The heart in this context has little to do with the blood-pumping organ in your chest, which is simply an organ that responds to signals from the brain and chemicals flowing in the blood, whether produced by the body or introduced into the blood stream by some other means.

Rather, when we speak of the heart and mind we are actually making reference to emotions and thoughts, the two main components of our brains—the limbic and Neocortex, respectively—which are responsible for creating human connections and motivating behavior. 

Research has shown that emotions [heart] are three times more impactful in creating human connections and driving behavior, than is rational thought [mind]. We are hard-wired emotional beings and when we operate in line with how we are wired everything works better.

That is why it is more important to have a meeting of the heart before trying to have a meeting of the mind. The heart acts like a filter or lens through which rational thought is interpreted. A meeting of hearts first makes a meeting of minds much easier.

Here is a practical example. I was recently involved in a conversation between the sales and service depts. of a dealership. These depts. are notoriously at odds with each other as each tries to glean gross from each car deal for their own dept. seemingly to the detriment of the other. 

At the beginning of the meeting the General Manager welcomed the managers to share their concerns with the other as he wrote their concerns on a whiteboard. Once the concerns had been listed the General Manager instinctively wanted to start handling each of the concerns in turn.

I jumped in and asked the group whether we could spend a little time having a meeting of the hearts first before trying to have a meeting of the minds. The leaders gave me a little bit of blank stare so I explained that each of them has feelings that is based on both perception and reality, although probably more perception. I further explained that these feelings either further or inhibit our ability to resolve our concerns and differences. And until we have a meeting of the hearts it would be difficult to have a meeting of the minds. They seemed to understand so we proceeded further.

I asked each manager to share how they felt about the other leader and their dept., which led to a great conversation about why they felt that way. Once we were able to clear up the emotional disconnects we were able to work through each of the previously stated concerns with relative ease.

To be more effective great leaders seek a meeting of the heart before attempting a meeting of the mind.

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

Any great endeavor requires sacrifice—time, resources, choices, and human will are all constrained. When we choose one direction we are naturally sacrificing another direction. When we invest time and resources in one choice it means they are no longer available for another choice. And human will has an affinity for comfort, which is typically diametrically opposed to the concept of sacrifice.

It is said that the biggest enemy of great is good, not bad. 

Improving past bad requires some sacrifice, but the amount of sacrifice required to improve past good seems exponentially greater. In addition, pushing past good, in pursuit of great requires us to sacrifice comfort with no guarantee that we will actually achieve great. That is why most people accept good-enough—they lack the will and passion to make the necessary sacrifices to get to great.

Great leaders, however, are driven by a vision that boosts their will and passion and compels them to sacrifice. That is also why it is critical that all members of a team catch the vision [so that they are able to muster the will and passion to push on when everything within them wants to rest when they achieve results that are “good-enough,” but not great]. 

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

Great Leaders create cohesive teams, engaging cultures, inspiring visions, compelling missions, and fulfilling outcomes.

Bad Leaders allow toxic teammates, default cultures, unknown visions, optional missions, and mediocre outcomes.

Who would you rather follow?

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

What is buy in? And why is it critical to true teamwork and engagement?

Buy in involves more than just saying yes or raising a hand. Yes is simply a word in a world where words are cheap. In fact, words are similar to intentions, which don’t amount to anything without actions.

Buy in requires a positive attitude and psychological commitment or ownership so that words are transformed into actions and momentum towards the collective result.

Unfortunately many people say yes [to a job], because they need money or feel obligated to participate, but are not truly bought in to the vision and mission of the endeavor. A job can be done with one’s “hands and feet”, but buy in involves surrendering one’s heart and mind. 

The study of the brain reveals that this thing we often describe as “engagement” is connected with the limbic system of the brain, which is also our emotional center. We cannot force people to emotionally connect. People must volunteer their emotions and their emotional connections. In other words, they must feel something before they truly buy in and engage—passion, desire, commitment, responsibility, etc.

Everybody has heard the expression of an emotionally disconnected person who says, “I may be standing up on the outside, but I am sitting down on the inside.” In other words, when people are emotionally disconnected they may go through the motions [with their hands and feet], but this results in 40-70% effort. 

That is also why you can never coerce or manipulate somebody into buying in. Buy in involves a choice and a degree of submission [to surrender one’s heart and mind].

I believe that is what is behind the old saying, “If you love something set it free. If it comes back to you it’s yours. If not, it was never yours to start with.” 

That is why great leaders seek buy in—so they get the entire person and not just their obligatory parts. And that is how great leaders build great teams that achieve great results!

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

I contend that the secret sauce of every great organization is inherent in its guiding principles—it is what differentiates one organization from another and it is what ultimately determines the organization’s trajectory, like the rudder of a ship.

So, what are the guiding principles that are determining the trajectory of your organization?

If you have taken the time to define them, good for you, you are one of the few organizations that has done so. Remember, however, that guiding principles are more evident in the actions of your people than in the words you put on paper or the posters you hang on the wall.

The challenge with guiding principles is that once you define them your organization will be held to the higher standard outlined in your principles. Maybe that is why most organizations do not take the time to define a set of guiding principles, although that is simply fallacious thinking. 

Defining guiding principles is not just an exercise so you can check the HR box. Defining guiding principles is an important step of providing your organization with a greater sense of purpose and identity, elements that have been proven to provide people with a greater sense of intrinsic motivation, direction and affinity with the organization.

When you define your guiding principles be careful that you select elements that are inherent and core to your organization. Don’t simply choose a number of aspirational or “permission-to-play” principles, like: honesty, integrity, etc.

Your guiding principles need to be things that are already inherent to your organization, but which you want to honor, recognize, and ensure greater consistency. 

Your guiding principles also need to be non-negotiable—you must be willing to sacrifice other things, like money, time, comfort, etc. before you compromise your principles.

Once you define your guiding principles and live them consistently they will guide the behaviors of your people and they will become baked into your culture and motivate those actions for which your organization will be known and valued by others…leading to greater customer loyalty and higher employee retention.

Don’t leave your organization rudderless. Carve out time to define your guiding principles. The effort will pay ongoing dividends and it is something that will define you as a leader!

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

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.

Considering that leadership can be defined as intentional influence, and in its simplest form leadership is represented by getting a team from HERE to THERE, it follows that leadership is a selfless act.

Legacies can take many forms. Some people donate large sums of money to buildings or endowments, which are in turn named after them, but that is not the kind of legacy we are talking about here. While those are fantastic contributions they do not belong in the same category of legacy that is associated with leadership.

By nature great leaders get themselves out of the way and allow results to speak for themselves while they themselves stand in the background. 

Great leaders own the consequences of actions gone awry, but give accolades to others for endeavors that succeed.

Great leaders also look beyond the momentary and place greater weight on future impact. Hence, combining selflessness and future orientation results is the kind of legacy that great leaders leave.

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