There is a big difference between being told what to do and being invited on a journey. 

For one thing, having things imposed is rarely met with enthusiasm and whatever motivation is aroused tends to be the result of fear, which is only productive in short spurts and not sustainable for longer periods. And, when people are forced to do things they tend not to take responsibility when things don’t turn out.

Being invited on a journey, however, generates significant and sustainable motivation, because: 

1. It conveys courtesy and respect, which creates positive feelings and emotional connections—a form of glue for teams. 
2. It offers choice—participating in the journey is not mandatory so joining the journey is accompanied with psychological buy-in. 
3. Psychological buy-in translates into greater ownership of results. 
4. Choosing to participate in the journey indicates greater desire and alignment, resulting in the selection of better, more aligned, and more capable individuals.

Great leaders commit to the journey [mission] and selflessly invite great people to join in. By giving others a choice, and being clear about what the journey entails, great leaders ensure the assembly of a better team knowing that even if they invite some wrong people those individuals can opt out if they do not wish to participate, don’t align with the objective, or are not willing to expend the effort.

Practically, nobody intentionally chooses wrong people. Yet, too often even good leaders choose others based on past experience and hope [that they will buy-in to the vision] only to learn, after considerable investment of time and money, that the individual did not understand what the journey actually entailed, or joined simply for a paycheck, and were not truly committed. Either way bringing the wrong people onto the team can be expensive and result in lost time.

Great leaders understand that leadership is about getting a team from one place to another. Great leaders focus on the journey and work hard to keep attention on the team and not themselves—another factor that spurs on a team.

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.

We all start out ignorant—an unconscious incompetent—not knowing that we don’t know. Yet thinking we know a lot.

Then we gain some awareness and realize there is so much more that we still don’t know—we’re a conscious incompetent. 

In fact, one of the greatest realizations is that we will never know all there is to know and that life is a journey of gaining awareness and taking actions in response to our increased awareness. Hence, all learning and development begins with awareness.

When we take responsibility for the things we become aware of and take appropriate action our skill and capability increase—becoming the conscious competent.

Then, the more we practice and form habits around our expanded awareness we don’t even realize all the things we now do with great skill—unconscious competence.

That is why great leaders seek awareness. It not only broadens their perspective, but gives more options for actions. 

In this way awareness becomes the ultimate antidote for insanity. Awareness, reveals new pathways to avoid doing the same [ineffective] things over and over. 

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.

Imagine trying to navigate a voyage using only the wake of your boat. All is well as long as you are going in a straight line without obstacles, wind, waves, and currents. 

The wake of your boat is simply a lagging indicator of where you have been. It’s a by-product of the boat moving through the water and provides no assurance of where you are headed or what actions need to be taken to get to where you ultimately want to go.

To establish direction, and undertake course corrections, you need leading actions, like: turns of a steering wheel and adjustments to engine speeds to align with compass readings, etc.

In the start-up phase of every business it all about leading actions taken in pursuit of a vision, with clarity and inspiration provided by the leader. However, and sadly, most business leaders swivel in their chairs after financial results start to appear and become managers of lagging indicators.

Great leaders, however, stay focused on leading indicators—measures of their leading actions—to influence future directions and performance while using lagging indicators to analyze how well their leading actions are working.

In the automotive dealership a leading indicator would be appointments set for the following day, while the lagging indicator would be number of vehicles sold or gross generated. It doesn’t help to talk about lagging indicators unless it results in adjustments to leading actions.

For organizations in general it is said that the quality and cadence of meetings are a leading indicator, which provide better insight into the health and well being of the organization than do their financial statements.

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.

While work may akin to knocking over dominos, leadership focuses on which domino will knock over the most subsequent dominos with the same effort—the Domino Effect.

The domino effect can easily be visualized by placing a row of dominoes upright, separated by a small distance. Upon pushing the first domino, the next domino in line will be knocked over, and so on, thus firing a linear chain reaction in which each domino’s fall is triggered by the domino immediately preceding it. (Wikipedia)

The chain reaction continues, regardless of the length of the chain, because when the first domino is toppled, the energy transferred by its fall is greater than the energy needed to knock over the following domino. This is why a small domino can topple a larger domino. And, given an appropriate sequence of dominos a two inch domino could eventually topple the Empire State Building by the 18^thdomino, the Eiffel Tower by the 23^rd, and bridge the gap between the earth and the moon by the 57^th.

That is why great leaders take time to consider how things are strategically linked and then apply effort to that thing that represents the lead domino. In this way the leader not only minimizes the effort, but optimizes the result.

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.