Posts Tagged ‘failure’

When Chaos Reigns – A Quintessential Leadership Perspective

Posted: November 6, 2016 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership
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Chaos reigns where quintessential leadership does not existIn any given situation in life, to be successful, productive, and growing, leadership (to be clear, not just someone who self-appoints themselves as a leader, or someone who is elevated to a leadership position by an entrenched buddy system that establishes criteria that are so limited that they ensure that person alone can be given the leadership position and they can fill the minion positions around them, or someone with a title who is not a leader, but instead an authentic quintessential leader) must be in place: clear, established, identified, and where the buck stops.

When leadership is absent or unquintessential leadership is in place, chaos reigns. (more…)

Unquintessential Leadership: The Impact of Pervasive Dishonesty on Teams

Posted: April 24, 2016 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership
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Pervasive dishonesty is unquintessential leadership and destroys trust and trustworthinessI think we’ve all encountered people in our lives who wouldn’t know the truth if it hit them in the face. They are fundamentally and pervasively dishonest about everything, whether it’s major or minor, big or small, important or unimportant.

One thing we learn quickly about pervasively dishonest people is that we can’t trust them or anything they say or do at all. The moment they speak or act, our guards go up and our minds start questioning how far from the facts – if there are even actual facts involved – they are straying or whether their words and actions are pure confabulation and never happened at all. (more…)

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 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?