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This month’s entry is a guest post written by Rick Newton. He co-founded the Center for Serving Leadership with John Stahl-Wert in 2015 because of their shared vision and passion of equipping leaders to awaken, align, and achieve Great Purpose.

Here in the United States, we have just come through a historic election – unlike one that anyone has ever seen. Don’t worry – I am not going to get into political opinion, but I do want to get into politics – and talk about how Serving Leaders are needed in every facet of society, especially Government.

There are many problems with our society, and I trace all of them back to leadership – or to be more precise, a lack of serving leadership. Too often, leaders in government are self-centered, egotistic, and more concerned about staying in power than serving the people they represent.

When self-centered leadership is in place, we see the results: name-calling, blame-shifting, miscommunication, no communication, undermining, dysfunction, and an inability and unwillingness to rise above differences to serve the common good.

In my last post, I wrote on the leadership challenge of turning vision into reality, or as some would say, bridging the strategy-execution gap. In this entry, I want to share briefly on how leaders can get what they say to line up with what they do. In other words, as leaders, how can we fix our misalignments so that everything we’re saying and doing is moving in the same direction?

True story: Mr. T.S. Wong, founder of one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world, Jetta, made a decision 38 years ago that he would focus his leadership efforts on aligning what his company said with what they did. None of his contemporaries in the People’s Republic of China in 1977 were thinking this way. “If they promised it,” Mr. Wong said, “They would do it.” He was determined that his company would not represent what they weren’t. If they said it, they would be it.