Tag Archives: leaders

Things You Can Do, Today, Tomorrow and the Next Day, Part 1

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This is the first of a series of articles written to explore specific things individual men and women can do to make a difference in the world around them. Making a difference is what leadership is all about and, ultimately, each of us will be judged as a leader on the basis of how much of a difference did we make and toward what objectives.

Positive leaders are whole people and their leadership extends to all aspects of the world in which they live and interact. These men and women recognize that we are all interdependent and that nothing leaders do can be done in isolation.

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The key to leadership is action! Our discussion of leadership would be meaningless unless we offer specific suggestions for action strategies that can be implemented immediately. Things you can do that will have a dramatic impact on your life and on the world around you.

Each of these things is not only possible they are imminently doable. All that is required is a willing participant who will open his or her heart to the possibilities and will act and act now!

Our discussion will address strategies for the full spectrum of our lives to include home, the community and the workplace. This list of strategies is not intended to be exhaustive. Our purpose is to get you started, to serve as an ignition system. The list is as long as your imagination and success requires that you utilize your imagination, fully.

ACTION STRATEGIES FOR HOME

1. Exercise your mind, body and self esteem.

Actions:
Implement an exercise program to get your body in shape. Do it at home or away from home. Walk, exercise, play tennis or basketball, ride a real or stationary bicycle, join a health club, take aerobic classes, join the mall walkers’ club at your nearest shopping mall. Do not overdo it! Start slowly and build up to a daily regimen that works for you, but make a commitment and stick to it. You will feel better, have more energy, more stamina, and more enthusiasm for life and be less susceptible to depression.

Initiate a reading program. Set aside at least fifteen to twenty minutes a day, at a time that works well for you, to read something educational or inspirational, beyond the local newspaper. Feel free to vary the material you read according to your interests and activities and according to your job requirements. It will expand your mind and your imagination, introduce you to new ideas, broaden your vocabulary, improve your positive outlook, and inspire you to live your life more fully.

Commence a serious regimen for your self esteem. Listen to motivational tapes. Smile and talk to yourself in the mirror. Read motivational books. Keep a diary of your innermost thoughts and feelings as you strive to build a positive self-concept.

Become a giver rather than a taker. Begin to think of yourself as a giving person and start doing things for other people. Nothing makes us feel better about ourselves than to receive positive feedback from the people in our lives; and nothing generates positive feedback from the people in our lives more than doing things to help those people feel good about themselves. Share yourself with the people about whom you care! These things you do for yourself, but not only for yourself. The best way to enhance your contribution to your family, your job, and community is to take good care of yourself. You are important to the people in your life. They care about you and they need you. Take good care of yourself for their sake as well as for your own sake.

Go on a sensible diet, not a fad diet; take a vitamin and mineral supplement. If you are unhappy with your appearance, do something about it. Get a new hair style; dress differently; try a different style of eyeglasses.
Begin to look at yourself through different eyes. When you look at yourself through the eyes of someone who feels good about him or herself you can begin to see the warmth and the friendliness in your face, especially if you are smiling. Discard the idea that you have to look like a movie star; very few people possess that type of good looks. Think instead of all the friendly and interesting people you know. Think about their faces and their appearance. How do you perceive them? You enjoy seeing them because they are warm and friendly people and the various characteristics of their appearance are distinguishing. What draws you to them is not their facial or physical beauty, but their warmth and friendliness, their openness and their genuine concern for you. Think of yourself as this type of person and very soon you will begin to see that type of person when you smile at yourself in the mirror.

Think positive, life-affirming thoughts as often as possible. Fill your mind with positive thoughts and purge yourself of as many negative thoughts and feelings as possible. Count your blessings. Do not be discouraged when negative thoughts keep cropping up. They are normal for all human beings. Think of it as weeding the garden. The more you pull the weeds the more the flowers flourish, yet the weeds keep coming. It is a never-ending job. Once you have cleared the garden a few times, however, the weed growth begins to diminish. So, too, will it be with your negative feelings and thoughts.

Change the way you respond to people. When someone asks how you are doing, how do you respond? Try something new the next time someone asks. Say: “Better than I have in a long time!” If they want to hear more you can say: “I have been working to develop a positive attitude and it has given me a whole new outlook on life.” You don’t have to say any more than this but be sure to smile when you say it. If people want to know more then don’t be shy. Share your gift of positive living with them and you will feel even better about yourself. Do not worry as you would in the past, about being embarrassed.

Pay attention to the other people in your life. When you meet other people, do not push your ideas on them but reach out to them in a totally different way. Give them your attention, after all attention is one of the greatest gifts you can give to another human being. Listen to them and hear what they are saying. Ask relevant questions that demonstrate that you are listening. Give them positive feedback and encouragement at every opportunity without preaching and without talking about yourself. Do not talk about yourself at all unless they ask, specifically. The more you truly listen to others and give them fully of your attention, you are making them feel like the most important person in the world and they will choose to spend more time with you than they may have ever done in the past.

Do a self-assessment exercise. Make a list the things you like about yourself and that other people like about you and then rejoice in and celebrate the positive things in your life. Also list those things about you about which you are unhappy. Pick up to five of the things about which you are unhappy and develop action strategies for change. If you commit to those action strategies it won’t be long until you will be scratching things off of your list or transferring them to the list of things you like about yourself. When you eliminate an item from this latter list, replace them with another item.

Motivating the People of Your Organization: The Fifth Attribute of Positive Leaders

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The fifth and final attribute of positive leaders everywhere deals most directly with what powerful positive leaders do on a daily basis. They work hard to create a motivated workforce and they do it not by some grand design but rather by working with individual men and women, whether one-to-one or in groups.

How often have you heard the complaint that “people don’t want to work anymore!” or, “Our employees don’t appreciate their jobs!”? How many times have you heard yourself making similar comments?

We have all felt this way and each of us has experienced the frustrations that result from a poorly motivated workforce and from our apparent inability to turn the situation around.

We categorically reject the hypothesis that people do not want to work, in favor of an alternate idea: that people don’t know how to work and be productive. It is a subtle but important distinction. We submit that people can be taught. The challenge to leadership is to teach these things and to ignite the internal motivation that exists in each of us to learn and to excel.

Human motivation is a complex subject. For all of the attention motivation receives its critical role is underappreciated. As complicated as the subject of human motivation may be, motivating people or, more appropriately, igniting a person’s internal motivation is a relatively simple challenge. The key to human motivation in the work place, or anywhere else, is to make people feel important.

Everyone wants to feel important. Leaders who effectively convey that their people are truly vital to the organization will have a dynamic, energetic, and motivated team of people.

Examine your own experience with your favorite supervisor or teacher. You felt a special relationship with your mentor, a real kinship. You knew you were liked and you did your best work while they were involved in your life. What did they do differently than the other teachers and supervisors who clutter your memory?

These leaders treated you as if you were special. They liked you; they remembered your name; they listened to you; they valued your opinion; they showed appreciation for your efforts; they smiled at you; they treated you with respect; they trusted you; they challenged you; they tried to help you do a better job; they provided you with clear expectations; they gave you continuous and ongoing feedback; they let you make mistakes without fear of retribution or humiliation; they encouraged you to try again; they made sure you received full recognition for your contributions; they expected much from you and so much more.

They worked hard to make you feel important. It was a genuine display of affection. And, it was easy because they liked people. Positive leaders genuinely care about and believe in the capabilities of the men and women in their organization.

There will always be a few unproductive people, no matter how capable their supervisor, but they are the exception, not the norm. The majority of employees can and will be both motivated and productive if you are an effective leader. When they are not, the responsibility is yours, not society’s. You recruited them, you hired them, you train and evaluated them. It may well be that they came to your shop poorly prepared to live up to your expectations but they were the best of the lot. After you signed them on you accepted responsibility for their performance and outcomes.
As a leader, the only meaningful measure of your own performance is how well you take this raw material and mold it into a well-trained, well-focused, and highly motivated work force.

Learn how to be a positive leader and how to create an environment that fosters the internal motivation of your people. It is easy once you acquire the genuine belief that your people are your most important resource and you communicate that fact to them through your words, your actions, and through the rules, structure, and culture of your organization.

Make people feel important!

Commitment to Mission, Vision, & Values: The Third Attribute of Positive Leaders

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There is a direct relationship between the efficacy of leadership and the level of passion positive leaders exhibit for the mission, vision, and values of their organization. This passionate commitment is the third attribute of positive leaders.

Whatever products and services an organization produces and whoever its customers may be, powerful positive leaders have a clear vision for the future of their organizations and an articulate and well-defined purpose or mission. Positive leaders convey that mission to the people of their organizations, relentlessly. There is a simple adage. If the people of an organization, irrespective of the position they occupy, do not know what their leaders are going to say before they say it, then the leaders are not communicating their message with sufficient frequency and effectiveness. Relentless is just another word for commitment.

Positive leaders never squander an opportunity to tell their organization’s story or share its mission, vision, and values. One of the distinguishing characteristics of winning organizations is that everyone in the organization, or at any link in the supply chain, can articulate its mission, vision, and values.

A mission statement is a concise representation of purpose: whom does the organization exist to serve and what needs of its customers does the entity exist to satisfy? The best mission statements also address the level of excellence to which the organization aspires, which is a measure of customer satisfaction.

At no time can anyone in the organization be permitted to lose sight of its mission or purpose. History teaches us that human beings are prone to diversions from their purpose in the midst of the natural and seemingly infinite distractions to which they are inevitably subjected. It is the commitment of positive leaders that keeps mission and purpose at the forefront of the organization’s consciousness.

The leader’s vision transcends mission and purpose, recognizing that these are fluid concepts in a dynamic universe. Vision addresses the organization’s standing in its marketplace and its future direction. Among other things, vision assures that the entity’s strategic plan is sufficiently future-oriented. What does the future hold? How will customer needs and requirements evolve? What innovations in product or service will be needed to assure the entity’s competitive advantage?

The values of the organization are the things its leaders consider most important and almost always include commitment to customer satisfaction and exemplary quality. Values must also include information that conveys esteem with which the people of the organization are held. An entity’s values are the moral benchmarks against which each and every action of the organization is gauged.

This focus on values is critical because one of the most common problems that keep organizations from optimal performance is that its actions are not in sync with the things its leaders say. A clear focus on and an unrelenting commitment to the values of the organization on the part of its leaders serves as preventative maintenance that retards the emergence of secondary agendas and counter cultures. Such commitments are nothing more than a demonstration of a positive leader’s integrity.

A member of a client organization once commented, after a discussion of values, that these sound like nothing more than time-worn platitudes. I prefer to think of them as the underlying principles that guide the leaders of winning organizations.

Understanding Organizations: The Second Attribute of Positive Leaders

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Mastery of applied organizational theory is as vital to the success of leadership as knowledge of the piano is to the accomplished pianist. Organizations are the medium in which men and women function in society – they are the playing fields of life and business.

Positive leaders understand organizations in all of their complexity and are accomplished artists in both macro- and micro-organizational theory. Most managers possess, or at least utilize, only a rudimentary understanding of organizations. They are like novice personal computer users. They can stumble their way through a few application programs but their lack of in-depth understanding of the computer and its software keeps them from using more than a fraction of the machine’s capability. Occasionally they actually threaten or damage the system by utilizing it improperly or counter-productively.

At the macro level the positive leader is a student of organizational theory and devotes a significant amount of time keeping up with the literature of the field. At the micro level he or she is intimately in tune with his or her own organization, with its mission and vision; its products and/or services and the specific customer needs that these products and services fulfill; with its people, its personality and subcultures; with its supply chain; its metrics; and, with its informal power structures. The leader spends a significant amount of time out in the organization, and with its supply chain partners, listening, talking, and getting involved with people.

When confronted with the decision of choosing future leaders, from among its talented individuals, organizations must often choose between men and women with demonstrated leadership skills versus those with great technical knowledge and with familiarity with the local organization. Many people have technical expertise and local experience while only select few possess demonstrated leadership ability. Further, although leadership skills can be taught, it’s much easier to teach the technical and local aspects of an organization.

Organizations would do well to choose managers and supervisors on the basis of their demonstrated leadership ability. Organizations are also well-advised to make significant investments in the leadership development of its talented men and women, early in their careers. That being said, the most talented leaders will not achieve their optimal potential unless they make a relentless commitment to become masters of organizational theory and application at both the macro and micro levels.

Organizations typically promote their best workers to leadership positions. Just because an employee is at the top of the list of technical performers does not mean that they would make good managers and supervisors unless the organization has made an effort to prepare them for not only the role of leader but also for the transition from technical expert to formal leader. Often, people appointed to leadership positions on the basis of their technical excellence become unhappy and disillusioned with their new role. They were happier in a role in which they were valued for their technical expertise but rarely are they able to walk away. Often such promotions are the only way to move up the compensation ladder in an organization. Walking away from the disappointing leadership role may mean relinquishing the raise as well as losing face because they were unsuccessful.

If the organization has made an investment in leadership development of their best people prior to promoting them they will have identified those who will and will not be both happy and successful in a leadership role. For that reason, in addition to a focus on leadership development, the most successful organizations find a way to elevate the compensation of their technical stars to levels comparable to what they might have earned had they been given leadership responsibility. There is no rule that says that technical stars must not earn as much or more than their supervisors and managers.

One the other side of the equation, it is imperative that people who are appointed to leadership positions because of their demonstrated leadership ability rather than technical expertise make a commitment to ongoing development of their technical knowledge. They may not have to perform technical tasks as well as their technically-accomplished employees but the need to understand the technical aspects of the work every bit as much. They must also be able to teach new employees how to become technically competent.

A Healthy Self-Esteem, the 1st Attribute of Positive Leaders

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The first distinguishing characteristic of positive leaders – the first attribute – is a strong and positive self-concept. Positive leaders have a clear sense of who they are and where they are going. They have confidence in themselves and in their talents and abilities. They believe in themselves; they believe themselves to be somehow special. It is this core belief – this strong sense of self – from which the power of positive leadership emanates.
Leadership, as we have already discovered, implies taking risks, forging new concepts, charting new courses, breaking new trails. Leadership means going first – often where no man or woman has gone before. This takes great courage, confidence, and character and these traits, so common to the great leaders of history, are nothing more than manifestations of a strong self-esteem.

Leaders must be outwardly directed. They are concerned about the world and about other people. It is not that their own needs are left unattended – quite the contrary, positive leaders are secure in themselves. They know in the deepest part of their souls that they are okay – that nothing that can happen in the external world can diminish their worth as a living, breathing human being; as a child of Creation. From this foundation of a secure ego they are able to give freely of themselves. They have, in fact, discovered one of the greatest secrets of life: that the best way to serve one’s self, to feed a healthy ego, is to serve others. The more we give the greater the gifts we receive.

For men and women with an underdeveloped ego who find themselves in a leadership role, this is an alien concept. They have not reached the crest of the mountain from which they can see the panorama. They spend the greater part of their time and energy advancing their individual interests rather than attending to the needs of their organization and its people. As a result, as leaders they are ineffectual. Just as importantly, this self-serving behavior is apparent to the people with whom these individuals work and interact.

There are very few individuals for whom a healthy self-concept comes easily and most of us must work relentlessly at maintaining our self-esteem. Much like we must do with purpose, we must periodically step back and assess the health of our self-esteem. Unless we have perfected the process of retaining a healthy ego, the natural ebbs and flows of life can lead to disequilibrium. We are often unaware that our focus has shifted from the external world to the internal.

Effective positive leaders work relentlessly to maintain a healthy self-esteem much in the way individuals exercise their bodies to maintain physical health and well-being. Exposing ourselves to positive and inspirational thoughts and ideas is an important component of this ego-development process. It is also important to take time for introspection. Examine your strengths and weakness as objectively as you are able and then develop action plans to work on your imperfections. It is also suggested that you ask your closest friends or significant others to help you with this process as we are not always able to view ourselves the way others perceive us.

Remember always that we will never be perfect. Humans are, by definition, imperfect beings and there are no exceptions. It is not necessary that we are always right, what is important is that we strive to do what is right. Look around you at positive leaders. Often they are the strong, silent types who are so confident in themselves that it becomes unnecessary to boast of their prowess or accomplishments. The deeds of these men and women speak far more eloquently than anything they might say. You can possess this same confidence, this same sense of self if only you will reach out for it.

People Are Our Most Important Resource, The Third Cornerstone of Positive Leadership

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The third philosophical cornerstone of our Theory of Positive Leadership is a commitment to the belief that people are the most important resource/asset of any organization. Organizations exist to serve people, whether individually or corporately. Business organizations exist to serve customers and other organizations such as not-for-profit agencies and departments or agencies of government exist to serve a constituency.

Organizations employ many different kinds of assets in the production of their products and services. Those assets include land, buildings, equipment, information, and technology in addition to people but it is people that are paramount. Nothing illustrates this more definitively that the knowledge that the very value of each of the other assets is measured in terms of their utility to people. It takes human energy to put all other assets to work for a meaningful purpose.

Interestingly, accounting practices allow us to treat non-human resources as depreciable assets but requires us to treat wages and salaries of a cost. This contributes, I believe, to the tendency of executives to think of people and their wages and salaries as a cost of doing business rather than as an investment in a valuable asset without which it would be impossible to do business.

One of the things that distinguish powerful positive leaders from their less successful counterparts is that everything these men and women do conveys clearly and unequivocally that the people of their organization are the most important asset – an invaluable resource.

Peter Drucker writes, “organizations that fail to develop their people, fail in the long run.”
Positive organizations relentlessly invest in the development of their people by insuring that their people:

• Receive ongoing training of a meaningful kind,
• Receive clear expectations
• Are supported by performance management systems that give ongoing positive feedback
• Work in an environment that is safe both physically and emotionally
• Enjoy compensation and benefit packages are not only competitive in the marketplace but that also reward excellence.
• Have the tools and resources necessary for the successful performance of their work
• Feel that they have some control over their own success, and
• Are full participants in the process of delivering exemplary quality.

Positive leaders also recognize that the members of their organization are not the only people who are critical to the ongoing success of their venture. Positive leaders understand that their ultimate success depends on all members of their supply chain and they work to create a culture of interdependence, partnership, and abundance mentality that spans the entire supply chain population.

Build Strength and Independence Not Weakness and Dependence!

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Whenever I give positive leadership seminars there are a number of recurring questions. One of the most common is “How do I get my people to accept responsibility for getting things done when I can’t be there to watch over them?” I love this question because its answer addresses some of the most common mistakes of managers and supervisors, irrespective of venue.

The answer to this seemingly inevitable questions is, simply, “If you want people to accept responsibility when you are away, teach them to accept responsibility when you are there.”

Many leaders are surprised to learn that they create dependencies as a result of their leadership approach. Our objective as leaders should always be to develop a staff of men and women who are strong and independent rather than weak and dependent. One of the ways to accomplish this objective is to teach and coach rather than to tell and do.

When issues arise in the midst of the game, when the pressure of time is upon us, it is easy for leaders to step in and solve problems and take action. In doing this we have, indeed, resolved the issue but we have, unwittingly, taught the lesson that only managers and supervisors cans solve problems, resolve issues, take action, and make things happen. The result, of course, is that the next time an issue arises, people stop and wait for their manager or supervisor to swoop in with a solution.

What positive leaders do, on the other hand, is teach their people how to solve problems and take action on their own. This can be accomplished only if we have created an environment in which people are expected to take initiative and in which there are minimal fears of making mistakes.

This approach is just another facet of delegating to people. Remember that the absolute best leaders are nearly invisible because they are seldom required to get involved in routine operational problem-solving. This is also one of the reasons why the best leaders are the most creative and innovative. They spend their time looking for opportunities to expand the boundaries of conventional wisdom.

The best leaders also spend significant chunks of their time giving support and feedback to their people. They are committed to the ongoing development of each of their employees. It is amazing how easy it becomes for people to respond positively to constructive feedback and to rise to ever-increasing expectations when they have come to view their supervisor as a coach and mentor rather than as a critic and task master. When people have also been given opportunities to learn new skills, gain new experiences, and are invited to participate routinely in the innovation process, true magic begins to happen.

Powerful positive leaders not only preside over a team of people who accept responsibility on their own but they also have men and women who look relentlessly for continuous improvement opportunities without being asked or prompted. Such expectations and the resulting behavior have become internalized as part of the culture.

One of the other managerial/supervisory behaviors that contribute to creating dependencies is the preservation of one’s own stature as the most skilled, knowledgeable, and competent person in the department.

Most supervisors are promoted, after all, on the basis of their technical competency. As soon as you are appointed to a leadership role, however, the supervisor’s purpose shifts. As a leader, our job is to help each of our people become the most knowledgeable, competent, and productive people of which they are capable. When some of those individual’s have surpassed the competency of their supervisors, then leadership excellence has been achieved.

Remember that, as a leader, your job is not to demonstrate how great you are rather it is to teach your people how great they can be.

The Kids Are at their Games Again!

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Yes, we all know we need to get people off of Food Stamps!

Yes, even though it is the law of the land we know the Affordable Care Act, affectionately or not so affectionately known as ObamaCare, is a bad solution that will only make the system worse and drive up costs because of its reliance on the health insurance industry.

But, why do we continue to play the same games. Rather than put our heads together in recognition that our country is in trouble and because we need to find some new solutions that will actually work, we play like two kids on the beach who cannot get along. Rather than build something beautiful, together, we devote all of our energy to tearing down the other guy or gal’s sand castle.

On the beach, the only consequence of such child’s play is that parents have a source of frustrated amusement that Bob and Sally can’t play together.

In the real world, at the seats of power of the United States of America, such games hurt people who can least afford to be hurt and bring us no closer to meaningful solutions.

When we use ObamaCare as leverage to try to win budget concessions in an attempt to reduce federal spending, we create a stalemate that will eventually lead to a government shut down or sequester that will take money out of the pockets of hard-working Americans and benefits away from the unfortunate who have no way to make up the difference.
Of greater long-term consequence is the fact that such stalemates and painful cuts only deepen the resentment of the disenfranchised who have already become embittered; they are citizens who no longer believe in the American dream and who have become hopeless, and feel powerless to change the outcomes in their lives.

As long as this population of the disenfranchised continues to grow, the burden that must be carried by the rest of us will only grow with no end in sight. Somehow, rather than push them further away from mainstream America we need, desperately, to find a way to pull these people back in as productive citizens who can help us face the challenges of an uncertain and rather frightening future.

When are we going to find positive leaders who can find a way to set aside their differences and work together to find solutions to the enormously difficult challenges confronting us? When will someone say “enough!” and begin working to pull people to the table to do the important work of our government?

Our elected officials in both the executive and legislative branches of our government have become trapped in their daily work that they have forgotten to step back and look at the panorama. The only thing they know is attack and destroy what their opponents want to accomplish and to remain committed to fruitless process of incremental change in dealing with monumental challenges; challenges that cannot be overcome incrementally.

For those of you who are reading these words, you are not powerless. Provide some positive leadership and begin expressing you concerns directly to your elected officials. Tell them what you think. Just as importantly, encourage the people you know to roll up their sleeves and share in the work.

The clock is ticking and when the tipping point is reached there will be no second chances.

Exponential Thinking

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How do you teach yourself and your people to think exponentially? Exponential thinking is often referred to as “thinking outside the box” or “creative thinking”. While the phrase “thinking outside the box” has become cliché, the activity of expanding one’s paradigms and thinking creatively is a critical skill that powerful, positive leaders rely on to manage their organizations and to make a difference in their personal lives and community.

We live in a multi-dimensional, interdependent world in which events about which we may be unaware or that seem disconnected to us still impact our lives and businesses. The most effective leaders are tuned into the world around them, fully aware of the interdependencies. These men and women recognize how easy it becomes for people who are immersed in their daily work activity to lose sight of events taking place around them.

“Systems Thinking,” a term used by Peter Senge in his best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline , teaches us how to step back to a point from which we can examine our world, our lives, and our organizations as an integral whole. This perspective enables us not only to see the broad forces that influence our activity but also to see how what we do influences the whole in ways that may not be apparent to us. Under a systems thinking approach we are able to examine our basic assumptions about the world in which we live and work and about why we do the things we do the way we do them.

What all organizations must do is to periodically stop and re-examine where they are going and how far they have come. Is our mission still important? Are our goals and objectives still appropriate given the changes that have taken place in our industry, in our supply chain, or in our world in general? Have any of the things that have changed in our environment also altered the needs of our customers? That such changes, unnoticed, can have a devastating impact on a business organization’s future is bad enough. Just as importantly, these changes often create new opportunities for the alert and the innovative.

Creating an organization in which all members are engaged in a learning process, and in which they are encouraged to develop and share new ideas can pay enormous dividends. Senge refers to such entities as “learning organizations.” Many quality systems have been designed to function as an integrated part of the production process in order to facilitate continuous improvement. Only a special few, however, actually make the effort and investment to teach people how to think exponentially and then reward them for sharing.

What we have learned is that continuous improvement is insufficient for the dynamic world in which we live and do business. What is needed is “relentless improvement” in an environment in which people at all levels of the organization have been taught to accept responsibility for exceeding the customer’s expectations. Acceptance of such responsibility is the purest form of positive leadership. Most organizations are blessed with a small number of individuals who are natural leaders, irrespective of their titles and formal authority. The challenge of executive leaders who wish to infuse their organizations with positive leadership and exponential thinking requires, first, that those executives are, themselves, positive leaders and, second, that they make a relentless commitment to developing the leadership skills of their people.

Positive leadership is more than just a skill that people with titles keep tucked away in their portfolios. Positive leadership is a craft that must be practiced daily and one of the tools utilized by such craftspersons is exponential thinking. In one organization with which I was involve, we encouraged exponential thinking by including what we then called “continuous improvement” as one of the criteria by which employees at all levels of the organization were evaluated in the company’s “integrated performance management system” One of the best ways to build creativity into your organization is to be creative in developing ways to encourage, celebrate, and reward exponential thinking on the part of your people.