by Jane Perdue | Kindness, Leadership
Gregory is the CEO for a small manufacturing firm that’s struggling to retain market share. The company has a long and proud history of financial success, so the poor business results are troubling.
To right the ship, the leadership team introduced multiple changes in how the business is run and staffed. While these changes were necessary for staying in business, they caused turbulence in employee morale and prompted employees to lose confidence in the ability of the firm’s management team.
The decline in employee confidence troubled Gregory and his team. He wondered if they might not have changed too much, too fast. (more…)
by Jane Perdue | Kindness
An insightful poem by Dale Wimbrow written in 1934, yet the message remains fresh and true today. Enjoy!
When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf*,
And the world makes you King for a day,
Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,
And see what that guy has to say.
For it isn’t your Father, or Mother, or Wife,
Who judgement upon you must pass.
The feller whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.
He’s the feller to please, never mind all the rest,
For he’s with you clear up to the end,
And you’ve passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.
You may be like Jack Horner and “chisel” a plum,
And think you’re a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look him straight in the eye.
You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you’ve cheated the guy in the glass.
* means wealth
by Jane Perdue | Inspiration, Kindness, Leadership
Do you hear agitated, frustrated, and concerned whispers at your workplace…
I don’t know how to do any more with less.
I just can’t work any harder.
No one seems to care.
Is my job next?
Does anyone care about me as person, or is it all about the bottom line?
I don’t matter around here.
Are you hearing similar whispers in your head as you contemplate your career future in these tumultuous times?
With the job market still unstable, be gentle with yourself.
Nurture your skills, pay attention to your feelings, reach out for support.
Take time to laugh, to play, to reflect, to rejoice.
For those whom you lead, embed a heartbeat in your spreadsheet. Liberally sprinkle caring, heartfelt laughter, and time for talking and sharing into your need for accountability, results, and performance. Too much emphasis on logic makes the whispers of discontent louder. We’re all hard-wired to connect. When the workplace only seems to value results, people feel like they don’t matter. So the whispers begin.
What greater sign of illustrious leadership could there be today than someone who nurtures themself and who takes/makes the stand that they are leading from the head and the heart, too.
What have you done to nurture yourself and those you lead?
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Some quotes about leading from your head and heart on which to reflect
To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting to what we are against. ~Christina Baldwin
Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration—of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine. ~Lance Secretan
Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do. The visible signs of artful leadership are expressed, ultimately, in its practice. ~Max Dupree
The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there. ~John Buchan
Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others may receive your orders without being humiliated. ~Dag Hammarskjöld
Are there heartbeats in your spreadsheets, or is everything all about the numbers? ~Jane Perdue
Image source before quote: pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Kindness
We’d been beach combing for an hour. Now it was time to survey each other’s treasures.
We poured three glasses of wine and settled in our beach chairs to savor the sunset view, compare our finds, and share some easy conversation between old friends.
We spread our respective bounty across the sea grass mat. Our haul was small – each one of us had returned with a carefully chosen selection of perfect unbroken shells.
Just what one would expect from three over-achieving, results-oriented business women.
But we missed the point, didn’t we?
We overlooked all those perfect pieces of shells, not unlike our lives.
Is anyone’s life one perfect piece?
Aren’t our lives really a collection of pieces of perfect with lots of learning lessons tucked in-between?
Now when we gather sea treasures, our collections are much more eclectic: unusually-shaped and/or colored fragments, bits of sea glass, and broken segments of sand dollars.
Findings much more representative of the tossings and turnings of the ocean…and our lives.
What’s in your sea treasure collection?
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Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time. ~Rebecca Wells
At its root, perfectionism isn’t really about a deep love of being meticulous. It’s about fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of failure. Fear of success. ~Michael Law
Perfectionism measures our beginner’s work against the finished work of masters. Perfectionism thrives on comparison and competition. It doesn’t know how to say, “Good try,” or “Job well done.” The critic does not believe in creative glee–or any glee at all, for that matter. No, perfectionism is a serious matter. ~Julia Cameron
Perfectionism is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. ~Danna Faulds
90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head. ~Jon Acuff
Image source before quote: morgueFile.com
by Jane Perdue | Character, Kindness
“All I could look at in the meeting was Eric’s nose! Goodness, it’s so big I can’t believe it! He reminds me so much of a clown that I just can’t take him seriously.”
“Her voice is so annoying. That southern nasal tang drives me crazy.”
“Jessica is wearing, what, a size 14 these days? I remember when she was superthin and looked so much better. She’s really let herself go.”
No doubt, appearance is important in the workplace. Being well-groomed and presenting a professional image is part of the business success package.
Can’t and don’t dispute that.
Yet, despite what the media and movies might want us to believe about the importance of appearance, inner beauty must count for more. Maybe it’s a matter of getting older and having more lines, but, more and more, I see the value in taking and making the time to look past appearance. To see people at a deeper level, looking past the outer appearance to see what “lives” in someone’s head and heart. To not judge and attribute based only on what we see.
Character, compassion, empathy, and curiosity can all exist regardless of having a big nose, a twangy voice, or a generous waistline.
Isn’t that what we should be looking for? Right? Wrong?
Shouldn’t we look for the goodness on the inside despite what the outer package looks like? Won’t we find the richness and real depth of character there?
What’s your thoughts on not letting physical appearance shape how we view someone?
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Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. ~Desmond Tutu
When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves. ~William Arthur Ward
Love chooses to believe the best about people. It gives them the benefit of the doubt. It refuses to fill in the unknowns with negative assumptions. And when our worst hopes are proven to be true, love makes every effort to deal with them and move forward. As much as possible, love focuses on the positive. ~Stephen Kendrick
by Kevin Eikenberry | Kindness
February is the love month – the month of St. Valentine, of cupid and perhaps of memories of Valentine’s Days past. Personally, I like it because I love the original Necco brand heart candies.
But I digress.
Why would we talk about love in an issure of a professional/business/leadership blog post?
Most people might shy away from this topic. I mean, love isn’t a business topic, is it?
If we could read the hypothetical blogs of shop and business owners and their hypothetical consultants prior to the Industrial Revolution, I believe we would have read lots about love in business and the workplace.
While businesses and professions were passed down generation to generation, I believe that most of the time for the most part, people loved their work.
They cared about their customers. They believed in the importance of what they were doing.
As technology and mechanization increased, the nature and context of work changed significantly. One natural outgrowth was the size of organizations. Now companies grew larger and more people came to work in a centralized place.
Fast forwarding to late in the 1800’s, people like Fredrick Taylor, the founder of Scientific Management, moved organizations forward through the systematic observation and understanding of working systems so they could be improved.
This was important work, and work that in many ways led to the supposed removal of emotion from the workplace.
Zoom forward again to the Quality work of pioneers like Deming, Juran, and others, and you will see the furtherance of the focus on the work output, process improvement and productivity gain (and this focus, though not the intent of these thinkers, often lead to the further reduction of the perceived value of emotion in the workplace).
Look around today and you will see that the world of work continues to evolve.
While there are still many very historically large organizations (which you may work in), organizations are generally getting smaller (and overwhelming, smaller more agile organizations have higher productivity, profitability and create more jobs).
More and more of the conversation in organizations is about the importance of things like pride, caring for customers, engaging employees and much more.
Pride, caring, and engagement. These and many other current topics are thinly veiled attempts to talk about the importance of the emotional component of the workplace.
Love. Passion. Belief.
These concepts have been important in all forms of work and commerce since the beginning of time. These aren’t “new-age” concepts, nor are they important only to the authors who write about them and the speakers who speak about them.
Organizations are made up of people.
And people, generally speaking, haven’t changed. We all have the same basic wants, needs and desires.
This isn’t a newer generation issue or a passing fad. People are people are people, and people have been around far longer than organizations.
Organizations of the size and complexity we now see are a relatively new phenomenon.
We are still learning, and recognizing that the true power of the organization is the people inside those organizations.
The lessons we are learning – the lessons we need to heed and master as leaders – are at the heart of long term organizational success.
Passion. Caring. Service. Pride. Belief. Fun. Engagement.
L-O-V-E. Don’t make that a four letter word in your organization.
Happy LOVE Month.
Today’s guest post is by Kevin Eikenberry, author, speaker, trainer, consultant, and the Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group . His book, co-authored with Guy Harris, From Bud to Boss – Secrets to a Successful Transition to Remarkable Leadership launched on February 15, 2011.
