Leadership and 5 Secrets of Legacy
November 5, 2009 by Scott Hammond
Filed under Relationship Development, Speaking
Leadership means many things to many people…I think it means being proactive… being the first:
- Taking the initiative
- Setting the standard
- Managing
- Planning
- Resourcing
- Identifying vision, goals and priorities
- A good leader takes responsibility and says” the buck stops here”.
- Leaders show the way and model by example what they’re trying to accomplish.
- Leaders press on and press in, and they run counter to the culture of convenience… they refuse to get stuck in the “bright and shiny objects”, diversions, and side eddies of our culture.
- Leaders strain and strive with intentionality and energy to build relationships and create a legacy and heritage and their families…. I do much of this is simply by taking the initiative, being intentional and planning by writing and accomplishing compelling goals that are relationship based…
Leaving a Legacy of Leadership
Who does not want to leave a positive legacy!
We want to leave a heritage to my family, friends, church and community at large.
Think about your personal leadership, through which you leave us a legacy to those behind you. See life as a chance to identify your purpose, position, passion, and posture.
What shapes you? Intentions? Motives? Opinions? Thoughts? Responses? What shapes your words, attitudes, deeds, reactions, and more?
So what is leadership, do you have it?
How do you get it?
What are you leaving behind now?
What do you want to leave behind?
What will change in order for you to do the above?
How do you get there from here?
To impress or to influence…
would you rather impress someone or truly have an influence in their life? Impressions are on the surface, therefore, are often superficial.
Influence on the other hand, is often real, honest, and requires far more ability.
Influence necessitates communication with people and the cessation of self absorption.
Your life’s lessons…
Many of our life’s lessons are made up from our experiences, relationships, and mistakes. Have you been honest with your fears, failures, frustrations, and feelings?
The above serve to shape your life’s message. That life’s message consists of a spiritual component, your life’s lessons, your life’s passions, and indeed, your life’s mission. Most of what we call failure can be transformed to tangible lessons we can share with those we have relationships with; pain transformed to purpose and passion.
Every leader has 5 components that define him or her.
1. Let’s talk about your POSITION…
Are you in a position to be credible, vulnerable, real, and genuine?
Are you believable, touchable, straight up, humane, and do you have integrity?
2. Every leader must have his PURPOSE.
People are the priority.
Are you able to connect with people are you a relationship builder?
Do you serve and meet needs?
Do you truly love other people?
Can you allow love to define your purpose and thereby your leadership legacy?
3. The third element of leadership is your POSTURE.
Do you live in a posture of being open, teachable, and always learning? Are you able to lose preconceived notions ideas and attitudes? You walk in the Spirit and live in the art of possibility in your day-to-day living?
4. One last element is your PASSION.
Passions define leadership.
What are you passionate about? Are you a spokesperson for your passions? What causes, groups of people, or issues do you champion?
5. Your Mission in life.
Do you want to leave a legacy of love for those around you?
Then have quality relationships with people. Be an example to follow. Serve others.
Leaving a legacy of leadership also means the facing and overcoming of adversity. How you deal with adversity defines you. Are you bitter, or better?
You will need faith to face your challenges. Then you can come through, as someone who can truly serve others and help them in their time of need.
A LEADER–
- A leader knows where she is going, why she is going, and how to get there
- A leader knows no discouragement, presents no alibi
- A leader knows how to lead without being dictatorial; true leaders are humble
- A leader leads for the good of the most concerned, and not for personal gratification of his or her own ideas
- A leader looks for the best in those he or she serves
- A leader marches with a group, and interprets correctly the signs of the pathway that leads to success
- A leader has his or her head in the clouds, but his or her feet on the ground
- A true leader considers leadership as an opportunity for service
- A leader is one who has not sought the high places, but who’s been drafted into service because of his or her ability and willingness to serve
- A leader listens, communicates, and cares
- A leader has courageous conversations
- A leader manages time, money, resources and is a good steward
- A leader washes dishes, cleans the bathrooms, and does what’s needed
- A leader does not look for, nor require, kudos
In conclusion, we all need to–
Find our voice and use it toward our life’s passions, purpose, posture, and position to leave a legacy of leadership. Find your voice and your gifts, and use your voice and your gifts. Lastly, help others find their voice and their gifts, so they too may leave a lasting legacy of leadership and a heritage of love.
Great Leadership Quotes
February 7, 2009 by Scott Hammond
Filed under Goal-setting, Relationship Development
“There have been meetings of only a moment which have left impressions for life, for eternity. No one can understand that mysterious thing we call influence…yet …everyone of us continually exerts influence, either to heal, to bless, to leave marks of beauty; or to wound, to hurt, to poison, to stain other lives.”
- J.R. Miller
“Leadership is getting people to work for you when they are not obligated.”
- Fred Smith
“We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere.”
- Author Unknown
“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.”
- Albert Einstein
“The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.”
THE STOCKDALE PARADOX….(timely)
June 23, 2008 by Scott Hammond
Filed under Health/Wellness/Wholeness, Relationship Development, Religion
Good To Great, by Jim Collins
The Stockdale Paradox
Chapter 4, pages 83–85
The name refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda. At one point, he beat himself with a stool and cut himself with a razor, deliberately disfiguring himself, so that he could not be put on videotape as an example of a “well-treated prisoner.” He exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife through their letters, knowing that discovery would mean more torture and perhaps death. He instituted rules that would help people to deal with torture (no one can resist torture indefinitely, so he created a step-wise system—after x minutes, you can say certain things—that gave the men milestones to survive toward). He instituted an elaborate internal communications system to reduce the sense of isolation that their captors tried to create, which used a five-by-five matrix of tap codes for alpha characters. (Tap-tap equals the letter a, tap-pause-tap-tap equals the letter b, tap-tap-pause-tap equals the letter f, and so forth, for 25 letters, c doubling for k.) At one point, during an imposed silence, the prisoners mopped and swept the central yard using the code, swish-swashing out “We love you” to Stockdale, on the third anniversary of his being shot down. After his release, Stockdale became the first three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor.59
You can understand, then, my anticipation at the prospect of spending part of an afternoon with Stockdale. One of my students had written his paper on Stockdale, who happened to be a senior research fellow studying the Stoic philosophers at the Hoover Institution right across the street from my office, and Stockdale invited the two of us for lunch. In preparation, I read In Love and War, the book Stockdale and his wife had written in alternating chapters, chronicling their experiences during those eight years.
As I moved through the book, I found myself getting depressed. It just seemed so bleak—the uncertainty of his fate, the brutality of his captors, and so forth. And then, it dawned on me: “Here I am sitting in my warm and comfortable office, looking out over the beautiful Stanford campus on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I’m getting depressed reading this, and I know the end of the story! I know that he gets out, reunites with his family, becomes a national hero, and gets to spend the later years of his life studying philosophy on this same beautiful campus. If it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?”
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
* * *
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”
10 Principles of Leadership
June 23, 2008 by Scott Hammond
Filed under Fathering, Relationship Development, Sales
|
Ten Principles of Leadership
By Tod C. Novak |
|||||||||||
|
Good Dad, Bad Dad: 7 Secrets of Effective Fathers…Conclusion
November 16, 2007 by Scott Hammond
Filed under Fathering
As fathers, we have a choice…
It’s a choice regarding investment… not necessarily of money, stocks, bonds… but of time and life units.
Your choice, and you’re free to decide how you will invest your life units..
Will it be for stuff? Possessions? Status? Fame? Pleasure?…
Or perhaps you could invest your life units in your family, your kids, leaving a legacy, a heritage, and a quality-of-life inheritance for them.
You won’t be perfect, but you can be intentional, sequential, methodical, and directional in this vital goal. You have no choice but to succeed!
You will need help along the way. Some of the resources you will need to be humble enough to ask will be…
- your wife
- father mentors
- your kids
- other resources including books, CDs, tapes and DVDs, and the Web
- goal-setting tools and techniques
- accountability with others whom you trust and love…
How much do care?
Be honest with yourself and others.
Are you willing to do the work? Pay the price? Take the steps?
It’s truly up to you to be the architect of your own father plan. You can not afford to be self deceived, haphazard, or halfhearted when it comes to deciding and acting in this vital area…
You can ask yourself the following questions again and again…
- who are you??
- what do you want??
- why are you here??
- what’s not happening now that you would like to see start happening??
- what’s happening now that you would like to see stop happening??
What will it be, dad?… what’s it gonna be?… make a decision…. do something!
Fathers, you are the architects, and you’ve got to get comfortable enough to lead and to put together your “Dad Plan” .
You’ve got to start somewhere.. so how bout this?…a goal is a dream with a deadline…
- dream, plan, write, and share two or three goals you have as a father
- post them and review them on a regular basis
- be accountable to yourself and someone else to accomplish them
- when you fail and fall short (which you will)… move on and press forward and start back up where you left off. Have forgiveness and grace on yourself, your kids, and your spouse and others.
The key here is attitude… you don’t HAVE to do these things.. but you GET to do these things.
Your motivation and attitude is everything so decide now in the seat of your will, that this is a priority, and you will succeed!
When will you get started on your Dad Plan?
How will it look when you schedule your kids into your life and really keep your appointments with them?
What will it take for you to be the initiator/leader with this plan, and in your family?
If not you, who? If not now, when?
How about you…. and how about right now…