Leadership is not about you or your title, your money your possessions, your power, or how much pleasure you can get from life.
Leaders never have all the answers, but they seek them constantly and often find them in the places that others have overlooked.
The articles below will challenge you and inspire you to grow your thinking and your behavior first, and then help you bring your best to the people and the organizations you serve.
Have you ever worked with someone that has a title but:
Where there is smoke there is usually fire.
Not long ago I met with someone that was struggling because new team members were speaking up and contributing at a higher level than he was comfortable with. He had a bigger title, more experience, and a deeper understanding of the organization’s history. He trusts the detailed work that the founders of that organization did to set it up and feels like is his it responsibility to ensure that their guidelines are followed. The new team members either don’t know or don’t fully understand that history, but they have strong skills, great experience, a huge desire to serve and are unafraid to challenge the status quo.
It was good for me to hear this man’s perspective, as I am usually on the other side of that experience –Deeply believing that:
[Tweet “We were all given a brain to think and a heart to serve.”]
A little over a month ago I spoke to a group of senior level business leaders. Toward the end of our time together, one man said his wife was working for an organization that has downsized several times in the past 12 months, the workload is increasing and morale is tanking. He wanted to know how to support her at a higher level.
Two weeks ago I watched another leader navigate the 4th layoff this year.
Do you care deeply about truth, freedom and people from all nations races, and religions? Do the debates about what the world should and should not be doing for refugees, about how to deal with the threat of terrorism without hating and fearing others, about the right to bear arms and the need for gun control – make your head spin?
We have a crisis of leadership and a need to personally be involved in changing the world of leadership for the better. ~Mike Henry Sr.
Like many of you, I am deeply concerned about truth, freedom, people, and the state of leadership in my home country and in our world. And the more I read, listen and observe, the more I’m aware of:
I was leading a small team in a culturally diverse city in the U.S. when two of my employees asked why all the titled leaders on our leadership team were white.
I was raised in a part of the country that was not culturally diverse, today – nearly a decade after their question 89% of the population in my home state is white and 95% of the county that surrounded the town I grew up in was white. As a result, it was a question I didn’t see coming and one I did not have a good answer for.
[Tweet “If you seek to lead well… You will consider uncomfortable questions.”]
My reactions:
