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Leadership at Work: Talking is Not Acting
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I found an old saying that sums up the importance of moving past thinking and feeling to doing: “Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold – but so does a hard-boiled egg”.
Leadership at work, as a boss, co-worker or direct report, also as a parent or neighbor is really the same. It is difficult. It means putting skin in the game and being willing to take the criticism that will inevitably come your way.
Here is a list of core issues to consider as part of your leadership development. It does not matter where you fall in the pecking order of life; these are the basic requirements of leadership at every level. Leadership is ability to:
• Set a clear agenda
• Take tough and often unpopular stands
• Tell the truth without blame or judgment
• Draw a unarguable line in the sand
• Refuse to compromise your values
• Stop the powers that want to “buy you”
• Look to the past for pattern repetition
• Look to the present for healthy options
• Hold the vision for a sustainable future
The most difficult aspect of leadership is the willingness to stand for what you believe and not succumb to popular pressures of the day. Sadly, so many of the leaders who are valued for following the above list met with untimely and often tragic deaths. So, is leadership at the highest level a form of martyrdom? It can appear that way.
In the book “Leadership Without Easy Answers” Ron Heifetz takes on the age old question of what to do when the doing is complex and tough. He used examples of leaders able to lead through difficult times and stay the course. What he shows in leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Lyndon Johnson is the stamina to act by walking into the throes of dissention, acting with personal conviction to not eat until change happens, or in Johnson’s case, to refrain from acting too soon so the cause of civil rights would not be diminished to a back room. There are great lessons to be learned reading this book.
In “Don’t Bring It to Work” there are examples of how we tend to revert to patterns learned in our childhood families when stress escalates. That is where true leaders can be separated from the rest who automatically tend to blame others, deny problems, jump to conclusions, avoid the issues, and deflect the concerns. These patterns from our young years were there for survival and security and do not aid us in making long term, mature choices. We need to be aware of the trap of falling back into old, outmoded ways.
In stressful times leadership decisions are what moves a team, an organization, a country forward. In the end, after the deliberation, after the speeches, after the closed door meetings and open forum town halls, there must be action. It takes great personal strength and inner knowing to stay the course and not compromise. Carpe diem, seize the moment, is the ability to read a situation, live with the tension, and take the stand.
