BLOG

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.

As leaders, we each bring value to the world in our own distinct way. The uniqueness of the start of our leadership journey is extraordinary as we are born into the world and then move out to engage it, seeking to have impact, hoping to make friends, longing to achieve results, and aspiring to make a difference.

However, we can find profound similarities among us all in our calling to serve. Several fundamental challenges are consistent across our individual leadership journeys. One of these common leadership challenges is learning how to translate vision into reality. Or, as we more usually say it: How can we bridge our strategy-execution gap?

At the heart of serving leadership is a point of view about the human person, namely, that people are your organization’s greatest treasure. This point of view requires a change in the minds and hearts of leaders who are accustomed to thinking of their people as tools; even our accounting system labels people a “liability” on the balance sheet! The people who work for us are an asset, not a liability, and that is to say the very least.

Explore Each Person’s Strengths
In an earlier post, we emphasized the importance of getting to know each of your team members so that you can better serve them. One of the most important areas of knowledge about a person is knowledge about that person’s strengths. Strengths are those tasks that the person performs well and, importantly, loves doing. Both criteria—capability and passion—must be present to call something a strength.