The Fires of the Forge

Catching Up

I'd like to share with you what I've been up to, which obviously hasn't been blogging! I may have taken a hiatus from blogging, but it was for good reason.

I've needed to get real with my self in a couple of areas. I will share more about that later, and what I learned about my leadership as a result. For this post, I'd like to simply share one thing I've been focused on during these past 30 days of learning and reflection.

Have you thought about why it is so bloody difficult to get anything more than an incremental change in the results you and your team produce? It is a virtually endemic problem: leaders everywhere push-push-pushing for the next level of results. It works for a little while. They make progress, a lot or a little. And then, over time, all they can seem to manage is to eke out small, incremental changes. Or they plateau. Or, worse case, entropy or inertia sets in.

When they hit the diminishing returns, plateauing or backsliding, many leaders try to "shake things up." Not a bad idea, sometimes. But often this isn't a very considered approach--more like an act of desperation, frustration or both.

Helping leaders produce better results is my business, so I spend a lot of time not just thinking about this, but actively working with it. One of the things I did during my blogging hiatus was to really pause, stop and reflect on the products and services I offer and how they can support a breakthrough in results as opposed to incremental improvement. In the past,

I could not articulate with precision the overall approach I use--it was just "natural" to the way I did things. But it has dawned on me that I need to be able to articulate the "big picture" so the leaders I work with can understand the interconnected, interrelated and interdependent nature of the different things I recommend they do.

I captured the overall approach and the ideology on which it is based in four pages. And what I will do is share it with you here. And I want to be very specific about why I am sharing it with you before I begin sharing it over several blogs that will follow this intro.

The reason I want to share my overall approach with you is so you can inventory where your approach to improving results may be lacking. I want to be clear about this: I am not taking on any new clients right now. I am blessed with a full business. I am not sharing the approach to "sell" you. I am sharing it because I am excited to think that the comprehensive and integrated nature of the approach may help you evaluate whether your approach to 2009 needs shoring up. And, if so, you can take action on that your self.

Even if you have worked with me in the past or are currently working with me, I believe you will find this overview very worthwhile and useful. I hope so.

Whoever you are, I'd enjoy hearing from you if you find the overview helpful. Whether you agree, or disagree. Whether you have a compliment, or a suggestion. And most importantly, if, as a result of reading my approach, you decide to change your own... well, gosh, I'd truly enjoy hearing from you. Because the core purpose for this blog is to "give back" and "give away" what I know to leaders who are determined to forge themselves today into the leaders tomorrow requires. The only thing I ask in exchange is to hear from you from time to time if I am accomplishing that purpose.

Barack Obama and You and Personal Responsibility

As I write to you tonight, on January 19, 2009, the nation is atwitter. Barack Obama’s approval ratings are at an all-time high as even some of those who were against him are now for him, and for what he now symbolizes to us… hope.

Tomorrow, we likely will hear him challenge us to increase our personal responsibility. That is a theme that resonates down deep to the root of your heritage as an American, for had not our forebears exercised it there would be no United States of America.

What I wonder is this. What is personal responsibility? Do I even know what that means? Or is it merely a phrase that stirs the fibers of my being and yet means naught because I do not know how to translate it into the actions of my mind, emotions, tongue, hands and feet?

Do you know what personal responsibility is? If not, if you don't define it for yourself, how will you meet his call? And, if you do believe you know, what would those who know you tell me, particularly those you have wronged? I am challenging you because I am challenging my self.

I ask these questions because we are in a mess. The mess is the sum total of decades of lack of personal responsibility by every single one of us in a country whose cornerstone was personal responsibility. And Barack Obama is going to ask you and I to accept personal responsibility tomorrow.

Are we ready for that, I wonder? Willing? Able?

Will I become more personally responsible, I wonder? Or will I nod up and down enthusiastically in a country with my countrymen who feel it in the bones but have not found pause even though we are in a mess, pause for each of us to inventory in what ways our personal responsibility is lacking?

All this has me asking one very basic question. What I believe is the right question.

“What is personal responsibility and In what ways have I not yet accepted it?”

That is a carefully phrased question. I didn’t ask whether I have accepted full personal responsibility. I know I have not. And it is extremely likely you have not either. For the big, fat, honkin’ mirror right in front of our individual faces is a collective mirror of a country that has not. That is the inconvenient truth.

And while some may have accepted more than others, what does that matter when everyone uses the fact that some are less responsible than they as an excuse to delay becoming even more responsible? Where you have not accepted it—where I have not accepted it—that is where the weakness lies and our greatest potential slumbers in the shadows. Goethe said that if we would but each sweep in front of our own doors the whole world would be clean.

Further, if you want to accept personal responsibility, I’d encourage you to not turn over your power, your responsibility, your will-to-good and your responsibility to act to our new president. That is not what he needs, what we need nor will that work. In this times of “outsourcing”, this is the last frontier. You cannot outsource personal responsibility. Nor can I. Freedom is not free.

So, for myself I have a very simple prescription. First, identify in what ways I have not fully accepted personal responsibility. Second, as my act of service to humanity, shore up those areas in my self, my life and relationships. Shine the light in those dark spaces, Transmute them through action. Third, both support and hold our new president accountable. Hope ushers in fools, and the times don’t favor that.

And as the inauguration happens, realize that you and I are being inaugurated too, and that has consequences and repercussions of great import that are simply unknowable as we peer down a very long road. Is it a road of return, a return to prosperity and good times? I don’t think so, the imbalances now reverberating from those so-called good times are too great. We became more materially prosperous than spiritually rich and on so many levels we have taken more than we have given. Therefore, we cannot retrace our steps, we cannot find solace there, in a return down a road that led to imbalance in the first place.

No, this road you and I and our fellow Americans now must walk isn’t a road of return. It is a road to a level of consciousness in which both corruption and idealism burn just as brightly as the other in an inferno fired by courage, love, goodwill and right action.

Personal responsibility is what is required to both create the conditions for those new times, and to prepare, purify and fortify us for that journey. A journey where every man, woman and child must be a leader in order to support one. This is the new leadership, where a leader and supporters are true equals in all respects except that their respective activities are different due to an agreement as to who will do what. An agreement that can be revoked by anyone, because everyone has power.

And you and I.