“Management has a lot to do with answers. Leadership is a function of questions. And the first question for a leader always is: ‘Who do we intend to be?’ Not ‘What are we going to do?’ but ‘Who do we intend to be?’” —Max De Pree, Herman Miller

As leaders we spend a lot of time focusing on action, on getting results. To do this, most of us track our actions with a “to do” list of some sort. However, great leadership is more than just getting results, it requires us to act from a deep sense of who we are. To have a foundation integrity and character that inspires and motivates others to trust us and in turn take action. As leaders it’s important that we manage our action, with a “to do” list, as well as our being, with a “to be” list.

Read more about this on “The Practice of Leadership” blog

Albert Einstein Quotes

“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds.
The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly
submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”

How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep (Dr. Bruce Weinstein)

This evening before you go to bed, ask yourself the following five questions:

1. Did I avoid causing harm?

2. Did I make things better?
3. Did I respect others?
4. Was I fair?
5. Was I compassionate?

“Our lives are works in progress, and by striving to live ethically, we
seek to bring out the best in ourselves. In so doing we may very well
bring out the best in others. It bears repeating: Do the right thing
simply because it is the right thing to do. Even so, we reap many
professional and personal rewards in taking ethics seriously in all we
do. Enjoying deep, restful, restorative slumber is one of those
dividends.”

Getting lost can lead to big discoveries- Simple Truths: The Blog of Inspiration

Today is Columbus Day. We all know the story. Columbus was trying to find an alternate route to India. Instead he got credit for one of the biggest discoveries ever (even if he wasn’t the first one to find it).

Going off into the unknown and getting lost takes you out of the box. The best way to come up with new ideas, and get out of a rut is to take yourself out of your normal context. Get up and walk around. Experience something new. You won’t put things in perspective until you can view what’s happening from a third-party’s point of view.

Forget what’s easy, what’s routine, what’s comfortable. The road to change, the road to success even, doesn’t always go in one direction. It’s twisty, and steep, and you may fall down along the way, but it’s better to have a hard time on the road to success, than to have an easy journey down to road to mediocrity.

Take a risk today, and get lost. You never know if you might find what you were looking for all along.

Infectious Leadership – Harvard Business Online’s Michael Watkins

“For good or ill, the senior leadership of every organization is infectious. By this I mean that leaders’ behaviors tend to be transmitted to their direct reports, who pass them on to the next level, and so on down through their organizations. Over time, they permeate the organization from top to bottom, influencing activity at all levels. Eventually they become embodied in the organizational culture, influencing the types of people who get promoted and hired into the organization, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop — either positive or negative.”

Mr. Watkins makes some excellent points on how ‘infections’ a leader’s behavior is on others. And it’s not just at the top levels that this is true. For good or bad, each of us affects (or ‘infects’) the people around us. This also means that we are affected (infected) by the people around us.

Based on this, we not only need to BE the type of person that positively impacts others, but also need to work on SURROUNDING ourselves with those types of people.

Got Change?

“You have a relational account with every person in your life: your employees, colleagues, superiors, family, and friends. And you have to manage each of those accounts, making an effort to make deposits and working to minimize withdrawals.”

This is a great summary of a topic that John Maxwell has mentioned in some of his (highly recommended) books, combined with a current day example of the concept.

Don’t Worry, Be You

“Just be you. You are good enough. In the long run, any success you achieve, if you don’t act like yourself, won’t seem real anyway. You will just feel like an imposter or a phony.” … “No one can tell you how to do anything that hasn’t been done before. If you are going to do anything creative, you have to make it up yourself. There is no guidebook.

If you have an idea that sounds good to you, go for it. Just be you. Do what is in your heart. You may fail, but at least you will have tried. Don’t waste your life worrying too much about being normal. Lots of people are normal. It is more fun to be different. Just be you.”

Read Marshall’s thoughts on this at BusinessWeek

…Think of this – if we learn something in that 5% of the time that we don’t do it so well, that makes the ‘failure’ a very large success. So it follows that WHENEVER we attempt something – and LEARN from our mistakes – we will succeed. So whenever we take that risk and volunteer we succeed 100% of the time.

But if we don’t attempt something, we always fail. We lose the opportunity, and regret our weakness, and that moment can’t be recaptured.

Read the full article at: Create Your Communications Experience