The Quintessential Leader Perspective on Forgiveness

Posted: January 29, 2015 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership
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forgiveness quintessential leader

Of all the things that we humans are called upon to do, it is my opinion that real, genuine, authentic forgiveness is one of the most difficult. Humans, by nature, get a certain perverse enjoyment out of nursing grudges against others, holding on to wrongs done to them, and feeding what they believe is eternal and justifiable anger toward other people.

It doesn’t make any sense logically, objectively, or rationally because, in the end, unforgiveness causes a lot of self-inflicted pain that can sometimes last for the rest of a person’s life.

Because here’s the irony of being unforgiving.

No one suffers but the person who can’t or won’t forgive. The people who wronged the unforgiving go on with their lives, unaware of, perhaps, or, more likely, uncaring about the effect their behaviors. Read the rest of this entry »

The Quintessential Leader Perspective on the Struggle To and For Change

Posted: January 19, 2015 in Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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martin luther king 1966

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Greek word agōnízomai, from which the English word agonize comes, means to struggle intensely. Real change involves real agony. As Dr. King so astutely observed, change is not inevitable.

Inertia is our natural state. Inertia is comfortable. But inertia is also stagnant. Too often, we settle for inertia as our state of being because it’s easy and because that’s the way we (or someone before us) have always done things, have always thought about things, and have always been.

Inertia, as all of us who’ve studied physics know, requires a lot of force to overcome. But, for change, the force comes primarily from within us in the elements of desire, choice, and action combined. Read the rest of this entry »

The Quintessential Leader Perspective On the Art – and Beauty – of Silence

Posted: January 16, 2015 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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still waters run deep the art of silenceThere is an expression that “still waters run deep” that is often applied to people who tend to be mostly silent and low-key in their exterior lives that belies much complexity, thoughtfulness, and depth in their interior lives.

In other words, these people are masters at the art – and revel in the beauty of – silence. They enjoy the sound of silence. They crave more silence than not. And they are completely comfortable – in fact, they are most comfortable – in and with silence.

Before we discuss the art and beauty of silence, we must clear up some common misconceptions.

First, the art of silence doesn’t mean never talking (or writing), nor does it mean a lack of passion when talking (or writing). It’s not an either/or trait, unlike the way a lot of this-or-that, all-or-nothing generalists tend to portray the art of silence.

Second, the art of silence doesn’t indicate weakness, shyness, fear, or being intimidated. Too often the art of silence is portrayed as an inferior trait. Nothing could be further than the truth!

Third, the art of silence doesn’t mean not listening and not hearing. In fact, it means just the the opposite. Unlike talkative people who have great difficulty (and many times are completely tone-deaf) listening to and hearing anybody else because they’re so busy talking themselves, people who are masters at the art of silence hear and see everything that is said or done.

The difference is the art of silence, which includes self-control and self-discipline, knows when and/or if to respond to things that are said and done, which is why the art of silence is a quintessential leadership trait.

While the art of silence comes naturally to some people (introverts, for example, as described in Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking), it is something that can be learned by everybody.

How do quintessential leaders use the art of silence? And why do quintessential leaders use the art of silence? Those are the two aspects of the art of silence that we will look at today.

One of the ways that quintessential leaders use the art of silence is to filter out distractions. Distractions come in many forms, but one of the most prevalent and hardest to avoid and/or ignore is incessant talking.

Some people who talk incessantly just need to talk all the time. And if they can find someone who will engage with them interactively, then they have even more to talk about.

Some of these people can’t abide any kind of silence, so in the absence of external noise, they talk to fill the void. Everything that comes into their minds comes out of their mouths.

There is no editing and there is no evaluation of timing, appropriateness, or audience. The words are simply there and they must be uttered immediately out loud.

Because there is no content control for people who need to talk, there is often inciting and offensive content in what they talk about as well.

The other kinds of people who talk incessantly are people who think out loud to process their ideas. These people are also looking for engagement because they want external feedback as they work through the process.

the art of silence and the beautiful of silence quintessential leadershipThe same lack of content control, timing, and appropriateness may accompany this.

More likely, though, the biggest distraction in this kind of incessant talking is the drawn-out, rambling, unorganized, and sometimes incoherent process of formulating ideas out loud (people who are masters of the art of silence go through the same idea-formulating process, but they do it internally, not externally).

Quintessential leaders use the art of silence to stop the distraction of incessant talking by refusing to engage in the moment (incessant talkers need engagement, so if someone won’t engage, they’ll move and find others who will).

Quintessential leaders also use the art of silence in this situation because if their flow of productivity in working/thinking/life, which requires complete focus and attention, gets interrupted, they will lose a lot of time in the future to get back into that flow, if, in fact, they are able to. In other words, the total cost of not using the art of silence far outweighs any benefit of immediate engagement. 

However, for some idea formulations (either in terms of importance, experience, and/or coaching), quintessential leaders are very willing to participate, but the timing and the scope must be negotiated and agreed upon in advance.

And there are two crucial reasons why.

The first reason is because quintessential leaders will have the time to come fully prepared for discussions like these. The second reason is so that quintessential leaders can carve out a piece of time to give the person and the process their undivided attention.

Another area where quintessential leaders use the art of silence is the area of dealing with challenging people. No matter what teams we lead in life, there will always be a challenging cast of characters among them.

Challenging people may be uninformed and biased-by-spinning loudmouths. They may be instigators. They may be argumentative. They may be talebearers (includes gossiping). They may be extremely needy. They may be drama queens or kings. They may be attention-seekers. They may be manipulators.

In whatever form challenging people appear (and I’ve listed some of the major areas above), quintessential leaders must be adept in using the art of silence in the right way at precisely the right times to effectively neutralize and/or eliminate the area of challenge.

There are two things that all challenging people are looking for in terms of satisfaction with these kinds of behaviors. One is total engagement. The other is total agreement (or a really good knock-down-drag-out argument).

Quintessential leaders give them neither with the art of silence.

Silence has several positive results.

First, quintessential leaders are modeling the right behavior – in effect, coaching them in “this-is-what-it-looks-like” – for their teams to learn as they encounter challenging people along the way.

Second, the art of silence immediately shuts down the challenging person. It also removes them and their influence from the team, because if there is no satisfaction in one place, challenging people will quickly go looking somewhere else for it, since that’s the driving need behind these behaviors.

noisy discordant screeching A third way that quintessential leaders use the art of silence is to create enough space between them and everything and everyone else to create a place in their lives where they can retreat to as often and as long as they need to. This place is a place of assured peace, safety, comfort, and….wait for it…silence where quintessential leaders go to recharge and regroup.

Quintessential leaders don’t disconnect from life when they go to this place. They are fully engaged in everything that is important in life in necessary, productive, and practical ways.

However, they are completely distanced from all the unnecessary, all the impractical, all the frivolous, and all the jingly-jangly-clanging noise that comes at us from every direction and makes up our modern existences.

This is a personal and internal requirement for quintessential leaders, because this place must exist for quintessential leaders to be quintessential leaders. How often and how long the stays are will vary from situation to situation and individual to individual. But they must occur regularly.

If they don’t, then quintessential leaders become unquintessential leaders because they will lose sight of the big-picture, the vision, the focus, and the effective use of the art – and beauty of – silence.

And they will end up simply being another discordant note in the ever-increasingly-screeching and ear-splitting symphony of noise that has become the never-ending soundtrack of our lives.

Are we effectively using the the art of silence or have we forgotten and are on our way to becoming an insignificant off-key note that is lost in a maze of unpalatable noise?

I can answer that for myself alone.

What is your answer? 

 

The Quintessential Leader Perspective on Vision and Focus

Posted: January 14, 2015 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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vision and focus quintessential leader perspectiveContrary to popular opinion, vision and focus are not the same thing. They are related, but vision and focus are distinct from each other in many ways. To be a quintessential leader, we must possess both vision and focus and know when and how to execute them consistently and well.

Frankly, many people in leadership positions today do not have either vision or focus. The majority of the exceptions to this have one, but not the other. That sliver-thin few, then, that possess both vision and focus are the ones we want to focus on in this post and, as we strive to be quintessential leaders ourselves, that we want to emulate.

What is vision and what role does it play in quintessential leadership? Vision is a big-picture and well-defined view of a distinct and yet-to-be-realized goal. Our mission statements, organizationally and individually, must capture vision.

This is the first step of quintessential leadership. Vision must be clear and concrete in its expression and it must create a framework within which we operate. In other words, if anything about us – thinking, being, doing, saying – goes outside that framework, then we have lost our vision.

Vision answers essential questions in broad terms, distinguishing the uniqueness of why we and our organizations exist and what we alone bring to the table to achieve a stated objective.

(If we cannot find anything unique in our existence – and by unique, I don’t mean philosophical differences, power plays, personality differences, etc. – then we won’t have a very compelling vision.

It will be difficult, if not impossible, if our stated vision looks almost identical to all the other organizations in our field, to distinguish why we should be the organization of choice. Not only that, but where there is no unique vision and there are lots of very similar competitors, the end result is confusion and attrition. In other words, everyone in the field loses in the end.)

Vision answers these questions:

  1. Why do we exist?
  2. What are our objectives?
  3. What is the framework in which we will meet those objectives?
  4. How is our framework both unique and better able to meet those objectives?
  5. What does success, in terms of the objective, look like?

seeing without vision helen keller quintessential leaderOne of the biggest problems I see with vision statements in general is the wrong objective. Getting money, getting more customers, doing this, doing that are all short-term objectives and they are selfish objectives, and they are the wrong objectives.

Vision’s objective is long-term and consists of not what we get, but what we give. Because reaching long-term objectives requires giving a substantial investment of ourselves and our resources to the effort to give something better than what exists now to others beyond the organizational boundaries.

In other words, vision requires a selflessness that very few people in leadership positions now have. But quintessential leaders do and you see it in everything they are, they say, and they do.

vision goals mission statement

Vision is the first and necessary part of being a quintessential leader. The second and equally-important part of being a quintessential leader is focus.

Focus is keeping your eye on the goal and moving toward it without deviation. It sounds simple, but this is, in many ways, the harder part to actually accomplish.

We live in a distraction-filled world that makes getting focus, keeping focus, and maintaining focus toward long-term goals the most difficult accomplishment to actually achieve for all of us.

Much of this is because our attention spans have been shortened to almost non-existence both subtly and overtly.

The overt ways have come to our doorsteps as a result of the technological revolution.

A constant and steady stream of new and cool gadgets litter and clog up our neurological landscape and they all seek to claim our attention and our desire at the same time.

24/7 virtual connectivity through email, cell phones, and social media are all increasingly fragmenting our time and attention while demanding our continual obsequiousness.

The subtle ways our attention spans have been practically destroyed can be attributed to the media and the workplace.

no focus no destination winston churchill quintessential leaderMedia’s contributions have been shorter commercials with more products advertised, 24/7 multiple-channel access to talking heads, and, from digital providers, multiple-screen programming that can be simultaneously (sports channels lead in this area). With the addition of streaming services, our neurological landscapes have just become completely overcrowded and overwhelmed.

The workplace has contributed to this with its championing of multitasking – the more things you can do at one time, the more brilliant, the more talented, the more wonderful you are – and multitaskers, creating in the process, including most of the people in leadership positions, a superficial semblance of productivity that upon closer examination shows no depth, no forward progress, and no focus.

So how do quintessential leaders keep their focus when it’s clear all the odds are against them?

They never allow the vision, the mission statement, and the goal out of their sight. They, like salmon, swim upstream against the tide of distractions, exercising extreme self-discipline and extreme determination all the time to get to that goal.

Quintessential leaders are big-picture and long-term people and that’s how they live and breathe. As a result, they’re able to move right through the distractions without getting caught up in them for the most part.

Occasionally, though, even quintessential leaders will get taken in temporarily by a distraction that may seem important or significant. But the difference is that quintessential leaders recognize that it’s a distraction.

So what do quintessential leaders do? They always evaluate the distraction in terms of their vision, their mission statement and their focus. If the distraction is within that big-picture framework and needs to be addressed or resolved on the spot, quintessential leaders take care of it immediately and starting moving forward again.

Quintessential leaders, then, are never moving and doing just for the sake of moving and doing. If moving and doing does not have a purpose within the vision, the mission statement, and the goal, it’s irrelevant and eliminated.

Quintessential leaders are very proficient at this because they’ve either been doing it all their lives – some of us are naturally wired this way – or they’ve learned how to do it in the process of becoming quintessential leaders.

It’s not always easy, it’s not always fun, and it’s most definitely not always popular. 

But quintessential always eventually reach their goals, in the end, no matter how long, how bumpy, how rough, how intense, and how grueling the journey between the initial vision and the completed objective is.

So let’s look at ourselves in relationship to our vision and our focus.

Unquintessential leaders (people who have no vision and/or no focus) tend to complain about having too many things to do at once, not being able to finish anything, finding it hard to focus on what they’re supposed to be doing, having no breathing room or free time to recharge.

Unquintessential leaders also complain about not being organized and being perpetually confused about what they’re supposed to be doing, and, often, in the end, they quit, either literally or symbolically (just going through the motions as a pretender).

Quintessential leaders (people who have both vision – with the right objective – and focus), on the other hand, rarely complain about the effort and the toll it takes from and on them – and it does because all effort takes a toll, but the difference is whether it ultimately means anything or not – and the only thing they will complain about, at times, is having to expend even more effort to keep all the distractions and noise out so that they stay focused on the objective.

There is no disorganization, no lack of clarity, and no confusion. And they don’t quit, no matter what gets thrown in their way along the route from vision to goal.

So, my fellow quintessential leaders, how are we doing?

 

The Quintessential Leader Perspective on the Process of Team-Building

Posted: January 8, 2015 in Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Team Building & Development
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team-building recruiting interviewing assessing hiringTeam-building consists of four distinct steps: recruiting, interviewing, assessing, and hiring. A flawed approach in any one of these steps will, at the least, severely derail the process, and, at the worst, stop it altogether.

Modern team-building has become an increasingly-frustrating, long and drawn out, and very unsatisfying process for both organizations and potential team members. Much of this is because of the lack of quintessential leadership guiding the process.

If your organization is having difficulty building the right teams and building great teams – which delays new project initiatives, on-going projects advancement, and, ultimately, has a negative effect on customers (existing and new) and profits – then this post will show you why.

By showing you how quintessential leaders build teams, this post will also guide you in addressing the issues and flaws in the process that are holding your organization back from fulfilling its mission statement, from growing, from being successful, and from being more profitable.

The recruiting phase of team-building is the critical part of the team-building process. If this is not done well or effectively, then the rest of the steps – interviewing, assessing, and hiring – won’t matter.

It’s that important.

And yet, most of the time, very little, if any, quality attention and investment is given to this step. As a result, this is where the biggest bottlenecks occur and where the process tends to crash and burn.

Why?

There are several key reasons why recruiting is the least effective and most failure-ridden step of your organization’s team-building efforts:

  1. The role of potential team member additions is fuzzy.

    This is usually because the person who is responsible for leadership of the team is not clear on exactly what they want, but they want it now.

    As a result, they create a vague and general position description that 90% of potential team members meet the criteria for, resulting in an overwhelming number of potential team members who aren’t a match for the actual position.

  2. The role of potential team member additions is burdensomely skill-heavy and skill-specific.

    This is usually because the person who is responsible for the leadership of the team has created a rigid, unrealistic box that potential team members are expected to fit immediately and 100% into on Day 1 if they are added to the team.

    As a result, no potential team members possess all the skills and the proficiency levels specified, so no potential team members are a match for the position.

  3. The role of potential team member additions is inaccurately named.

    This is usually because either the person responsible for the leadership of the team has not defined the role in their own mind precisely enough or because the organization has a very lateral structure where functions and roles are not the same thing, but they look like the same thing on paper.

    As a result, potential team members who are “overqualified” apply. And, unfortunately, these potential team members intimidate the team leaders because of their experience and expertise. So, only from the team leaders’ standpoint, these potential team members are not considered a match.

  4. Potential team members are being vetted and eliminated through an automated human resources database system (designed by human resources departments and database administrators with no first-hand knowledge or understand of what job-specific complexities are involved with successfully adding a member to the team) with a limited and general keyword set.

    In other words, there is no human interaction in the initial phase of the recruiting process. The person responsible for leading the team doesn’t get a good and diverse choice of potential team members and potential team members who would be an excellent match get eliminated by an flawed automated process.

  5. Potential team members are being vetted by outsourced and offshore recruiters who barely understand and can communicate in the native language of the organization and the potential team members.

    As a result, the recruiters don’t really understand the requirements of the role, so they contact potential team members who most likely are not a match.

    For those potential team members, the interaction – always phone – is a nightmare because of the communication issues. Even if there is a possible match, potential team members will pass on it because they’re not going to agree to anything they can’t comprehend, language-wise.

  6. Organization recruiters either don’t understand or simply mismatch skill sets repeatedly.

    As a result, potential team members who are contacted by these kinds of recruiters end up being ready to gnash their teeth, pull their hair out, and include a phrase in their email signature that says “If you are recruiting for ‘x,’ ‘x’ does not equal ‘y,’ so please pass on by.”

  7. Organizations using domestic top-tier recruiting agencies – who have met with and know the potential team members they have available to offer – don’t give the recruiters enough concrete information about the role and the kind of potential team members they are looking for to enable the recruiters to do a good initial vetting job for them.

    As a result, recruiters reach out to potential team members who seem to meet the criteria given and being the process of setting the potential team member up with the person responsible for leading the team in the organization.

    This can go through several steps between the recruiter and the potential team member toward an interview and then suddenly stop because the organization hiring, or the team leader, or both realize they didn’t nail the role down concretely enough for the potential team members the recruiter is presenting them with.

    This is frustrating and a time-waster for both the recruiter and the potential team member (who may be putting other things on hold because this position is a good match) and it’s a time-waster for the organization that is hiring.

Quintessential leaders understand that recruiting is the crucial step in the team-building process. Therefore, this is the step they spend quality time on.

They first accurately and completely define the role they want to fill on their team. This is a skill that requires visualizing a human being in that role, not just things that are needed because nobody on the team has them or can do them. 

The definition should be big-picture, with the areas of responsibility framed out in the role’s description.

Quintessential leaders then identify the core competencies that the role requires.

This part of the recruiting step looks at experience, not in terms of specific applications, but in terms of what areas potential team members need to have experience, knowledge, and understanding in to successfully fill the identified role.

It also specifies the level (entry, intermediate, advanced, or expert) of experience, knowledge, and understanding that potential team members need to have to be a successful addition to the team. 

Core competencies are also identified and framed out in terms of the big picture.

At this point in the recruiting process, quintessential leaders have a very good idea of what they need in a potential team member, but because there are too many intangible things like personality, temperament, culture of the team/organization that also factor into who the successful candidate will be, quintessential leaders bypass the automated vetting systems because they realize they may lose great potential team members just because their resumes don’t exactly match the database keywords.

Although some quintessential leaders may use top-tier recruiting agencies (with specific instructions on the type of candidates they’re looking for), the majority of quintessential leaders usually do the actual dirty work – reading resumes and cover letters to select potential candidates – of recruiting themselves.

The reason is that cover letters and resumes can tell them a lot about potential candidates that they won’t be able to find out any other way other than a face-to-face interview.

Because quintessential leaders are big-picture people, they have an uncanny ability to connect disparate dots that may not look like they are related, but actually are.

By using this ability with actual cover letters and resumes, they will be able to identify, far more accurately than anyone or anything else, which candidates will be the best fit for the team.

Quintessential leaders also understand intangibles about people, and cover letters and resumes will often reveal those.

These intangibles include transferable skills (skills developed or learned in one industry, type of organization, or even life experience that can be used in other industries and types of organizations), skills that can be taught and learned, and intuitive or innate skills. These round out the big-picture snapshot of each potential team member.

Quintessential leaders now have a finite set of potential team members that they have personally identified as good fits for their teams to make initial contact with as the recruiting step transitions into the interviewing step of team-building.

And once the recruiting step is done, the rest of the team-building process is comparatively easy.

It’s unfortunate that most organizations and leaders of teams would rather expend the majority of their effort on the back end of the team-building process (which includes the termination process when poorly-chosen team members don’t work out), continually sacrificing productivity, success, and profitability as a result, instead of on the front end where it matters most.

“Building Trust and Being Trustworthy” – Excerpt from Chapter 10

Posted: January 4, 2015 in Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leader Books, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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the quintessential leader building trust and being trust worthy book

In the first post of this series, the excerpt from chapter 1 included a list of all the components we must develop and have to build trust and be trustworthy.

In the subsequent chapter excerpts detailing the components we need to have and develop to build trust and be trustworthy, chapter 2 discusses honesty, chapter 3 discusses integrity, andchapter 4 discusses fairness, chapter 5 discussesrighting wrongs, chapter 6 discusses accountability, and chapter 7 discusses consistency, chapter 8 discusses sincerity, and chapter 9 discusses setting boundaries.

This post, which includes an excerpt from chapter 10, discusses the component of setting a higher standard that builds trust and makes us trustworthy.

Setting a higher standard should be the first thing people in leadership positions do. Before anything else.

While setting a higher standard goes hand-in-hand with setting boundaries, setting a higher standard establishes evidentiary boundaries of character, which affects every area of our conduct. 

These are standards that we adhere to no matter where we are, what we are doing, or who we are with. And they are standards that we expect the members on our teams to adhere to as well.

Let’s look how a lack of setting a higher standard looks in real life. This should have everyone reading this nodding their heads because there is not one of us who hasn’t seen it.

How many times have we seen someone who seems to have a higher standard of conduct when we’re with them and then they deny that by their conduct (words and actions) when they’re not with us?

On social media, perhaps. With other people, perhaps. In different venues than the one(s) we associate them with. 

Now let me ask the harder question. What was our reaction to their lack of a higher standard?

If we shrugged it off, thinking it was no big deal, or if we were invited and joined into to whatever the conduct was, then we have not set a higher standard for ourselves either.

Only you can answer for yourself and only I can answer for myself, but if we have not set a higher standard, then we are not quintessential leaders and we are destroying trust and not being trustworthy.

Building trust and being trustworthy is an integrated trait of quintessential leaders.

It is also an integrated trait that all of us – because each and every one of us leads at least one team, small or large, of people in our lives – need to develop and have as part of the core of who we are and what we are. In essence, this trait is at the center of exemplary character and conduct, and none of us should settle for anything less than this in ourselves and others.

Unfortunately, most of us settle for less. A lot less. In ourselves. In others. 

The majority of people in leadership positions today are not trust builders and they are not trustworthy. Many of us, frankly, are also not trust builders and trustworthy.

We live in a world that with no moral code as its foundation that expects trust to be non-existent or broken. Look around. It’s everywhere, including, in many cases, very close to you.

And society has become so accustomed to this that it glorifies it instead of condemning it.

Politicians who lie routinely, who line their pockets with money and perks while making decisions that hurt and destroy the people they are supposed to represent, who cheat on their wives because they can.

Arts and sports celebrities who have no regard for faithfulness to their spouses, who live hedonistic lifestyles that destroy their families, the people around them, and, eventually their lives.

Religious leaders who cheat on their wives, who cheat on their taxes, and who scam their congregations both in how they deceitfully handle the word of God and in coercive and corrupt financial matters, acquiring wealth and power in the process.

Business leaders who destroy millions of lives by deceit, fraud, and illegal actions that result in their employees and customers losing everything while they escape any kind of punitive action and instead reap obscene profits and end their tenures – only to go to another financially lucrative position – with golden parachutes that are equally obscene.

And we, as individual leaders for our teams, who cheat on our taxes, who are routinely dishonest with the children (our own and others) and other people entrusted to us, who routinely steal things from our workplaces (you most likely didn’t pay for that pen you’re using at work, so it doesn’t belong to you), who routinely break traffic laws, who will walk out of stores with something we were not charged for and never think twice about it, who will take extra money that we’re not owed in financial transactions without blinking an eye, who cheat on our spouses, who marry until “divorce do us part,” and who, as a course of habit, break confidences of family and friends, gossip about family and friends behind their backs, and destroy reputations in the process.

Maybe we haven’t thought about building trust and being trustworthy at this kind of nitty gritty level.

But until we do – and we develop and have this trait as the core of who and what we are – we will not build trust and we will not be trustworthy. And we will not be quintessential leaders.

Trust and trustworthiness is probably the single most important trait we can possess. And it is also the most fragile.

It can take a long time to build and be, but it can be broken irreparably in a single second.

Therefore, this is a lifetime work on and in ourselves that we must commit to making an integral part of our character by continually developing it, maintaining it, and growing it. 

This goal should be our goal.

But it requires courage. It requires diligence. It requires vigilance. It requires continual self-examination. It requires continual change. It requires the ability to, much of the time, stand alone to maintain.

It is not for the faint-hearted. It is not for the vacillators. It is not for the crowd-pleasers. It is not for the pretenders. It is not for the wannabes. It is not for the weak.

But if you’re reading this, I know that you’re not any of those kinds of people. Those kinds of people won’t even read this because it requires time, effort, change, and commitment, and too many of us are, sadly, either just too lazy or we just don’t care. 

Building Trust and Being Trustworthy takes an in-depth look at the “this is what it looks like in practice” aspect of each of the components we need to develop and have to build trust and be trustworthy. The second chapter discusses the component of honesty in building trust and being trustworthy.

olive-horizontal-line

Excerpt from”Chapter 10: The Setting A Higher Standard Component of Trust and Trustworthiness”

“I’ve thought deeply about this component for quite some time as I’ve, over the course of the last few years, observed in almost every area of life – families, politics, education, religion, military, business, society, and in many individual lives, not only the absence of a higher standard of performance and conduct, but increasingly, no-standard of performance and conduct.

It seems that the “anything goes” philosophy has become the norm in the world.

It has, because of the most recent US presidential election, a very thought-provoking article entitled “General Failure,” in the November 2012 issue of The Atlantic – which was written well before the revelation of General David Patraeus’s adultery with his biographer and the possible adultery of General John R. Allen with Jill Kelly – and finally the resignation of General Patraeus from being CIA director, come back full-force into my line of vision.

This kind of behavior (all the parties know each other and are closely linked to each other) among the powerful in Washington, DC, based on what I’ve read and heard about it, is not only commonplace, but is seen as acceptable. 

The initial reactions from people in leadership positions – Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), for example, who implied that General Patraeus should not have resigned because he committed adultery – made it evident that not only are people in leadership positions not setting a higher standard for performance and conduct, but there is, in fact, no standard.

It seems to me that before we talk about setting higher standards in terms of performance and conduct, we need to talk about adultery and why it falls into the higher standard category on a personal and leadership level.

Marriage vows are taken based on the trust of two people in each other. By their very nature, they create a trust relationship.

By entering a marriage covenant, both parties are setting, demanding, and promising to adhere to a higher standard of conduct. When either party to those vows, which are made traditionally before God and people, breaks them, that person breaks the trust relationship.

Frankly, if a spouse shows untrustworthiness and destroys the trust in his or her closest personal relationship in life, then he or she is untrustworthy and destroys trust in every part of his or her life.”

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