Goodness to Greatness Leadership-Seven Steps

GUEST POST by IRENE BECKER

Are YOU ready to lead from goodness to greatness? Are you ready to build the architecture of business, personal and inter-personal leadership?  Or, will you lead or will you follow the Pied Piper of discouragement and fear that leads the breaking news we ingest on a daily basis?

It is a challenge, but it’s a challenge that is worth our greatest effort.  And, amazingly when we have the courage to lead with our strengths, the courage to learn how to transform the changes and even crises we face into a positive catalyst for our true power and potential we become not only change agents, but change leaders. In so doing we inspire others to lead rather than follow, to move past fear and step into their greatest courage and power.

A challenge that requires seven steps, seven commitments. Business leadership, personal leadership and inter-personal leadership are all built upon an architecture that is simple but powerful.  Here are the seven steps, the seven pillars, that create the architecture of leadership in a world, workplace and marketplace of intense volatility, change and crisis.

1.  The commitment to lead and not follow.  Creating the architecture of what I call Q3™ power.  Developing enhanced IQ, EQ, SQ. Great leaders have always recognized and developed their intellectual capital, emotional capital and spiritual capital, because they recognized that being smart was not enough, being heart centered  was not enough, and being values driven was not enough.  Leadership evolves; leadership grows by developing and engaging all three Q’s. Part of developing Q3™   power is learning, but the most critical part is working with someone to actively use one’s strengths and transform changes and crises to increase one’s intellectual capital, emotional capital and spiritual capital.

2.   The commitment to the empowerment of self and others:  Creating a social or human architecture that will gather the commitment of others who want to lead collaboratively, because leadership and success today are achieved through servant or collaborative leadership.  The era of command and control leadership is dying its last death.  We need leaders who can stand at the head of the class not simply to articulate the vision, but to inspire and guide others who will in turn also lead. Getting empowered starts when we decide to build a fence around our integrity, hope, faith, potential and ability to make a difference and inspire others to do the same.  It cannot and will not come from looking at what is wrong, but rather from starting to recognize our individual strengths, our power and celebrating them from a place that is not ego driven, but rather driven by our desire to do our best work, build our best relationships, enable our best leadership, live better and happier lives.

3. The commitment to purpose and vision:  Creating a moral architecture, common purpose, a goal that speaks to something meaningful, purposeful that will engage others and is the common ground, the common goal that will be shared and cherished. The moral architecture, the vision keeps organizations competitive because it is only through creating and sustaining value for others that success is built and sustained.  It is only by creating value for employees, shareholders, clients, stakeholders and communities that success continues.  And, on a personal and inter-personal level, it is the moral architecture, or ability to stay in alignment with the core values we cherish, the goals that matter most to us that create success in our lives and relationships.

4. The commitment to communicating the vision:  Creating architecture of meaning that is conveyed not only by words but by actions — by the determination and the passion the leader has for the vision and by his/her ability to communicate this vision.  Developing the high emotional intelligence that drives masterful communication is critical.  Articulating and living the values creating the words, using symbols that paint a brilliant picture that engages others and helps them work collaboratively to the accomplishment of shared goals, i.e. the vision is what communicating the vision is all about.

 5. The commitment to courage:  Creating architecture of hope.  Developing an outlook that drives and sustains courage at the front lines, courage in the face of challenges and ignites the hope and the faith that drives our greatest thoughts and actions — the hope and faith that inspires our self and others.  Commitment to courage that cannot be achieved without building our spiritual quotient, without creating an alignment of our heads, hearts and souls that allows us to tap into the power within at the very worst of times.

6. The commitment to integrity.  Creating architecture of trust.  Nothing is built and sustained without trust.  Leadership of self and leadership of others starts with the inspiration to lead rather than follow the Q3™ strength (intellectual, emotional and spiritual capital to sustain leadership) and the spiritual capital to live and lead with the integrity that drives and sustains trust.   Trust is something we learn to build in ourselves, and we also can learn to build it in others.  Trust is the anchor for our spiritual quotient and it is also the catalyst which allows us to build and sustain the relationships that are critical to leadership, success and happiness.

7.  The commitment to action-ability.  Creating architecture of action-ability.  The greatest thoughts, best laid plans, or strategies are useless until they are made action-able.  Developing action-ability at the front lines of a business, economic, personal or inter-personal battle demands Q3™ power, and leadership is not leadership without action-ability.  The greatest ideas, the best strategies, the most inspiring words are lovely but impotent without action.  Leadership demands an architecture of action-ability.  When a leader learns to optimize strengths while using changes even crises to build IQ-EQ-SQ and develop tools, strategies that drive action-ability of self and others, power is engaged, leadership evolves and grows.

Nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished without determination, or without courage.  Today, the determination and courage to build business, personal and inter-personal leadership is not important — it is critical.  Engaging and actualizing this determination requires a bit of pixie dust.  Pixie dust born of hope, of that intangible but critical desire to contribute by not losing touch with our true power to effective positive change, to collaborate together to build and sustain a better human, personal and business bottom line.  The determination to aspire to our greatest good in our relationships, the greatest good in our work, the greatest strength in moving away from fear and discouragement by finding that pixie dust, tapping into the hope that we can make a difference and will.  That spark that is the soul of leadership, and one that we can chose to re-ignite if we are ready to take the road less travelled.  With great leadership comes great responsibility to stand at the front lines of battle with the conviction to win the war, and the greatest war we fight is from inside out.  The greatest battle we face is to inspire, engage and lead the best in ourselves by building our Q3™ strengths so that we can in turn inspire, engage and lead others who in turn lead vertically and horizontally in their lives and organizations.

Leadership is a choice, and it is one of the most difficult choices one can make because it clearly means taking the road less traveled, and it means developing courage when others have lost theirs, determination when few have it because it is far easier to manage than to lead.  It is far easier to become complacent or discouraged by the multiplicity of challenges and crises we face on an individual and collective basis.  But, easier is not necessarily better, and the easy path is not the one that can help us fill our pocketbooks and our souls.