them.
  3. Sending the resume or website links to their professional contacts with a brief summary of qualifications, areas of competence, as well as a recommendation (i.e., a reference) and a request for a time-delimited followup. If their professional contacts don’t do the followup, quintessential leaders do, both as a reminder and as an advocate for those looking for employment.
  4. If there’s interest, setting up a face-to-face for the potential employer and potential employee to meet.

What does impractical look like (although some of these are the best people know how to offer – which is why we all need the education provided in this post – if you want to make people’s employment searches even more frustrating and hopeless, do any or all of these)?

  1. Reviewing the resume or website links and saying “Oh, that’s great experience” or making suggestions to change it, but doing absolutely nothing else with it.
  2. Indicating, by a weak or lackluster response, that you’re not going to go out of your way to do anything with the information.
  3. Promising that you’ll do something and then promptly and forever forgetting about it.
  4. “Advising” people looking for employment in a way that is condescending (when this is a person’s full-time job, they’ve already turned over every rock we can think of and many we can’t even imagine) or deceptive (dishonesty in any form is unacceptable – if we suggest it, we are definitively not quintessential leaders).
  5. Sending generic newspaper articles or job fair notices of hiring that you’re not connected to and don’t have any direct influence (or interest) with to people looking for employment.
  6. Giving people “leads” on jobs they aren’t remotely looking for, are overqualified or unqualified for, and/or are infeasible because of location differences and expense involved.

Another practical way that quintessential leaders lend a helping hand to people seeking employment and financial stability is to support their other attempts to create revenue streams and use their networks to help generate revenue from these streams.

Many people who are seeking employment and financial stability have looked at every possible avenue for earning an income and being self-sufficient. In addition to their full-time employment searches, they have put in long hours creating things of value (using skills like sewing, knitting, crocheting, woodworking, jewelry-making, baking, confection-making, writing and self-publishing books to educate and inform, etc.) to offer for purchase, so that they can not only earn the money they receive, but the person who pays gets something of value in return.

Esty revenue stream lend a helping handThese items are generally sold through venues Amazon lend a helping handlike Etsy or Amazon, where the seller gets a fraction of the purchase price for each item sold (for example, for a $10 printed book, Amazon authors get less than $2 in payment, while they do not get anything for the Kindle version unless someone buys it after purchasing the hard copy).

Quintessential leaders invest the time and interest to find out if people looking for employment have these kinds of items for sale. If they do, instead of handing cash to these people, quintessential leaders lend a practical hand by:

  1. Committing to buying their products (once every three months, for example);
  2. Reviewing the item at the purchasing site;
  3. Getting a firm commitment from a certain number of people in their social and professional networks to buy the item and asking those people to do the same with their social and professional networks and to pass the same instructions on with each iteration of getting social and professional networks involved in the process.

This is win-win all the way around. The people purchasing are getting something of value at a great price. With enough volume from the cumulative social and professional networking and purchasing, the people selling are actually earning the money they receive and it may give them enough financial stability to be able to hang in there until employment materializes. Or it may lead to something totally different that opens new doors and new opportunities for the person who is seeking employment.

Most importantly, it gives these people the ability to pay forward being able to practically lend a helping hand to the people in their lives.

As always, we as quintessential leaders need to look in our own mirrors to see how – or whether – we are doing.

Do we practically lend a helping hand to other people? Or are we guilty of being impractical in our attempts to help, pulling further down the very people we should be making every effort in our power (and we have a lot, but it takes our attention, our time, and our effort) to pull up?

What are we doing? How are we doing?

The Quintessential Leader Perspective on the Hiring Process

Posted: April 15, 2015 in Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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Modern Hiring ProcessThere are a gazillion fancy catch phrases in the Human Resources world-that-exists-unto-itself that describe the hiring process. Talent Aquisition is my least favorite (as if people are inanimate commodities that are bought from or sold to the lowest bidder – although that can seem like the crux of a modern employment search).

But in the end, the process is still, despite all the automated keyword vetting that allows the cream of the crop to get overlooked because some programmer (who doesn’t know anything but coding) is doing the vetting instead of a live human being, essentially to find a person to fill a position.

But today’s hiring process is a mess. So many extraneous and nonsensical layers have been built into the hiring process that the actual person hiring and the actual person they should be hiring have less of a chance to connect in person with each other than we do of seeing Halley’s Comet again in our lifetime. 

This is unquintessential leadership on steroids. Whatever “genius” thought this was a good idea was clueless about teams, team-building, and quintessential leadership. 

By taking the control of the process out of the hands of the people directly responsible for building teams, the current hiring methodology limits (and eliminates) viable – and, in some cases, the best – choices that would be considered without all the filtering layers now in place.

And, yet, because unquintessential leadership is the norm in most organizations, the very people who have built this Frankenstein of a system complain loudly and frequently about how hard it is to find good candidates and qualified candidates to fill their open positions.

The reality is those candidates exist, but the hiring process in its current iteration makes it next to impossible to find them. 

Why?

Because instead of depending, as quintessential leaders do, on their own eyes, their own ears, their own evaluation skills, and on their own intuition to spot strong soft skills and a good fit for existing teams, these unquintessential leaders have outsourced the most important function of building an organization to programmers, recruiting mills, and generic Human Resources departments, instead of doing this essential work, start to finish, themselves.

They don’t realize, to their detriment, that while you can quantify many aspects of organization-building – and, therefore, relegate it to people who don’t know anything about it, but can follow an if-then-else logic sequence that’s defined for them – you can’t quantify people.

And most organizations have forgotten that their most valuable resources are people: living, breathing, thinking, creating humans with personalities, skills, talents, strengths and potential that can’t be assessed or utilized without a direct human-to-human relationship.

Let’s look at the current hiring process and see why it exemplifies unquintessential leadership.

Major Online Job BoardsThe hiring process usually starts with digital job boards.

Most of the job boards, frankly, are a joke, even if a job-seeker uses keywords and date filters. Monster is the worst at just throwing out the most random and irrelevant search results you can imagine, no matter what parameters it’s given. Careerbuilder isn’t much better. Dice is pretty iffy as well. And LinkedIn ranks in the bottom of the tier as well. 

Indeed is probably the best of the job boards, but their search results aren’t all that great either. And it’s always a bit disconcerting to see job titles that spell “Manager” as “Manger” and other similar typos.

Once a prospective candidate has what has to pass for maybe-related search results, then the online application begins.

Alice Cooper did a song called “Welcome to My Nightmare.” Job applicants should consider playing this on an endless loop while they are applying for jobs, because this part is a nightmare.

It’s important to remember that this process happens with every single job that an applicant applies for. It is enough to make the most sane among us go stark-raving mad.

There is no standard for digital employment applications.

Almost all of them require setting up an account and creating a password just to get into the application. 

While most systems ask the applicant to upload a resume, almost none of the systems automatically populate the application form with the information on the resume. The applicant has to manually fill in everything.

Some systems have twenty or more screens to go through to actually complete an application for submission. Some retain the application information and some require an applicant to re-enter everything all over again for each new job being applied for. 

When the job applicant finally gets through this process and actually submits an application, then they wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. 

Apparently most job applications go to Never Never Land, because applicants don’t hear anything ever on 99% of them.

The 1% that job applicants do hear back on take various forms and are as infinitely frustrating as the 99% that they don’t hear anything back on.

The 1% shakes out like this:

  1. Immediate autobot email that says Human Resources has carefully reviewed the applicant’s qualifications, and while they’re impressive, Human Resources has decided to pursue other more qualified candidates. In other words, our program glanced at your stuff and decided you suck.
  2. For the most part, if a recruiter calls, it is a shiny-happy recruiter (remember, they get paid for every applicant they place) that calls and chats Recruiter Processfor 30 minutes with the applicant and promises to get back to them. Applicants will grow old waiting for that next phone call.
  3. In rare cases, a serious recruiter will call, then Skype, and then tell the applicant they will get their paperwork to the person hiring and will be in touch with the applicant when they hear something back. This ends up, for the most part, being another situation in which the applicant will grow old waiting for the return phone call.
  4. Even more rare, somebody at the hiring company will email the applicant with a one-line question, like “Are you willing to relocate?” or “What are your salary requirements?” Apparently, when the applicant responds their responses go to some sort of email dead zone, because that’s the last the applicant hears about the position.
  5. And in the rarest of cases, after the applicant jumps through a myriad of convoluted hoops, they finally get an interview with the hiring company.

The unquintessential leadership continues into the interview process, in most cases. As I’ve discussed before most people hiring aren’t exactly sure what they are hiring for. These are the same people who end up interviewing for a position they’re nebulous on themselves.

Once in a blue moon, the interviewer is a quintessential leader and the process works. However, blue moons are rare and so are interviewers who are quintessential leaders.

Generally, these unquintessential leaders can’t communicate well or effectively.

Poor Interviewing SkillsInstead of leading the conversation, they expect the applicant to do all the work. Pulling any concrete information out of these interviewers is next to impossible. Questions that the applicant asks are either deflected or answered in such vague terms that the interviewer might as well have not answered.

It may not be uncomfortable for the interviewer, but any job applicant worth their salt will have a high level of discomfort, as they sit there and ask themselves, “Why am I here?”

And the odds are extremely high that the applicant won’t get hired, which is probably for the best, because if somebody can’t even lead an interview, they certainly can’t lead a team. But, again, it’s frustrating.

The whole hiring process is replete with endless frustration. It’s demoralizing. And it seems to be designed to favor the survival of the fittest – only those who don’t quit until something finally breaks seem to be the winners.

Ask anybody who’s been through it and finally found employment, though, if they feel like a winner. The answer, because job applicants are the losers just about all of the time in the hiring process, will be “No.”

Besides all the unquintessential leadership involved in the current hiring process, the biggest problem throughout the process is communication. No communication. Delayed communication. Iffy communication. Vague communication. Wrong communication.

Quintessential leaders put a high premium on excellent communication, clear communication, correct communication, and prompt communication. That is a core component of life, of team-building, and of hiring.

Quintessential leaders also forgo the multilayered, inefficient, and dysfunctional current trend of hiring. They don’t let anyone or anything get between themselves and potential team members.

Because they know what they are looking for and they know that they will know it when they see it, quintessential leaders will do all the legwork, from advertising a position to filling the position, hands-on and by themselves (they will involve their teams in peer interviews when applicants come in, though, because the team’s input is an important part of the decision-making process).

This is the best and most effective way to hire people and, despite the unquintessential leader’s excuse that they don’t have time to do that, it is the most productive, long-term, time that quintessential leaders can spend to build their teams for productivity, for success, and for profitability.

Is your organization a mess when it comes to hiring?

Is the hiring process so convoluted that it takes forever to get a new team member on board and when they finally get there, everybody realizes it was bad hire?

Does the choice come down to making do with somebody who is not the right fit just to have a body or to leave a position open and go through the whole time-intensive, convoluted hiring process again, with no guarantee that the results will be different the next time around?

For those of us striving to be quintessential leaders, this is unacceptable. We need to take back our team-building responsibilities, no matter how much of our own time we have to invest. It’s that important.

What are we going to do about it?

More importantly, what are you personally going to do about it?

 

 

 

 

“What’s In It For Me?” – An Unquintessential Leader Attitude

Posted: April 8, 2015 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership
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what's in for me unquintessential leadershipRecently I posted on the rampant narcissism and entitlement that pervades society, including most people in leadership positions, today.

The song in the video above, “What Have You Done For Me Lately?,” by Janet Jackson kept coming back to me as I’ve continued to think about the specific attitudes that characterize entitlement and narcissism, and this post will discuss a riff on this attitude, which is “What’s in it for me?”

The driving mindset behind “What’s in for me?” is simple and selfish. It translates into “I’m not going to do anything that doesn’t benefit or reward me.” It is manifested in many ways, a few of which we’ll look at today. 

One the primary places where this attitude and mindset exists is in modern sales and marketing operations. It is a key phrase that both salespeople and marketing specialists use when they are talking to customers, either in person or via media.

It’s rather duplicitous, though. On the surface, it seems to be selfless in appealing to customers’ narcissism and entitlement only. However, it’s revealing of the sellers’ mindset because when customers buy, sellers make money and profits, so sellers are always asking “What’s in it for me?” as well.

One of the ever-popular sales/marketing techniques where this attitude is blatantly revealed is pyramid or multilevel marketing (MLM) sales (also known as schemes).

Multilevel Marketing Pyramid SalesThese kinds of sales depend on a tiered sales system, where the top person in the tier gets paid every time everybody under them buys something. If the person has salespeople on their tier, then those salespeople get paid every time their customers order, and the top person on the tier gets paid as well.

In other words, every single sale in that tier amounts to “What’s in it for me?” That is a primary reason why MLM salespeople consistently have so much aggressive and repetitive marketing and advertising for products that are sold this way.

That is also why there are a plethora of “sounds-too-good-to-be-true” (remember what your parents taught you about this statement), unprovable, deceptive, and outright dishonest claims around many of the products sold using this method.

And, of course, the parent companies for these MLM products make a fortune on the backs of their salespeople (independent distributors).

Why?

Because the MLM salespeople do all the marketing, all the advertising, and all the legwork for new customers, and the cost to the parent company is minimal compared to direct sales and marketing costs for non-MLM companies.

This is the unquintessential leadership attitude of “What’s in it for me?” at its worst and most obvious.

What's In It For Me? Unquintessential Leader MindsetBut it would be a mistake to assume that this is not the mindset in the majority of organizations today, because unquintessential leadership abounds, and this is the unwritten and unspoken mantra that is the underpinning of that leadership.

Would it surprise you, though, if I told you that the “What’s in it for me?” attitude is not just a prevailing organizational attitude, but an increasingly prevalent individual and personal attitude as well? That means we – you and I – are very susceptible to having and operating by this unquintessential leadership mindset in both our private and public lives.

What does it look like in us as individuals? That’s what you and I, as people who are striving to be quintessential leaders, need to be able to identify so that we can ensure that it’s not an attitude that we have and live our lives by.

Let’s ask some questions to find out what this mindset looks like in us as individuals:

  1. Do we notice people in genuine need everywhere in our lives?
  2. Do we routinely and proactively offer to help people in genuine need (time, money, effort, etc.)?
  3. Do we help people in genuine need without expecting anything in return?
  4. Do we help people in genuine need without holding it over their heads, now or in the future?
  5. Would we offer to buy a stranger something to eat if they ask us for money for food?
  6. Would we give a stranger the coat or sweater we’re wearing if they are out in the cold without either?
  7. Would we be willing to share our last bit of food, heat, and clothing with a stranger who is also hungry, cold, and underdressed for the weather?

If we answered “no” or “it depends” to any or all of these questions, then we need to examine our attitudes for the unquintessential leadership “what’s in it for me?” mindset that has somehow begun to creep into our autopilot programming.

Obviously, none of us as individuals can take care of all the genuine needs that exist in the world. But within our little spheres of the world, we can certainly make a conscious and continual effort to do what we are able when we’re able.

And that means that we, as quintessential leaders, should always be proactively looking for genuine needs that we can fill.

When is the last time we cleaned out our family’s drawers and closets and donated the clothes, shoes, etc. that we don’t wear anymore to a homeless shelter or to a battered women’s shelter?

When is the last time we went – and took our kids – to visit homebound elderly people we know or elderly people in an assisted living facility or a nursing home? Many of these people have no visitors, including, sadly, their own families, at all and life, as they end it, is alone and lonely.

Selfless GivingThese are just a few examples. We should be able to come up with many more and take action to help freely and selflessly, because that’s the opposite of the “What’s in it for me?” attitude.

While these questions deal with our private lives, we also should be doing the same thing in our public lives.

When is the last time we had a conversation with our team members just to see how they’re doing and to see if they have personal needs that we can help out with?

A good example is the increasing number of employees who have a fulltime job at our organizations and also have a fulltime job at home as caregivers not just for their spouses and children, but additionally for their aging parents as well.

We could organize the rest of our team to provide meals for the employees and their families two or three nights a week (this could be as simple as a casserole and a salad made on Sunday and brought to work on Monday).

We could see if there are errands like grocery shopping or picking up medications at the pharmacy that we can do for the employees to cut down on the number of things they have to do in addition to working fulltime and being a extended family caregiver fulltime.

Again, this is just one example. As quintessential leaders, we should be looking for these areas to serve – because that’s what selfless giving is – others around us everywhere in our lives.

So it’s time for each us to look in the mirror of our lives and ask which of these questions defines our mindsets and attitudes: “What’s in for me?” or “What can I do for you?”

If the question is the first, then we need to make changes. If the question is the second, then there’s always room to improve.

How are we doing?

 

 

 

Planes, Pilots, Flying and Quintessential Leadership

Posted: March 31, 2015 in Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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Airplanes are like organizationsThe connections between planes, pilots, flying and quintessential leadership have been percolating in my mind for several years. 

Each time there is a new air disaster, these connections come back to the front of my thinking and expand as I find deeper meaning and more interrelated threads between these on-the-surface seemingly dissimilar things.

They are very similar, as this post will demonstrate, because the same core mechanisms exist among them.

Let’s start at the basic connections. Planes are like organizations. Pilots are the leaders who are responsible for the planes. How pilots fly (lead) planes depends on whether the project (the flight) is successful or unsuccessful. (Passengers are customers who pay for and expect success every time.)

The health of a plane is a factor in successful outcomes. Like organizations, if a plane is poorly or sloppily maintained, has outdated equipment and/or software, and has major structural or mechanical problems that compromise its integrity, that will limit and hinder the ability of the pilot to lead the plane to a successful outcome: a safe landing and delivery of passengers to their destination.

The leadership ability of the pilot is also a factor in successful outcomes. This encompasses several areas, including experience, skills, health (vision and heart come to mind), lifestyle (getting enough sleep, alcohol and/or drug consumption, and allergies that are treated with medication), and attitude toward the job and the customers (selfless or self-centered).

How the pilot flies the plane is a third crucial factor in successful outcomes. And, while not the only factor, this factor can often mean the difference between successfully averting disaster or disastrously averting success when problems with the plane or another pilot arise. 

Why?

Pilots have choices as to how they fly a plane. They can choose to manually fly the plane, relying on their critical thinking, their skills, and their experience, or they can choose to fly the plane on autopilot, which is automation – often out-of-date and based on a limited (because humans write it) scope of scenarios under ideal conditions – software installed on all commercial planes. 

Pilots Are LeadersResearch has shown that when pilots depend on automation software primarily to fly their planes, they lose critical thinking skills. They also lose touch with the plane’s structure and instrumentation and how to use those to their greatest advantage – successful outcome – in emergency situations. Reaction time to crises is also considerably slower when pilots depend exclusively on autopilot to fly.

Too many inexperienced pilots depend solely on autopilot, which can lead to a disastrous outcome.

One of the more recent examples of this was the February 12, 2009 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 in Buffalo, NY, which killed 50 people (this included a man in the house the plane crashed into).

The pilots of Flight 3407 assumed that because they were flying on autopilot, they didn’t need to pay attention or monitor anything. Ice began to accumulate on the wings, making the plane heavier and dragging it down under the burgeoning weight, resulting in deceleration. The pilots didn’t notice.

Finally the plane began to stall as it descended. The pilot, inexperienced, confused, and panicked, pulled the stick shaker, which had alerted him to the impending stall of the engines, toward him instead of away from him. 19 seconds later the plane had crashed and 50 people were dead.

On the other end of this spectrum is the example of an experienced and highly-skilled pilot – ironically, almost a month before the crash in Buffalo, NY – who was flying USAirways Flight 1549 out of LaGuardia Airport in New York City. 

Captain Chelsey Sullenberger had just taken off from the runway when a flock of birds flew into the plane’s engines, stalling them both. Unable to maneuver back to LaGuardia or maneuver over to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, Captain Sullenberger was forced to land the plane in the Hudson River.

Because he was flying the plane manually, he was able to use his expertise and ability to think clearly in a time of crisis to accomplish a soft landing into the river, referred to as the Miracle on the Hudson, which kept the plane intact on impact and ensured the survival of all the passengers and crew.

For us as quintessential leaders, our experience, skills, attitudes, and how we choose to lead – on autopilot or manually – can also be the deciding factor in ultimate success (even if the only thing that amounts to is minimizing the impact of what is going to be a disaster no matter how we slice it) or ultimate failure.

As humans, autopilot is our default mode of operation. We are the sum of our biology, experiences, knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Some areas of our life depend on autopilot. Breathing is one of those. Imagine having to think about and manually having to force breath in and out of our lungs. We’d get nothing else accomplished in our lives but this because breath, more or less, is life.

So autopilot for some things is an absolute necessity. However, where we run into trouble with autopilot in our lives is in the areas of experience, knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Much depends on when we acquired them, how we acquired them, and how we apply them from that point on.

Most of our autopilot programming, if you will, is acquired early on in our lives. Because we don’t have full knowledge of everything and we don’t have the maturity or resources to (a) realize that, and (b) do something to correct it, we end up with a lot of faulty and outdated programming in our autopilot that we often employ the rest of our lives, resulting in the same old failures – some disastrous and some not – over and over again throughout our lives.

At some point, we would hope, maturity – and getting tired of the same old, same old – would direct us to start flying our lives manually so that we can figure out how to successfully navigate through, around, and beyond the things that our autopilot keeps crashing us in the middle of. (Sorry, Grammar Nazis, that preposition has to be at the end of that sentence. :-))

Quintessential leaders recognize that our autopilot is faulty and outdated. We understand that the only way to lead is manually.

Why?

Because leading manually ensures that we are:

  1. Fully engaged all the time
  2. Maximizing our current level of aggregate experience, expert skills, full knowledge, and optimized attitudes
  3. successful outcome quintessential leaderCritically thinking about obstacles, problems, options, and solutions
  4. Able to respond in real time without panic or chaos
  5. Able to ensure successful outcomes even in disastrous situations
  6. Updating – or, in some cases, rewriting from scratch – our autopilot with new and corrected code to use in future similar situations

So, my fellow quintessential leaders, now is the time for us to look in our own lives to discern the current state of our planes (organizations, families, congregations, schools, etc.), our piloting (leadership) experience, skills and attitudes, and whether we as pilots choose to fly (lead) on autopilot or manually.

What do we see? What needs to change? What do we need to change?

Are we willing to commit to what we can change and what we need to change, no matter how difficult it will be, how much resistance – from ourselves and others – we might encounter, and how much time and effort it will take?

If we’re striving to be quintessential leaders, the answer is unequivocally “Yes.” 

But here is the heart of the matter. What is your answer?

The Quintessential Leader Perspective on Respect

Posted: March 24, 2015 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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Dr. Ned M. RossThe first – and one of less than a handful of people whose lives have intersected with mine in which I’ve seen an unwavering commitment to quintessential leadership – quintessential leader in my life was my dad. He modeled quintessential leadership  in everything he was, he did, and he said.

When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate it as much. Now that I’m older, I appreciate it – and my dad – more and more with each passing day.

My dad’s been gone almost 17 years, but his example and the lessons he taught me about what quintessential leadership is and what it looks like in practice have taken root over the years, with those roots getting more deeply entrenched and stronger with time and practice, and have now begun to blossom and bear fruit in my own life.

I wish my dad were here to see that, although it was hard to tell then, I watched, I listened, I absorbed, and I took everything to heart. His experience, his counsel, and his wisdom have permeated my mind, my conscience, and my life as I’ve tried them, tested them, proved them, and found them to be true.

The older me would tell my dad that he was right (the younger me had a hard time admitting that anyone else was ever right) and would never stop expressing my gratitude and my love. That, for my dad, will have to wait for another day, one that I am looking forward to very much.

In the meantime, though, I have the opportunity to pass the lessons on in developing other quintessential leaders. I don’t claim to have mastered them nor to execute them perfectly. But that is a front-of-my-mind-always goal and nothing I think, say, or do isn’t within the context of that goal. That, my friends, is the first step to becoming a quintessential leader.

One of the ongoing lessons my dad taught me was to show respect to everybody. In my words. In my actions. In every area of my life. I can still hear him saying “Be nice to everyone you meet on the way up, because you’ll meet the same people on your way back down.”

Respect can be a complicated thing for us as people and us as quintessential leaders. It shouldn’t be, as I hope to show, since respect is an outward manifestation of our understanding of the brotherhood of humanity and of the integrity of our character, but it can be until we understand the essence of what respect is.

Respect is not tied to our likes or dislikes, our feelings and emotions, nor to what we agree or disagree about.

Instead, it is an acknowledgement that each of us has the exact same value in terms of our humanness – at our most basic structure, each of us is just a little dirt and a little water mixed together, and when death, the great equalizer, comes that is what we all return to, minus the water – and in terms of our purpose and our potential.

Most of the people in leadership positions today lack respect for anyone else. They may show favoritism to their lackeys as long as they support and help them and push their agendas – which are power, greed, and control – but favoritism is fickle and disappears when lackeys are inconvenient or no longer useful.

Respect is not fickle, nor is it tied to what someone else can do for us. That is simply beyond the grasp of most people in leadership positions today. 

respect quintessential leaderDisrespect is in vogue. It is wrapped up in the forms of tearing others down, name-calling, and put downs. It is characterized by people exposing the “weaknesses” of others, ripping those weaknesses – and those people – to shreds, and then the disrespecters exalting themselves to show how superior and better they are than the lowlifes they just called out.

As shameful and as disgusting as this conduct is, those who do it have no shame and no remorse. In fact, with social media, they’ve found a bigger and more public venue in which to flagrantly disrespect other people. As a result, disrespect has become the norm, while respect is becoming harder and harder to find.

A recent example of this pervasive disrespect – and this is a pattern of behavior with this individual – from someone in a leadership position, but who is not a quintessential leader, brought this back to the forefront of my thinking.

Here are a few excerpts from an email this person in a leadership position wrote to somebody he disagrees with:

“…that you remain a congenital liar incapable of telling the truth.”

“You seem to fail to grasp that you were used as a useful idiot…”

“…you were too stupid to realize that you were being used.”

“I have no time for lying fools whose mission in life is to slander and spread division…”

“Take your vomit somewhere else and don’t waste my time.”

I disagree, for different reasons, with almost all that the recipient of this email says as well. However, I would never communicate with this person – or anyone else on the planet – in a disrespectful manner. The person in a leadership position, though, had absolutely no qualms about it. 

As quintessential leaders, each of is responsible for showing respect to everyone and to modeling that to the quintessential leaders we are developing. Since that’s our responsibility, what does it look like in practice?

Not everybody is going to like everybody else. That’s a fact of life.

My dad, I think, came the closest of anybody I know to liking almost every person he ever met. I can think of two people I know for a fact that he didn’t like, and there may be two others, but he never said one way or the other.

I, on the other hand, have a longer list of people that I don’t care for and would rather not have to be within 300 miles of on any given day (and, frankly, the same is probably true for them with me). It’s not that they are awful people or bad people, but our personalities and temperaments are so different that we just don’t sync up on any kind of tangible level.

Given the choice to spend any kind of extended time with them or face a firing squad, I’d most likely choose the firing squad. Both are excruciating, but one is fast and one-and-done. Social pain is difficult for me, so quick elimination – my own – is generally my preference.

However, whether we are more like my dad and there’s almost nobody we don’t like or we’re more like me and have a pricklier personality and temperament, we still are responsible for being respectful to everybody.

We all have emotions and feelings and sometimes we get hurt, we get angry, and we get sad at what other people do to us and say to us. Disrespecting them – revenge and getting even – is our default response tendency as humans.

But quintessential leaders never forget their responsibility to be respectful and to be reminded that we have also hurt, angered, and saddened other people in our travels through life, and we’ve been shown respect, along with mercy and restraint, at times along the way when we didn’t deserve it. We pay that forward. It’s that simple.

As human beings, it’s often easier to find things we disagree on than things we agree on. That, too, is part of life. Sometimes those disagreements are deep and intense. Sometimes they are so fundamental, moral-wise, character-wise, and principle-wise, that they force a relationship between or among people to break – at least for the rest of this temporary existence of physical life.

However, no matter how strong the disagreement, even to the point of breaking relationships for the remainder of our physical lives, we may have with other people, we are still responsible for showing them respect.

I suspect that when this life is done and the next iteration occurs that we’ll all find that all the things we thought we knew were in fact next to nothing (and that little splinter where there was a minute bit of understanding and insight was more wrong than right) and all that we argued over, disagreed over, and fought over was basically a waste of time because none of us got it right.

If that’s the case, then our responsibility for being respectful to everybody else – even if they disrespect us – should weigh even heavier in who and what we as quintessential leaders are.

So how do quintessential leaders show respect? What does it look like?

  • Never personally attack anyone else. You can disagree and be respectful. You can dislike and be respectful. You can experience negative emotions and feelings and be respectful. You can break a relationship, because it’s the healthiest thing to do, and be respectful.
  • Never tear anyone else down. You are not anyone’s judge and jury. You have never value purpose potential equals respectwalked in their shoes, so whatever you think you know about them is not even close to their whole story. Show mercy.
  • Never badmouth anyone to anyone else. This an emotional response to anger, frustration, and impatience with other people. It says a whole lot more about you as a person than it does about the person you’re badmouthing.
  • Silence can be a form of respect, especially when it comes to anyone that we are hard-pressed to find or see anything positive about. Just because we don’t see it or haven’t found it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Silence ensures that we recognize that everyone has value, even if we don’t know personally what it is. It is often the better part of wisdom.

What would you add to this list of what respect looks like?

More importantly, how are we doing?

The Quintessential Leader Perspective on Entitlement and the Narcissism Epidemic

Posted: March 11, 2015 in Performance Management System, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Team Building & Development
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Narcissus Falling In Love With HimselfEntitlement and the narcissism epidemic is something that all of us as quintessential leaders have to deal with today. But where we have to deal with that may surprise us.

I’ve just finished reading Living in the Age of Entitlement: The Narcissism Epidemic by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. and W. Keith Campbell, Ph.D.

Since the beginning of the entitlement/narcissism epidemic that started in the 1970’s, with the “me” generation that the Baby Boomers of the 1960’s morphed into, it has exploded as the Baby Boomers have moved from young adulthood to now being senior citizens. The mess they have left in their tsunami wake as revolutionaries is the mess that we, in subsequent generations, have not only inherited but have also adapted to in many respects. Parents, since then, have been the cultivators of narcissistic children from birth, and society and culture pick up that ball and carriy it after children are old enough to go to daycare or go to school.

Before the 1970’s, entitlement and narcissism were rare in the general population. It was confined to the ranks of royalty and celebrities, but even in those ranks, it was not across the board.

I think knowing that was why I was surprised by the saying that Aibeelene, in the novel The Help (published in 2011), repeats again and again to Mae Mobley: “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” This is completely out of character for anybody to say in the world of 1963 Jackson, Mississippi – or anywhere else for that matter.

And yet this is an excellent example of how deeply rooted entitlement and narcissism are in our culture, in our society, and in ourselves. While this phrase would have never been uttered by anyone in 1963, by 2011, an equivalent of it would be a mainstay in the mouths of almost every parent and every elementary school teacher in the United States.

it's-all-about-meAlthough I have been keenly aware for quite some time of the “it’s all about me” attitude and belief that is everywhere in society today and is seemingly more overtly prevalent among the Millennials, there were incidents discussed in Living in the Age of Entitlement: The Narcissism Epidemic that surprised even me as to how early this indoctrination starts and how all of us, including Gen Xer’s like me and my generation (whose most recent parallel generation was the Lost Generation of the 1920’s) can be (and most have been) affected by it to one degree or another.

Narcissism is an epidemic in our society because it has infected every part of our lives and it has changed us in fundamental ways. Not all of us, but most of us. And that affects us as quintessential leaders because we’re not immune to the infection, and it affects the teams that we lead.

However, the one thing that should not be affected – and we have to get rid of any traces of the entitlement infection that we may have acquired along the way for this to be authentic, genuine, and effective – is how we lead.

If you have not yet read Building Trust and Being Trustworthy, I strongly urge you to read it. The must-have traits to build trust and be trustworthy are the core of quintessential leadership and they are the complete antithesis of – and the antidote to – entitlement and narcissism.

So you’re reading this and thinking “I don’t think I’m entitled and I’m certainly not a narcissist! I don’t need to read this because it doesn’t apply to me.” 

Keep reading. You are in for enlightenment if you are brave enough and honest enough to go on. And with enlightenment comes understanding and with understanding comes the potential to change. The choice to change is individual. And that’s on you. And that’s on me.

While not every person who feels entitled is a full-blown narcissist, most of American society has absorbed many of the narcissistic components of entitlement without even being aware of it. Everything in our culture is narcissistic and feeds our sense of entitlement if we don’t recognize it and consciously reject it.

Recognition is the first step to fighting the narcissism infection in our own lives. Pay attention to advertising (all forms of media). The underlying message is always “You’re special and you deserve this.” That idea of specialness and I’m owed this takes root and it begins the process of narcissism infection.

The reality, however, is that if everyone is special, then no one is special because the word “special” – which denotes being exceptional, unusual, singular, uncommon, notable, noteworthy, remarkable, and outstanding – loses its meaning.

We can’t all be special. In fact, we’re not all special. And, yet, that underlying notion of being special is rampant in our society. What this message of being special does is separate us from each other and it turns a blind eye to the fact that we, humanity, you and I, have much, much more in common than we have that makes us different. 

The idea of being special also causes us to think better of ourselves than we should and certainly exalts our opinions of ourselves compared to other people to dizzying heights. And because we’re inherently superior, in our own minds, to all the other lowly humans on the planet, we simultaneously turn our all attention completely to ourselves and expect the other 7+ billion people on the planet to turn all their attention to us too.

I doubt many of us are aware of how this narcissistic tendency has taken hold in our lives because we have absorbed the subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages that our culture throws at us at every turn. 

But I’m asking us to take the time to examine our lives and see where we’ve become narcissistic and entitled in our own lives.

As quintessential leaders – and as I’ve said before, we all lead a team or teams somewhere in our lives, as parents, as teachers, as athletic coaches, as pastors, as organizational leaders, as team leaders in an organizational setting, so this applies to all of us – we must be aware of how much this has infected our own lives and make an immediate and diligent effort to eradicate it, not only from ourselves, but also from our teams.

Nowhere is the narcissism epidemic more visible and more prevalent than on social media. That’s the first place that I suggest that each of us goes to examine ourselves because the volume and content of our social media accounts will give us a pretty good indication of how much entitlement and narcissism we’ve acquired in our own thinking and our own beliefs. 

Examples are constant updates that try to garner attention to ourselves, whether they are a non-ending stream of selfies or things that draw attention to us personally, or they are cryptic one or two-word messages like “Confused…” or “Sad…” or “SMH (shaking my head)…” or “Oh, bother!” that literally scream out “I need attention. I need an audience. Come talk to me. NOW!” 

Or they are simply a blow-by-blow account of every little part of our normal, ordinary, mundane, and, for the most part, boring lives, which is an unconscious way of saying “my normal, ordinary, mundane, and, for the most part, boring life is so important that you all need to know about it and pay attention to it.” In other words, my life and I are special.

If you have not read my three-part book review series on Michael Harris’ The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, please take some time to do that because digital technology and our constant connection to it plays a vital role in the widespread, across generational lines, infection of entitlement and narcissism in our society and in our culture. 

awesome special or narcissism?
This idea of specialness is insidious. These two images with this paragraph look harmless enough, right? And, yet, what is the real message here? You’re special. And being special means that the rules don’t apply to self-esteem or narcissism?you. You’re above correction, you’re your own person, you deserve the best, and you deserve everything you want whenever you want it just because you want it. You don’t have to cooperate with anyone. You don’t have to think about anybody but yourself.

And, if things don’t go right for you, well, everybody else is the problem, because it can’t possibly be such an awesome, wonderful, special, fabulous, spectacular, nobody-else-in-the-world-like-you, pinnacle-of-all-the-best-that-defines-humanity person that you are.

Writing that last paragraph made me queasy. But I think my queasiness comes from a realization that what that paragraph says is not far from the truth of how the majority of people see themselves in U.S. culture and society. That majority may include you and me.

And the sad reality is that it’s not true. 

So how do we as quintessential leaders eradicate entitlement and narcissism from ourselves and from our teams? This will be one of the the most daunting processes, I suspect, that we will undertake. But undertake it we must.

We have to recognize how entitlement (and narcissism) manifests itself.

Entitled people believe self-admiration is very important (and necessary). Entitled people also believe that self-expression (“I should be allowed to say whatever I want to say, however I want to say it, whenever I want to say it, wherever I want to say it.”) is necessary to establish their identities. Entitled people don’t recognize limits or boundaries.

Entitled people believe that just showing up is praiseworthy (think of little kids on a sports team with a losing season because they either stank as players or they were too distracted to play getting trophies just like the teams that were good and actually played the sport – it happens all the time), and that any effort (we all know someone who always says “But, I worked SO hard…” while they either never actually complete anything or what they do is so lousy that it has to be redone – by someone else – all over again) is deserving of recognition whether it produces anything good or not.

Entitled people hold everybody accountable and responsible except themselves. If something goes wrong, it’s somebody else’s or something else’s fault. They are blameless and faultless.

Entitled people let other people do their “dirty work.”

I have a close friend who works at a university in a department that is responsible for auditing student records to determine who is eligible for graduation each semester and who is not.

She and her team email (several times) students who should be eligible for graduation but are missing classes they need to be able to graduate well in advance of their anticipated graduation date so the students can do what they need to graduate on time.

Every semester, just before – and I mean two or three days before – graduation, my friend and her team get tons of phone calls about why students aren’t going to graduate and why they should be allowed to graduate (because they “deserve it” is usually the reasoning). The majority of these phone calls, however, come from the parents of the students, not the students themselves. 

And more and more common are the stories of younger employees who bring their parents to their job interviews and have their parents call to request vacation time or to fight with a company that’s terminated them because they either couldn’t do the job or they actually didn’t show up.

And that leads to a final point about entitled people. Entitled people believe their time is more valuable than anyone else’s time and that life should conform to their schedule instead of them conforming to life’s schedules. 

As quintessential leaders, whether we see entitlement and narcissism in ourselves or in ourselves and our teams or just in our teams, we must proactively remove it and replace it with the opposite, which is humility.

We do this first by treating all people fairly, without preferential treatment and without favoritism. Sometimes this means that we take corrective action with team members who are not meeting organizational standards and/or performance standards.

But this corrective action develops as a coaching process that starts as soon as we recognize that issues exist. This is part of a comprehensive performance management system that most organizations don’t see nor use as a year-round tool to develop employees, which is the goal of quintessential leaders.

Most organizations, instead, use a single part of a performance management system once a year. This is in the form of a review (which, in many cases, is tied to a raise), without any action plans, improvement plans, and side-by-side monitoring and coaching beforehand, at the end of the business year to hit people over the head with regarding things they didn’t even realize were an issue or that they were being evaluated on. And that is detrimental all the way around and is not quintessential leadership.

Some entitled people won’t change, no matter what we do as coaches and mentors to try to help them. That’s the reality. The narcissism is too entrenched and too much a part of who and what they are for them to do and be anything else. And the end result is either they resign (they won’t be told what to do or have limits set on them) or we terminate them (they never even attempt to meet organizational and/or performance standards).

But some entitled people will change, and it’s up to us as quintessential leaders to help them in that process. It won’t always be a piece of cake for anybody involved, but commitment and diligence on both sides to the process and to the end results of the process will eventually bring about the desired results. I know because I’ve been involved in this kind of process several times, and I can tell you it is so worth it when both people are committed to making it happen.

Coach Dean Smith UNC Quintessential LeaderAnother thing that we as quintessential leaders need to do to counter the entitlement/narcissism epidemic is to model and foster cooperation and teamwork, instead of making individuals on our teams the center of the universe. The late Coach Dean Smith of the University of North Carolina did this with every team he coached and I discussed how this helped the 1982 team win the NCAA championship over Georgetown, which had a single “superstar,” Patrick Ewing.

We consciously build teams to bring different talents to the table, but no talent alone is any greater or any more important than any other talent. Without all the talents, the team wouldn’t exist and we could not accomplish anything. Therefore, we must model and demand respect for and among the team. While we recognize uniqueness where it exists, we must be careful not to equate uniqueness with specialness. They are not the same thing. 

And one of the most important things that we as quintessential leaders must do as an antidote to entitlement and/or narcissism is to let people fail in a safe environment, where failure equals an opportunity to learn and grow instead of equaling derision, at best, and termination, at worst.  

The greatest lessons we learn in life and our greatest periods of growth often come as a result of failure (sometimes it’s spectacular and sometimes it’s not). In this age of entitlement, failure is missing and, as a result, so are growth and life lessons we can’t learn exactly the same way any other way.  

Parents are now accustomed to swooping in to save their kids from failure by doing homework, calling the university to try to get their kids graduated, going on job interviews with them, and negotiating with employers for benefits or after termination. 

Failures in the workplace often mean delays (which mean that other projects get delayed and potential profits get delayed), more work for the team, and possible negative consequences for the team leader if a project misses a milestone or misses a completion deadline. 

Because of this, it’s tempting for people in leadership positions to want to swoop in and fix everything and save the day. As quintessential leaders, we can’t do that. We have to be willing to stand in the gap and take the heat for delays and setbacks so that our teams have a safe place to fail and to learn from those failures.  

We can never forget the bigger picture that we are in the process of developing quintessential leaders. And quintessentials leaders fail at times. They have to face it. They have to deal with it. And they have to learn how to recover from it.

The bottom line is that if someone has never been allowed to fail, they will never be successful at living life and they will certainly never be quintessential leaders.

Failure forces us to look at ourselves honestly. It forces us to change. And it forces us to get up and try again. And again. And again. In the process of trying over and over, growth occurs because our character gets sharpened, our perspective gets broadened, and our ability to think outside the box gets stronger. We think, we create, we innovate. And sometimes we simply take a leap of faith into the unknown because there are no other options available.

The other side of experiencing failure is that it creates empathy, compassion, kindness, gentleness, and mercy in us toward others when they are dealing with a failure. We can help them, we can encourage them, and we can support them, because we share a common bond with them. 

Entitled people don’t do this, by the way. They gloat over others’ failures and they use those failures to put themselves on an even higher pedestal. Entitled people also ridicule other’s failures and they broadcast those failures to as many people who will listen, often dismissing those who have failed as weak, negative, a drain on their lives, and not worth any effort because all they do is feel sorry for themselves.

When we see this, we’re looking at narcissism and entitlement square in the face. There is a complete lack of connection to anything that doesn’t make them feel good or feel special. Failure does neither.

Failure is not all doom and gloom all the time, but it has its moments and a lot of ups and downs as people who are actually trying to navigate through failures are looking for avenues to overcome those failures.

Like anything else in life, failure is a lot like success in that most of the roads you take end up being dead ends and you have to start over again, which can get real old real fast, to try to find those few roads that are not.

But the thing that entitled people will never know is that our failures ultimately strengthen us and they forge excellent character because they leave us no choice but to confront all the things we normally avoid, that we’re afraid of, that are way outside our comfort zones, and that compel us to make, sometimes, really hard choices about what’s important and what’s not in every aspect of our lives. 

So the questions I leave us – you and me – with are simple.

Are we part of the entitlement/narcissism epidemic?

If we have been infected with entitlement/narcissism, are we going to do anything about it?

If we are going to do something about it, then what are we going to do and when are we going to do it?

Talk is cheap, my friends. Actions always speak louder than words.

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