Our world desperately needs servant leaders – in our organizations, in our neighborhoods, in our political system, in our court system – basically, everywhere. Servant leaders create environments where values – how people treat each other – are as important as results.
In the ‘Transition Decade’ the extent to which a person exhibits ‘Personal Leadership’ may be a critical determinant of career success, in any organization, especially government agencies such as hospitals and schools.
The more the workforce transitions towards a more agile and technologically enhanced entity within society, the more complex the knowledge base will be. If your intent is to be the master of your own destiny, rather than being subservient to whatever destiny picks out for you in terms of a career, then the pursuit of knowledge is the key.
Our integrity is maintained with every kept promise. If we live with unrelenting integrity, we might create a trend – in our work team, among our friends, in our neighborhoods – where others embrace unrelenting integrity in their lives. While getting others to embrace unrelenting integrity is beyond our control, if we can move the needle a bit that direction, greater trust, respect, and dignity might occur.
The start of a new year is always a wonderful opportunity to stop, do a stock-take of your personal and professional life and begin to plan what that transformation for the new year might look like for you. You may even draw on the ideas in last month’s article by David Ivers entitled “Personal and Professional Transformation. The notion here, of course, is how do you plan to be the best iteration of yourself at home and at work, each and every day of the new year? However, the year is now 2020 and the second decade of the 2000’s has been and gone and a new decade has just begun.
Are you a culture change skeptic? Do you have a hard time seeing how your organization’s work culture affects employee behavior, performance, or enthusiasm – so you tend to think it just doesn’t even exist?
The holidays evoke feelings of joy and excitement, as well as stress and perhaps anxiety toward family gatherings. With today’s politically charged climate, it’s likely there could be some uncomfortable conversations around the dinner table. Instead of succumbing to the family fights, use the opportunity to strengthen your mental fitness.
As the last month of the calendar year finally arrives and we collectively celebrate the end of one year and the start of a new year, Raymond Carver’s question is so pertinent. As you look over the year that has been, ask yourself: “Was it the year that should have been?” In other words, when you go back to your wish list of dreams on 1 January of this year, “did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?” It is a wonderful question and turns our focus to purposeful self-reflection and to personal and professional transformation.
A lot of discussion happens when the question of Culture comes up. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, we all claim to live within a ‘culture’ and that must mean that we, therefore, understand what culture is and how it works. This is similar to the notion that most people have visited a hospital, either to see a loved one or due to personal illness or injury and thus we all know how hospitals work, don’t we? The same is true of schools.