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When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one’s beloved extended community.
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Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
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People want guidance, not rhetoric. They need to know what the plan of action is, and how it will be implemented. They want to be given responsibility to help solve the problem and authority to act on it.
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Howard Schultz (Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time)
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Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.
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Germany Kent
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That's why I wanted to use Supper at Six to teach chemistry. Because when women understand chemistry, they begin to understand how things work."
Roth looked confused.
"I'm referring to atoms and molecules, Roth," she explained. "The real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits that have been created for them."
"You mean by men."
"I mean by artificial cultural and religious policies that put men in the highly unnatural role of single-sex leadership. Even a basic understanding of chemistry reveals the danger of such a lopsided approach."
"Well," he said, realizing he'd never seen it that way before, "I agree that society leaves much to be desired, but when it comes to religion, I tend to think it humbles us--teaches us our place in the world."
"Really?" she said, surprised. "I think it lets us off the hook. I think it teachers us that nothing is really our fault; that something or someone else is pulling the strings; that ultimately, we're not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray. But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness of the world. And we have the power to fix it.
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Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
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You are responsible for everything you TWEET and RETWEET.
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Germany Kent
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To be an ethical leader is indeed to be different. This kind of leader acknowledges the complexity of running a responsible business, yet tries to do it anyway.
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Andrew Leigh (Ethical Leadership: Creating and Sustaining an Ethical Business Culture)
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Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.
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Paul Gibbons (The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture)
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The chair's leadership also extends to individual board members. They should mentor and coach new members, help them integrate into the board's culture, and provide guidance on their roles and responsibilities.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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To impart a moral responsibility to exercise fairness in leadership builds greater leaders of strong character.
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Wayne Chirisa
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Our elders have failed us, they have not provided leadership, they have not provided counsel, they have been silent and compliant in the face of power. They have said nothing on fracking, climate collapse, the extinction crisis and done even less. The old have, for the most part, betrayed the young. This is as true of witchcraft as it is of our wider culture. It is therefore down to us as individuals to take our lead from the only source of initiation, living spirit, and through it embody the new witchcraft. We must become a witchcraft with a renewed sense of meaning and purpose, of responsibility to the land which is in crisis, or we are nothing more than consumers of the earth which will all too soon eat of us. Those who do not feel the imperative to act on this information demonstrate that they are not orientated, that is, they have no connection to the land and its denizens. Their magic is little more than a cerebral construct, and without being embodied is meaningless.
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Peter Grey
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To instill the values for the culture was and is the responsibility of the leadership, and staff alignment was critical to its success. It started with both board and staff. They realized that they needed to share the same value system that says, “I am the equipper, not the doer.” If not, there were going to be immense roadblocks to effectively mobilizing people for ministry.
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Sue Mallory (The Equipping Church)
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I worry that our nation today suffers from a deficit of empathy, and this is especially true of many in positions of national leadership. It is a phenomenon that is born from, and that exacerbates, the broader divisions tearing at our republic. We see a rising tribalism along cultural, ethnic, economic class, and geographic lines. And the responsibility for these divisions should fall more squarely on the shoulders of the powerful, those who need to be empathetic, than on those who need our empathy. When we live in a self-selected bubble of friends, neighbors, and colleagues, it is too easy to forget how important it is to try to walk in the shoes of others.
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Dan Rather (What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism)
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Respect, honesty, responsibility, and hope are the language of a great team leader.
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Samuel R. Chand (Cracking Your Church's Culture Code: Seven Keys to Unleashing Vision and Inspiration (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series Book 54))
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I am suggesting that as a leader it is your responsibility to shape the culture of your communities, to encourage them to beauty and resilience and prosperity, to make them thrive.
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Victoria Goddard (The Hands of the Emperor (Lays of the Hearth-Fire, #1))
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Organizational culture is simply the response of an organization to its political influences, both internal and external.
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Larrie D. Ferreiro
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Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.
(Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?)
Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other.
In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own.
I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel.
Is there a tunnel?" he said.
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Don DeLillo
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We as leaders are responsible for changes in our workplace, communities and homes beyond ourselves. We shouldn't just look at the bigger picture, as leaders we should also CREATE the bigger picture.
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Janna Cachola
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I began looking for these four: Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?” Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack. Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life. Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is easy to corroborate with references, and in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.
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Ben Horowitz (What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture)
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A controlling God, who is usually represented by a controlling church leadership, is just not good news. How can church leadership create freedom and not more rules? How can we bring out the best in human beings and keep it at the surface even as we deal with their problems and shortcomings? Can we empower others and release them to live from their best natures and from the truest reasons they are alive? Will we as Christian leaders, parents, and employers take on the responsibility to learn how to draw out the dreams and destiny in the people we lead?
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Danny Silk (Culture of Honor: Sustaining a Supernatural Enviornment: Sustaining a Supernatural Environment)
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We decided to use the metaphor that the company was like a sports team, not a family. Just as a great sports teams are constantly scouting for new players and culling others from their lineups, our team leaders would need to continually look for talent and reconfigure team makeup.
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Patty McCord (Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility)
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Leaders do not choose, rather they respond to God choosing them. Thus, the first responsive step of leadership is of utmost importance. It is an act of rebellion against the society of the spectacle - It is to relinquish a life of many options so that you can receive God's one option.
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Mark Sayers (Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm)
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We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry?
Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped.
The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot.
Assign responsibility, not tasks.
At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it.
If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people.
Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting.
We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones.
As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending!
Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable.
The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time.
Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time.
When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something.
There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality.
Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.
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Andy Stanley (Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend)
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In abdicating responsibility throughout God's kingdom at large, Christians have created a cultural vacuum of labor, influence, and leadership which the ungodly have come in to fill. The fact of the matter is, someone is going to exercise rulership in the earth. If not the godly, then the ungodly. If the righteous retreat completely, they have no reason to be surprised when they wake up one day to find their inheritance usurped by those who do not know God.
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Christian Overman (Assumptions that Affect Our Lives)
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Worship is God's gift of grace to us before it's our offering to God. We simply benefit from the perfect offering of the Son to the Father through the power of the Spirit (Ephesians 2:18). Worship is our humble, constant, appropriate, glad response to God's self-revelation and his enabling invitation. Apart from this perspective, leading worship can become self-motivated and self-exalting. We can become burdened by the responsibility to lead others and can think that we might not be able to deliver the goods. We subtly take pride in our worship, our singing, our playing, our planning, our performance, our leadership. Ultimately we separate ourselves from the God who drew us to worship him in the first place. That's why biblical worship is God-focused (God is clearly seen), God-centered (God is clearly the priority), and God-exalting (God is clearly honored). Gathering to praise God can't be a means to some "greater" end, such as church growth, evangelism, or personal ministry. God isn't a genie we summon by rubbing the bottle called "worship." He doesn't exist to help us get where we really want to go. God is where we want to go. So God's glory is the end of our worship, and not simply a means to something else. In the midst of a culture that glorifies our pitiful accomplishments in countless ways, we gather each week to proclaim God's wondrous deeds and to glory in his supreme value. He is holy, holy, holy. There is no one, and nothing, like the Lord.
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Bob Kauflin (Worship Matters: Leading Others to Encounter the Greatness of God)
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Rare are the leaders of organizations who will tell you that their people don’t matter. However, there is a big difference between understanding the value of the people inside an organization and actually making decisions that consider their needs. It’s like saying, “my kids are my priority,” but always putting work first. What kind of family dynamic or relationship with our kids do we think results? The same is true in business. When we say our people matter but we don’t actually care for them, it can shatter trust and create a culture of paranoia, cynicism, and self-interest. This is not some highfalutin management theory—it’s biology. We are social animals and we respond to the environments we’re in. Good people put in a bad environment are capable of doing bad things. People who may have done bad things, put in a good environment, are capable of becoming remarkable, trustworthy, and valuable members of an organization. This is why leadership matters. Leaders set the culture. Leaders are responsible for overseeing the environment in which people are asked to work . . . and the people will act in accordance with that culture.
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Bob Chapman (Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family)
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In a free society, we do not imprison those who violate profound cultural taboos or burn them at the stake. But they must be identified as dangerous radicals, not fit to be counted among the priesthood. The reaction is appropriate. To raise the dread question is to open the possibility that the institutions responsible “for the indoctrination of the young” and the other propaganda institutions may be infected by the most dangerous of plagues: insight and understanding. Awareness of the facts might threaten the social order, protected by a carefully spun web of pluralist mysticism, faith in the benevolence of our pure-hearted leadership, and general superstitious belief. An
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Noam Chomsky (The Essential Chomsky)
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Endless praise sounds false. They see through it. A central component of the manager-player relationship is that you have to make them take responsibility for their own actions, their own mistakes, their performance level, and finally the result. We were all in the results industry. Sometimes a scabby win would mean more to us than a 6-0 victory with a goal featuring 25 passes. The bottom line was always that Manchester United had to be victorious. That winning culture could be maintained only if I told a player what I thought about his performance in a climate of honesty. And yes, sometimes I would be forceful and aggressive. I would tell a player what the club demanded of them.
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Alex Ferguson (Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography)
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Everything we do and say will either underline or undermine our discipleship process.
As long as there is one unsaved person on my campus or in my city, then my church is not big enough.
One of the underlying principles of our discipleship strategy is that every believer can and should make disciples.
When a discipleship process fails, many times the fatal flaw is that the definition of discipleship is either unclear, unbiblical, or not commonly shared by the leadership team.
Write down what you love to do most, and then go do it with unbelievers. Whatever you love to do, turn it into an outreach.
You have to formulate a system that is appropriate for your cultural setting. Writing your own program for making disciples takes time, prayer, and some trial and error—just as it did with us. Learn and incorporate ideas from other churches around the world, but only after modification to make sure the strategies make sense in our culture and community.
Culture is changing so quickly that staying relevant requires our constant attention. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by focusing on the mechanics of our own efforts rather than our culture, we will become irrelevant almost overnight.
The easiest and most common way to fail at discipleship is to import a model or copy a method that worked somewhere else without first understanding the values that create a healthy discipleship culture. Principles and process are much more important than material, models, and methods.
The church is an organization that exists for its nonmembers.
Christianity does not promise a storm-free life. However, if we build our lives on biblical foundations, the storms of life will not destroy us. We cannot have lives that are storm-free, but we can become storm-proof.
Just as we have to figure out the most effective way to engage our community for Christ, we also have to figure out the most effective way to establish spiritual foundations in each unique context.
There is really only one biblical foundation we can build our lives on, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.
Pastors, teachers, and church staff believe their primary role is to serve as mentors. Their task is to equip every believer for the work of the ministry. It is not to do all the ministry, but to equip all the people to do it. Their top priority is to equip disciples to do ministry and to make disciples.
Do you spend more time ministering to people or preparing people to minister? No matter what your church responsibilities are, you can prepare others for the same ministry.
Insecurity in leadership is a deadly thing that will destroy any organization. It drives pastors and presidents to defensive positions, protecting their authority or exercising it simply to show who is the boss.
Disciple-making is a process that systematically moves people toward Christ and spiritual maturity; it is not a bunch of randomly disconnected church activities.
In the context of church leadership, one of the greatest and most important applications of faith is to trust the Holy Spirit to work in and through those you are leading. Without confidence that the Holy Spirit is in control, there is no empowering, no shared leadership, and, as a consequence, no multiplication.
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Steve Murrell (WikiChurch: Making Discipleship Engaging, Empowering, and Viral)
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Because when women understand chemistry, they begin to understand how things work.” Roth looked confused. “I’m referring to atoms and molecules, Roth,” she explained. “The real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits that have been created for them.” “You mean by men.” “I mean by artificial cultural and religious policies that put men in the highly unnatural role of single-sex leadership. Even a basic understanding of chemistry reveals the danger of such a lopsided approach.” “Well,” he said, realizing he’d never seen it that way before, “I agree that society leaves much to be desired, but when it comes to religion, I tend to think it humbles us—teaches us our place in the world.” “Really?” she said, surprised. “I think it lets us off the hook. I think it teaches us that nothing is really our fault; that something or someone else is pulling the strings; that ultimately, we’re not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray. But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness in the world. And we have the power to fix it.” “But surely you’re not suggesting that humans can fix the universe.” “I’m speaking of fixing us, Mr. Roth—our mistakes. Nature works on a higher intellectual plane. We can learn more, we can go further, but to accomplish this, we must throw open the doors. Too many brilliant minds are kept from scientific research thanks to ignorant biases like gender and race. It infuriates me and it should infuriate you. Science has big problems to solve: famine, disease, extinction. And those who purposefully close the door to others using self-serving, outdated cultural notions are not only dishonest, they’re knowingly lazy.
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Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
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I am passionate about... Doing the impossible, taking on big challenges Creating new structures to achieve big results Solving problems, removing obstacles Getting the best out of people I really like ... Working with very bright people who have good values Working with companies that are respected or where respect can be created Building a culture that will succeed and be a place where people can grow and enjoy work My greatest contribution is ... Being able to do many different things well Accomplishing the mission, exceeding expectations Building an organization from scratch Saving the day—taking dire situations, fixing them, and turning them into winners I am particularly good at... Taking things that look like failures and making them into exceptional successes Developing people—getting them to be creative, committed, and accountable Getting the job done quickly with practical, interesting solutions I am known for ... Creative leadership Overcoming challenging obstacles Rising to the occasion Seeing the core issues, problems, solutions Getting to the heart of the matter quickly, and intuitively analyzing the situation I have exceptional ability to ... Devise straightforward solutions that are efficient and practical Take complex problems and quickly develop elegant solutions Create solutions that get the job done Exercise: Passions and Gifts (Downloadable) Now it �s your turn. Complete the following sentences. You may list multiple answers for each of the items below. Keep your responses focused on the career and work aspects of your life. I feel passionate about ... What I really like is... My greatest contribution is... I am particularly good at... I am known for... I have an exceptional ability to... Colleagues often ask for my help with... What motivates me most is... I would feel disappointed, frustrated, or sad if I couldn�t do...
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Anonymous
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That’s why I wanted to use Supper at Six to teach chemistry. Because when women understand chemistry, they begin to understand how things work.”
Roth looked confused.
“I’m referring to atoms and molecules, Roth,” she explained. “The real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits that have been created for them.”
“You mean by men.”
“I mean by artificial cultural and religious policies that put men in the highly unnatural role of single-sex leadership. Even a basic understanding of chemistry reveals the danger of such a lopsided approach.”
“Well,” he said, realizing he’d never seen it that way before, “I agree that society leaves much to be desired, but when it comes to religion, I tend to think it humbles us—teaches us our place in the world.”
“Really?” she said, surprised. “I think it lets us off the hook. I think it teaches us that nothing is really our fault; that something or someone else is pulling the strings; that ultimately, we’re not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray. But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness in the world. And we have the power to fix it.”
“But surely you’re not suggesting that humans can fix the universe.”
“I’m speaking of fixing us, Mr. Roth—our mistakes. Nature works on a higher intellectual plane. We can learn more, we can go further, but to accomplish this, we must throw open the doors. Too many brilliant minds are kept from scientific research thanks to ignorant biases like gender and race. It infuriates me and it should infuriate you. Science has big problems to solve: famine, disease, extinction. And those who purposefully close the door to others using self-serving, outdated cultural notions are not only dishonest, they’re knowingly lazy. Hastings Research Institute is full of them.
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Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
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Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities.
Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition.
The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941.
A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death.
The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available.
Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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ADDRESSING DIVERSITY The way to reach the sheer diversity of the city is through new churches. New churches are the single best way to reach (1) new generations, (2) new residents, and (3) new people groups. Young adults have always been disproportionately located in newer congregations. Long-established congregations develop traditions (such as time of worship, length of service, emotional responsiveness, sermon topics, leadership styles, emotional atmosphere, and dozens of other tiny customs and mores) that reflect the sensibilities of longtime leaders who have the influence and resources to control the church life. These sensibilities often do not reach the younger generations. THE 1 PERCENT RULE Lyle Schaller talks about the 1 percent rule: “Each year any association of churches should plant new congregations at the rate of 1 percent of their existing total; otherwise, that association is in maintenance and decline. If an association wants to grow 50 percent plus [in a generation], it must plant 2 to 3 percent per year.”6 In addition, new residents are typically better reached by new churches. In older congregations, it may require years of tenure in the city before a person is allowed into a place of influence, but in a new church, new residents tend to have equal power with longtime area residents. Finally, new sociocultural groups in a community are generally better reached by new congregations. For example, if white-collar commuters move into an area where the older residents were farmers, a new church will probably be more receptive to the multiple needs of the new residents, while older churches will continue to be oriented to the original social group. And a new church that is intentionally multiethnic from the start will best reach new racial groups in a community. For example, if an all-Anglo neighborhood becomes 33 percent Hispanic, a new, deliberately biracial church will be far more likely to create “cultural space” for newcomers than will an older church in town. Brand-new immigrant groups can normally only be reached by churches ministering in their own languages. If we wait until a new group is sufficiently assimilated into American culture to come to our church, we will wait for years without reaching out to them. Remember that a new congregation for a new people group can often be planted within the overall structure of an existing church — perhaps through a new Sunday service at another time or a new network of house churches connected to a larger existing congregation. Though it may technically not be a new independent congregation, it serves the same function.
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Timothy J. Keller (Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City)
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The birthright consists of the material inheritance. The firstborn usually received a greater share from the father because he was expected to become the paterfamilias, having ultimate responsibility for all members of the extended family (e.g., mother, unwed sisters) as well as for the continuing care of the deceased. With this greater responsibility came greater resources. When Jacob negotiates to purchase the birthright in Ge 25:29–34, it is not clear whether the additional responsibilities come along with that or not. It is likely that this incident involves only the extra share of the inheritance, while leadership in the clan is given in Ge 27. ◆
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Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
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intentionally seeking to create a leadership culture where the people who are responsible for executing a decision are the ones with the authority to make the decision.
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Clay Scroggins (How to Lead When You're Not in Charge: Leveraging Influence When You Lack Authority)
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Although the social science construction of reality tends to emphasize how families differ from one another, I began to see that knowledge of what they have in common could be more important, as a basis both for promoting change and for enabling leaders and consultants to recognize the universal elements of emotional processes found in all institutions as well as in all families. Rather than assuming that a family’s cultural background determined its emotional processes, I found it far more useful to see culture as the medium through which a family’s own unique multi-generational emotional process worked its art. I began to see that stripping families of their cultural camouflage forced family members to be more accountable for their actions and their responses to one another. I also saw that once one focused on how families were similar rather than on how they differed, it was possible to see universal “laws” of emotional process that were obscured by becoming absorbed in the myriad data on family differences. And later I found that this principle applied to other kinds of institutions as well. For
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Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
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It is not the fault of the baristas working behind the counter. It is the responsibility of the leadership team to keep our culture alive, growing and thriving.
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Howard Schultz (Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul)
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It was now my responsibility to build my own culture within the U.S. Attorney’s office, one that would get the best out of our team and drawing, in different ways, on the lessons of Giuliani and Fahey. I tried to attend to this task from the very first day. I hired about fifty new prosecutors during my time as U.S. Attorney and sat with each of them as they took the oath of office. I invited them to bring their families. I told them that something remarkable was going to happen when they stood up and said they represented the United States of America—total strangers were going to believe what they said next. I explained to them that, although I didn’t want to burst their bubbles, this would not happen because of them. It would happen because of those who had gone before them and, through hundreds of promises made and kept, and hundreds of truths told and errors instantly corrected, built something for them. I called it a reservoir. I told them it was a reservoir of trust and credibility built for you and filled for you by people you never knew, by those who are long gone. A reservoir that makes possible so much of the good that is done by the institution you serve. A remarkable gift. I would explain to these bright young lawyers that, like all great gifts, this one comes with a responsibility, a solemn obligation to guard and protect that reservoir and pass it on to those who follow as full as you received it, or maybe even fuller. I would explain that the problem with reservoirs is that they take a very long time to fill but they can be drained by one hole in the dam. The actions of one person can destroy what it took hundreds of people years to build.
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James Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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In a study comparing mask wearing practices across 198 countries, the mortality rate from COVID 19 in those countries where mask wearing was either government policy or culture norm, increased by 8% per week on average, compared to 54% per week for countries that did not encourage mask wearing.
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Andy Slavitt (Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response)
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A democratic style of leadership has been responsible for more ingenuity, prosperity, happiness, and success in human history than any other style of leadership because a democratic style of leadership taps into the core idea that we are made to be free.
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Traci Fenton (Freedom at Work: The Leadership Strategy for Transforming Your Life, Your Organization, and Our World)
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Structured methods for learning Method Uses Useful for Organizational climate and employee satisfaction surveys Learning about culture and morale. Many organizations do such surveys regularly, and a database may already be available. If not, consider setting up a regular survey of employee perceptions. Useful for managers at all levels if the analysis is available specifically for your unit or group.
Usefulness depends on the granularity of the collection and analysis. This also assumes the survey instrument is a good one and the data have been collected carefully and analyzed rigorously. Structured sets of interviews with slices of the organization or unit Identifying shared and divergent perceptions of opportunities and problems. You can interview people at the same level in different departments (a horizontal slice) or bore down through multiple levels (a vertical slice). Whichever dimension you choose, ask everybody the same questions, and look for similarities and differences in people’s responses. Most useful for managers leading groups of people from different functional backgrounds.
Can be useful at lower levels if the unit is experiencing significant problems. Focus groups Probing issues that preoccupy key groups of employees, such as morale issues among frontline production or service workers. Gathering groups of people who work together also lets you see how they interact and identify who displays leadership. Fostering discussion promotes deeper insight. Most useful for managers of large groups of people who perform a similar function, such as sales managers or plant managers.
Can be useful for senior managers as a way of getting quick insights into the perceptions of key employee constituencies. Analysis of critical past decisions Illuminating decision-making patterns and sources of power and influence. Select an important recent decision, and look into how it was made. Who exerted influence at each stage? Talk with the people involved, probe their perceptions, and note what is and is not said. Most useful for higher-level managers of business units or project groups. Process analysis Examining interactions among departments or functions and assessing the efficiency of a process. Select an important process, such as delivery of products to customers or distributors, and assign a cross-functional group to chart the process and identify bottlenecks and problems. Most useful for managers of units or groups in which the work of multiple functional specialties must be integrated.
Can be useful for lower-level managers as a way of understanding how their groups fit into larger processes. Plant and market tours Learning firsthand from people close to the product. Plant tours let you meet production personnel informally and listen to their concerns. Meetings with sales and production staff help you assess technical capabilities. Market tours can introduce you to customers, whose comments can reveal problems and opportunities. Most useful for managers of business units. Pilot projects Gaining deep insight into technical capabilities, culture, and politics. Although these insights are not the primary purpose of pilot projects, you can learn a lot from how the organization or group responds to your pilot initiatives. Useful for managers at all levels. The size of the pilot projects and their impact will increase as you rise through the organization.
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Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
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The following fundamental principles are core to this standard: Strive to achieve excellence in strategic execution; Enhance transparency, responsibility, accountability, sustainability, and fairness; Balance portfolio value against overall risks; Ensure that investments in portfolio components are aligned with the organization's strategy; Obtain and maintain the sponsorship and engagement of senior management and key stakeholders; Exercise active and decisive leadership for the optimization of resource utilization; Foster a culture that embraces change and risk; and Navigate complexity to enable successful outcomes.
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Project Management Institute (The Standard for Portfolio Management)
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In response to contemporary changes in American culture influenced by the feminist movement, and as a result of the growing number of prominent Christian women contributing to these conversations conservative evangelical gender ideologies were in flux at the very moment that the politics of "family values" were being defined around a purportedly unchanging ideal of traditional family roles.
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Emily Suzanne Johnson (This Is Our Message: Women's Leadership in the New Christian Right)
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The culture of blame that is so prevalent in organizations is replaced with a culture of deep responsibility-taking and accountability.
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Arbinger Institute (Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box)
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The theoretical frameworks we bring to our praxis and our own experiences as scholars of color coalesce with a fundamental assumption in ACL, that identity is central to our praxis as leaders, and that our work as scholars advocating for increased diversity of leadership in spaces of higher learning is very much informed by our own identities.
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Lorri J. Santamaría (Culturally Responsive Leadership in Higher Education: Promoting Access, Equity, and Improvement)
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there’s actually a theory out there called leadership oppression, where people like you because you’re strong, but they don’t like you.
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Lorri J. Santamaría (Culturally Responsive Leadership in Higher Education: Promoting Access, Equity, and Improvement)
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The book led another CEO to institute a new way of tackling problems in the company. Whereas before, he would go to the person he thought was causing the problem and demand that that person fix it, the CEO began to consider how he himself might have contributed to the problem. He then convened a meeting including each person in the chain of command down to the level where the problem was manifest. He began the meeting by identifying the problem. He laid out all the ways he thought he had negatively contributed to the culture that had produced the problem and proposed a plan to rectify his contributions to the problem. He invited the person directly below him to do the same thing. And so on down the line. By the time it got to the person most immediately responsible for the problem, that person publicly took responsibility for his contributions to the problem and then proposed a plan for what he would do about it. In this way, a problem that had gone on literally for years was solved nearly overnight when the leaders stopped simply assigning responsibility and began holding themselves strictly accountable. This is now the model in that company for solving every problem encountered. This level of personal accountability in an organization should be every leader’s dream. What our experience tells us, and what we try to communicate in this book, is that in order to move from merely dreaming about a culture of responsibility-taking and accountability to actually experiencing it, the accountability has to start with the leader—whether that leader is the CEO, a division VP, a line manager, or a parent. The most effective leaders lead in this single way: by holding themselves more accountable than all.
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Arbinger Institute (Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box)
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So why don’t we take the step of setting goals for ourselves? One reason that stands out is that we aren’t willing to accept full responsibility for our lives. If we don’t set goals, then we don’t have to reach them. Another excuse is that goal setting has never been part of our lives or culture. As a result, we may end up mixing with people who have no clear idea where they are headed, becoming a person who “follows the followers.
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Archibald Marwizi (Making Success Deliberate)
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Santiago de Cuba
In 1553, Santiago was first invaded and plundered by the French. They were followed by the British, led by Sir Christopher Myngs, a British officer in the Royal Navy, who served under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, an infamous buccaneer. Cromwell promoted Myngs to the rank of Admiral and ordered him to the Caribbean in 1656, where he was responsible for looting Spanish settlements and conquering the island of Jamaica from the Spanish. During his career Myngs was also responsible for spawning the privateering career of Henry Morgan.
The British considered Myngs an Admiral, but to the Spanish he was a pirate when he broke through the strong Spanish defenses of Santiago de Cuba to plunder and sack the city. Santiago had lost its status as the capital of Cuba when the seat of power was moved to Havana in 1589, but many people to this day, feel it is still the capital city when it comes to culture. Of course, anyone from La Habana would strongly disagree with this! Carnival is the predominant pageant in the city because it relates to the Afro-Cuban beliefs rather than Christianity. It also occurs in July instead of February. The large number of Afro-Cubans in Santiago were responsible for bringing in much of the African culture found in eastern Cuba. Many of these people practice Santería, a syncretic religion that had emerged from different West African beliefs and was brought to Cuba from Haiti.
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Hank Bracker
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Parishes that have learned to develop a culture of continual invitation to leadership, training, and growth in responsibility for their members are predisposed to ongoing health and growth when pastor transitions occur
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William E. Simon Jr. (Great Catholic Parishes: A Living Mosiac: How Four Essential Practices Make Them Thrive)
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It is hard to find many better examples of values-first leadership than Ventura, California-based outdoor clothing company Patagonia. For more than 30 years, the company has defied conventional wisdom by building its brand as much around environmental responsibility as on quality products and service. How many businesses would run a marketing campaign encouraging customers to not buy new products but repair the old ones instead in order to reduce their environmental footprint? Only companies interested in creating a “lovability economy” would prioritize sustainable growth for themselves and the world and take a long-term perspective. They see themselves as stewards of meaningful relationships and understand that mutually positive interactions and exchanges of value are lasting. Patagonia has even made its supply chain public with an online map showing every farm, textile mill, and factory it uses in sourcing its materials and manufacturing its products. Anyone who wants to can see where their Patagonia products come from and verify that the company is walking the walk — using sustainable materials and producing apparel in facilities that are safe for workers. That is transparency that breeds trust. Founder Yvon Chouinard’s vision has also led to a culture that is not only employee-friendly (the company even encourages employees at its corporate headquarters to quit early when the surf is up) but attracts people whose values align with the company’s. This aggressively anti-profit, pro-values approach has yielded big dividends. The privately-held benefit corporation is tight-lipped about its revenues, but two years after it began its “cause marketing” campaign, sales increased 27 percent, to $575 million in 2013.7
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Brian de Haaff (Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It)
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A confident, informed, and compassionate instructional lead learner will propagate a positive culture. Creating a positive school culture is a responsibility any school leader must recognize and take seriously.
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Joe Sanfelippo (Hacking Leadership: 10 Ways Great Leaders Inspire Learning That Teachers, Students, and Parents Love (Hack Learning Series))
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Before you and I think of all the reasons he would not tell us to do these things, we need to think about this question first: is he Lord? Are you and I looking to Jesus for advice that seems fiscally responsible according to the standards of the world around us? Or are we looking to Jesus for total leadership in our lives, even if that means going against everything our affluent culture and maybe even our= affluent religious neighbors might tell us to do?
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David Platt (Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream)
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One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
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MODEL 2: Multiple Stakeholder Sustainability, Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams (2010) PROBLEM STATEMENT How can I assess the most significant organizational dilemmas resulting from conflicting stakeholder demands and also assess organizational priorities to create sustainable performance? ESSENCE Organizational sustainability is not limited to the fashionable environmental factors such as emissions, green energy, saving scarce resources, corporate social responsibility, and so on. The future strength of an organization depends on the way leadership and management deal with the tensions between the five major entities facing any organization: efficiency of business processes, people, clients, shareholders and society. The manner in which these tensions are addressed and resolved determines the future strength and opportunities of an organization. This model proposes that sustainability can be defined as the degree to which an organization is capable of creating long-term wealth by reconciling its most important (‘golden’) dilemmas, created between these five components. From this, professors and consultants Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams have identified ten dimensions consisting of dilemmas formed from these five components, because each one competes with the other four. HOW TO USE THE MODEL: The authors have developed a sustainability scan to use when making a diagnosis. This scan reveals: The major dilemmas and how people perceive the organization’s position in relation to these dilemmas; The corporate culture of an organization and their openness to the reconciliation of the major dilemmas; The competence of its leadership to reconcile these dilemmas. After the diagnosis, the organization can move on to reconciling the major dilemmas that lead to sustainable performance. To this end, the authors developed a dilemma reconciliation process. RESULTS To achieve sustainable success, organizations need to integrate the competing demands of their key stakeholders: operational processes, employees, clients, shareholders and society. By diagnosing and connecting different viewpoints and values, their research and consulting practice results in a better understanding of: The key challenges the organization faces with its various stakeholders and how to prioritize them; The extent to which leadership and management are capable of addressing the organizational dilemmas; The personal values of employees and their alignment with organizational values. These results help an organization define a corporate strategy in which crucial dilemmas are reconciled, and ensure that the company’s leadership is capable of executing the strategy sustainably. It does so while specifically addressing the company’s wealth-creating processes before the results show up in financial reports. It attempts to anticipate what the corporate financial performance will be some six months to three years in the future, as the financial effects of dilemma reconciliation are budgeted.
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Fons Trompenaars (10 Management Models)
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Who better to teach than the most capable among us? And I’m not just talking about seminars or formal settings. Our actions and behaviors, for better or worse, teach those who admire and look up to us how to govern their own lives. Are we thoughtful about how people learn and grow? As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the whole. Do we think of most activities as teaching opportunities and experiences as ways of learning? One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
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It is not necessary for district leadership to make a choice between structural and cultural change; both are absolutely necessary. But in many districts, efforts to uniformly implement RTI place a greater emphasis on compliance with paperwork and protocols than on high levels of engagement and ownership among its teachers. RTI is as much a way of thinking as it is a way of doing; it is not a list of tasks to complete, but a dynamic value system of goals that must be embedded in all of the school’s ongoing procedures. This way of thinking places a higher priority on making a shared commitment to every student’s success than on merely implementing programs.
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Austin Buffum (Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles (What Principals Need to Know))
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He then convened a meeting including each person in the chain of command down to the level where the problem was manifest. He began the meeting by identifying the problem. He laid out all the ways he thought he had negatively contributed to the culture that had produced the problem and proposed a plan to rectify his contributions to the problem. He invited the person directly below him to do the same thing. And so on down the line. By the time it got to the person most immediately responsible for the problem, that person publicly took responsibility for his contributions to the problem and then proposed a plan for what he would do about it. In this way, a problem that had gone on literally for years was solved nearly overnight when the leaders stopped simply assigning responsibility and began holding themselves strictly accountable. This is now the model in that company for solving every problem encountered.
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Arbinger Institute (Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box)
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Kennon Smith in their delineating of critical issues in education through the studio. Central to their investigation is a connection with other fields of design and bringing common essential characteristics to the field of instructional design. Design and narrative meet in two chapters. In the first, Katherine Cennamo relates her experiences in pairing two design forms in a multidisciplinary design studio. Not all design work is alike and different cultures exist in different disciplines. At the same time, there are lessons to be learned through this innovative studio environment. Subsequently, Wayne Nelson and David Palumbo present the crossover of an interactive design firm to engagement with instructional design. Blending processes and ideas from product design and user-experience design informs their work, beginning from their entertainment-oriented experience and moving toward an educational product. How people design—whether they are instructional designers, architects, or end users—is a valuable base for practice and education. Chapters by Lisa Yamagata-Lynch and Craig Howard examine the design process using different methods of inquiry, but both help us in our quest for understanding. While Yamagata-Lynch uses Cultural Historical Activity Theory to examine design from an end-user point of view, Howard builds on an extensive use of the case study method to examine our own practices of instructional design. As we have seen in these chapters, instructional design is a diverse field and, while the specific subject matter is important, it is but one component of education. Wayne Nelson outlines the possible scope of research and practice and finds ways to integrate the field beyond traditional educational research. The qualitative and subjective aspects of instructional design must also be addressed. The specific elements of message design, judgment, and ethics are presented in chapters by M.J. Bishop, Nilufer Korkmaz and Elizabeth Boling, and Stephanie Moore. Each is critical in a holistic understanding of the field of instructional design, touching on such questions as how we convey meaning and information, our judgment of quality in our work, and our responsibilities as designers. We began the symposium with the idea of the value of design thinking, and Gordon Rowland, in his chapter, presents a method for improving the use of design in learning and thinking. Design is “a unique and essential form of inquiry,” and Rowland’s method can advance the use of design as a full-fledged educational component. Examining design and education encourages us to address larger, more systemic issues. Marcia Ashbaugh and Anthony Piña examine leadership thinking and how it could infuse and direct instructional design. How to improve the practice of design inquiry extends to the full field of education and to leadership in higher education. Paul Zenke’s chapter examines the role of university leadership as designers. Challenges abound in the modern age for higher education, and the application of design thinking and transformation is sorely needed. Our story, the chapters of this book, began with detailed views of the work of instructional design
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Brad Hokanson (Design in Educational Technology: Design Thinking, Design Process, and the Design Studio (Educational Communications and Technology: Issues and Innovations Book 1))
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In international affairs, true strength is found in the pursuit of peace, not power."
"Diplomacy is the art of finding common ground in the vast diversity of our global landscape."
"Global progress depends on leaders who see beyond borders and build bridges of understanding."
"The world’s greatest challenges are solved not by isolation, but by the unity of nations working together."
"International affairs demand a balance of vision and pragmatism, of ideals and realities."
"In the global arena, dialogue is the most powerful weapon for resolving conflicts and fostering peace."
"True global leadership embraces the diversity of voices, recognizing that every culture adds value to our shared future."
"The key to a stable world lies in our ability to collaborate across borders and find solutions that benefit all."
"To navigate international affairs is to dance in the delicate balance between national interests and global responsibility."
"Sustainable development is a collective commitment that transcends borders, cultures, and politics.
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Vorng Panha
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In coaching a number of international teams we developed a culture awareness exercise that can be carried out in diverse pairings: Person A states: ‘What I would like you to know about my cultural background...’ Person B replies: ‘What I heard was...’ Person A clarifies any misunderstandings. Person B then responds by stating: ‘How I would act differently to respond to what you have told me is...’ Person A then lets Person B know which of these responses they would find helpful.
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Peter Hawkins (Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership)
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Effective delegation of tasks to team!
Establishing a culture of trust within your team, encouraging open communication and collaboration is the key. Clearly define the scope and context of each task, providing relevant background information to enhance understanding. Set measurable objectives and deadlines, allowing team members to take ownership of their responsibilities. Foster an environment that promotes continuous learning by encouraging team members to seek feedback and share insights throughout the process. Finally, regularly assess progress and adapt strategies as needed, ensuring that delegation remains a dynamic and responsive process. Draw a distinction between tearing down criticism to building up ( constructive) criticism. This points to communication skills.
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Henrietta Newton Martin-Legal Professional & Author
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Japan’s devotion to work ethic in their corporate and labour culture was mirrored in their rugby. When they beat us, hard work beat talent because talent didn’t work hard enough. And for that, I take full responsibility. As Springbok head coach, it was up to me to demand more time to prepare the team for the World Cup, but I just didn’t bargain hard enough.
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Heyneke Meyer (7 - My Notes on Leadership and Life)
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Steve Kerr’s Keys to Success 1. Working to create a strong team not only makes the team better, it also make you better. 2. Learn all you can from the people who are you life. 3. Use all of the opportunities you have to seek out additional knowledge, even if it doesn’t apply to your current responsibilities. 4. Create detailed plans about how you will tackle new jobs. Develop your management philosophy before you become a manager. 5. Every organization needs to have a set of core values. 6. Adjust to the resources and players you have. Use their skills and personalities to your advantage.
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Leadership Case Studies (The Team Building Strategies of Steve Kerr: How the NBA Head Coach of the Golden State Warriors Creates a Winning Culture)
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When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.”
“Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.”
“Never limit your ambitions.”
“If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.”
“Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.”
“Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.”
“Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.”
“When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.”
“We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.”
“Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!”
“Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.”
“Raising your voice is not an argument.”
“Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.”
“Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!”
“Be positively the influencer, not the follower.”
“Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.”
“If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.”
“Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following:
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!”
“Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!”
“Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!”
“Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!”
“A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!”
“Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!”
Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth”
“Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!”
“The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!”
“I’m realistically optimistic!”
“The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human”
“Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!”
“Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach”
“Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!”
“The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.”
“Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!”
“Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!
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Steve "Mr. Pineapple" Mathieu
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When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.”
“Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.”
“Never limit your ambitions.”
“If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.”
“Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.”
“Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.”
“Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.”
“When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.”
“We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.”
“Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!”
“Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.”
“Raising your voice is not an argument.”
“Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.”
“Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!”
“Be positively the influencer, not the follower.”
“Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.”
“If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.”
“Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following:
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!”
“Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!”
“Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!”
“Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!”
“A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!”
“Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!”
Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth”
“Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!”
“The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!”
“I’m realistically optimistic!”
“The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human”
“Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!”
“Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach”
“Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!”
“The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.”
“Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!”
“Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!
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Steve "Mr. Pineapple" Mathieu
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Beyond Politics (The Sonnet)
Changing leadership, changing party,
These ain’t change, but same old tribalism.
Changing the shape and name of tribalism,
Is not end of tribalism, but recurring tribalism.
If you really want to bring actual change,
Aim for a non-tribal society, one of nonsectarianism.
Replacing one sect with another may feel like change,
But it's just another form of unchanging divisionism.
Real change is when civic duty turns common sanity,
When there's no community service, only life and living.
The supreme policy is that of individual accountability,
True order comes through collectivity, not policing.
Stop relying on politicians for every little trouble.
And the world will be a place without political turmoil.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work)
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deep-seated issues that are part of our culture and national identity emerged to haunt us: Our obsession with individual liberties, even at the expense of others’ lives and health. Our belief that the country can isolate itself from the rest of the world and rely on our wealth to protect us from global problems. Our increasingly unequal and separate nation, where people like Ahmed shoulder the lion’s share of the risks and burdens. Our health care system, which is inaccessible to many even in normal times. Our diminishment of science and expertise.
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Andy Slavitt (Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response)
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A strong, positive culture holds us accountable for taking responsibility and finding solutions.
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Mitch Gray (How to Hire and Keep Great People)
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responses to our deductive assessments of intercultural competence and transcultural leadership, corporate effectiveness and sustainability, cultural aspects of personality and team development, and innovation.
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Fons Trompenaars (Riding the Waves of Culture, Fourth Edition: Understanding Diversity in Global Business)
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It was difficult to tell, for example, which countries were now on Japan’s side and which were not. Putting together what we read in the newspapers and the bits and pieces of information (or misinformation) we had gleaned from leaflets and the like, we formed a total picture of Japan and the war situation in 1959. We knew that the Great Japanese Empire had become a democratic Japan. We did not know when or how, but clearly there was now a democratic government, and the military organization had been reformed. It also appeared as though Japan was now engaged in cultural and economic relations with a large number of foreign countries. The Japanese government was still working for the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the new army was still engaged in military conflict with America. The new army seemed to be a modernized version of the old army, and we supposed that it must have assumed responsibility for the defense of East Asia as a whole, China included. China was now a communist country under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung: there seemed little doubt but that Mao had come to power with the support of Japan. No doubt he was now cooperating with Japan to implement the co-prosperity sphere. Although there was nothing in the newpapers about this, it was only logical that the American secret service would have eliminated any mention of it in preparing the newspapers for us.
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Hiroo Onoda (No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War (Bluejacket Books))
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Leaders who understand the natural law of stimulus and response know that if they look in the mirror and change their own behavior, rather than first point a finger of blame, that change in stimulus will produce a different and higher response in others.
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Roy Holley (The Power of Moral Leadership: A Timeless Guide to Increasing your Influence, Emotional Intelligence and Inner Peace)
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How organizations deal with failures or accidents is particularly instructive. Pathological organizations look for a “throat to choke”: Investigations aim to find the person or persons “responsible” for the problem, and then punish or blame them. But in complex adaptive systems, accidents are almost never the fault of a single person who saw clearly what was going to happen and then ran toward it or failed to act to prevent it. Rather, accidents typically emerge from a complex interplay of contributing factors. [...]
Thus, accident investigations that stop at “human error” are not just bad but dangerous. Human error should, instead, be the start of the investigation. Our goal should be to discover how we could improve information flow so that people have better or more timely information, or to find better tools to help prevent catastrophic failures following apparently mundane operations.
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Nicole Forsgren (Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations)
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Think about this. What would it take for you (or your staff) to move on from your current organization? Would you leave to feel valued, empowered, and largely left to your skills without being micromanaged but with the occasional “Hey, thanks for doing a great job!” from your manager? Organizational leaders: are you doing the little things to retain people? Are these attributes inherent and apparent in your organizational culture? If you are not asking yourselves these questions, you’d be wise to start doing so immediately. We should never underestimate how important it is for people to feel they are valued, respected, and heard. They want to know their voices matter and be met with a high level of responsiveness. All these needs rely on effective communication as the glue to bind them together.
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Albert Collu (Catapulting Change: Mindful Leadership To Launch Organizations and People)
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Transforming Culture It is easier to kill an organization than it is to change it. —Tom Peters Every gathering of people, every organization has a culture. Though a local church is much more than just an organization, every church has a culture. Some church cultures are healthy and some are unhealthy, but every church has a culture. Healthy church cultures are conducive for leadership development. They don’t merely say they value leadership development; they actually believe the Church is responsible to develop and deploy leaders, and they align their actions to this deeply held conviction. Culture ultimately begins with the actual beliefs and values that undergird all the actions and behavior. A church’s capacity for developing leaders relies on the collective worldview of the church and whether it is compatible with the ambition. A church’s culture has the power to significantly impede or empower its effectiveness in the Great Commission and the call to multiplication. Leaders create culture and culture shapes leaders and churches, even without recognizing it. Ministry leaders must understand the transformative power of culture if they want to have mature communities of faith.1 Organizational culture, and more pertinently church culture, is intensely potent. Church culture is a powerful force in the hands of those who shape a local church according to God’s design. If you are reading this book in any type of building, rebar is likely holding the building up and connecting the structure together. Glance up from the book and look for the rebar (short for reinforcing bar). You can’t see it, but it is impacting everything you see. You often can’t see culture, not in the same way you can see the doctrinal statement (the expressed convictions) or the leadership pipeline (the expressed constructs), but it holds everything in place. For better or worse, culture impacts your church more than you often realize. Building on the expert work of Edgar Schein, church culture can be seen in three layers, each layer building and depending on the layer below it.2 These layers move from actual beliefs to articulated beliefs, to the expression of those beliefs (called artifacts). All three layers make up the culture in a church. Actual beliefs are what the group collectively believes, not merely says they believe.
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Eric Geiger (Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development)
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Vision Cast. Once the church culture is assessed, the hard work really begins. The leadership of the local church must take the next, daring step: casting a new vision for a healthy culture that makes disciples and reproduces leaders. As a vision is shared for developing leaders, the vision must be rooted in biblical conviction. The church must hear that she is on the planet to make disciples, that the mission is urgent, and that God has called His people as missionaries into all spheres of life. Changing culture is changing the fundamental narrative of a local body of believers. Casting vision is all the more challenging when sin must be confronted. For Christians, our unwanted behaviors are often not just unhelpful or nonstrategic; often what needs to be addressed is actually sin. This makes forming culture a gut-wrenching experience. We are not simply moving people past their previous mistakes and misunderstandings. Rather, culture change through vision-casting in the local church often means walking the church through corporate repentance. Churches, and church leaders, cannot be simple pragmatists attempting to get the most effective behaviors to produce the greatest return. Instead, we are worshippers, living under the kind rule of our Sovereign Father. The local church needs brave culture leaders. We need to paint wonderful pictures of future obedience, while leading our churches to repent of our past failures. In order to move our people into a new season of obedience, grief is an appropriate response. This grief in Scripture is not just an individual activity; it’s a corporate activity, led by church leaders. Peter preached the first gospel message with an aim of producing grief over sin. He accused them of crucifying and killing Jesus (Acts 2:23, 36). Their response? “They were cut to the heart . . . and said, ‘Brothers, what must we do?’” (v. 37). They experienced grief of sin, which produced repentance (v. 38).9 The path forward for the Christian church is through the road of repentance. The content of this vision will become a roadmap. What theological convictions need to be changed, added, or forgotten? What will it look like once the new convictions are embraced?
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Eric Geiger (Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development)
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reconnected. Similarly, there seemed to be three universal laws regarding the children of all families that transcended their cultural and sociological characteristics. The children who work through the natural problems of maturing with the least amount of emotional or physical residue are those whose parents have made them least important to their own salvation. (Throughout this work, maturity will be defined as the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny.) Children rarely succeed in rising above the maturity level of their parents, and this principle applies to all mentoring, healing, or administrative relationships. Parents cannot produce change in a troubling child, no matter how caring, savvy, or intelligent they may be, until they become completely and totally fed up with their child’s behavior.
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Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
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Maybe you didn’t intend to build or support an unfair reality, but you can change it, now that you are learning how. This is every leader’s most sacred responsibility, particularly if their road to leadership has been smoother because of their identity.
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Jennifer Brown (How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive)
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As Cook says, “Developing these experimentation systems is the responsibility of senior management; they have to be put in by the leadership. It’s moving leaders from playing Caesar with their thumbs up and down on every idea to—instead—putting in the culture and the systems so that teams can move and innovate at the speed of the experimentation system.
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Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
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Organizational Excellence' would reflect the organization's ability to make sufficient commitment to clinch and apply progressive changes in the system through updating information with applied decision making, overhauling structural responsibilities from time to time, strengthen people’s management, learning/training systems, and periodical improvisation of work process ( work flow links). With the strapping leadership of the top management, strategical partnerships are resourcefully tapped and managed which in turn reverberate impressing a positive impact on their people, customers/clientele, clientele’s business, organization's business and in turn end up contributing to the infrastructure of the nation they serve with a broader impact made on the society at large.
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Henrietta Newton Martin-Legal Advisor & Author
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Seek out incremental wins. Instead of immediately revolutionizing the company, start small and crush a few things first; once you’ve earned trust, you will garner bigger responsibilities and influence.
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Jim Knight (Leadership That Rocks)
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Core subjects include English, reading, and language arts; world languages; arts; mathematics; economics; science; geography; history; and government and civics. Learning and innovation skills are those possessed by students who are prepared for the 21st century and include creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration. Information, media, and technology skills are needed to manage the abundance of information and also contribute to the building of it. These include information literacy; media literacy; and information, communications, and technology (ICT) literacy. Life and career skills are those abilities necessary to navigate complex life and work environments. These include flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, and leadership and responsibility.
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Laura M. Greenstein (Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Guide to Evaluating Mastery and Authentic Learning)
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British writer George Bernard Shaw as having said, "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the circumstances. Unreasonable people adapt the circumstances to themselves. Progress depends on unreasonable people." I think it is appropriate to mention this quotation again here because it highlights the dilemma that confronts us when we seriously consider making fundamental changes in how we live, how we work, our business culture and our practices for coordination. It suggests that if we expect anything to change, we need to be unreasonable. More specifically, we need to make unreasonable commitments. If we only commit to what we think is reasonable or feasible, we are, by definition, making commitments to more of the same—to living in the cultural drift. "Reasons" are, by definition, products of past experience and common understandings for why things happen and what is or is not possible. Being unreasonable is not the same as being unrealistic. Being unreasonable means acting in a manner that is inconsistent with conventional wisdom and common sense. Any example of significant change began with someone making a commitment to a possibility that was viewed as unreasonable or impossible at the time. Commitment is the difference between living in a context of responsibility for creating the future versus living in a context of reasonableness in which we must cope with whatever the circumstances give us.
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Jim Selman (LEADERSHIP BY JIM SELMAN)
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The ability to make rational decisions is limited, or bounded, by the extent of people’s information. To broaden employees’ understanding, a firm should promote a tradition of teamwork and interdependence and develop future leaders by rotating them among work assignments in different departments and geographic locations. In order to reduce structural secrecy, there may be short-term opportunity costs, but the long-term benefits are significant.12 Firms must think about long-term greed and what it means. Through actions and training, leaders must explain the pressures on short-term thinking and how the firm resolves the conflicts of short- and long-term goals. Potentially conflicting or confusing organizational goals, such as putting clients first while also having a duty to shareholders, require strong signals from leadership as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. These nuances cannot be left to statements of principles; they must be modeled by leaders’ actions each day. Leaders must understand that external influences can shape the culture. For example, there are competitive, technological, and regulatory pressures. Responses to them can have unintended consequences, including drifting from principles. This can increase the probability of an organizational failure. An organization needs to understand to what extent models impact behavior, decisions made by business leaders, and organizational culture. For example, boards of directors of public companies should ask questions if earnings per share (EPS) estimates are too consistent with analysts’ estimates. They should ask whether the firm is managing to models or to what is in the best long-term interests of the firm. Leaders get too much credit and too much blame. Leaders need to uphold the firm’s shared values—and that is a key component to leadership.13 But too little emphasis is given to the organizational elements that shape behavior or provide an environment for leadership or change. An organization’s structure, incentives, and values last longer and have more impact than those of individual leaders. Usually when there is a change or loss or failure there is a tendency to blame one thing or one person, when typically there are complex organizational cultural reasons. It is the duty of leaders and board members to examine what is responsible, not who is responsible.
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Steven G. Mandis (What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences)
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God creates man and woman to cherish their shared equality while complementing their various differences..Most people view marriage as a means of self-fulfillment accompanied by sexual satisfaction..The husband is the head of his wife? Wives should submit to their husbands? Are you serious?.In our limited understanding, we hear [these] words and we recoil in disgust..As soon as we hear the word submission alongside the previous picture of headship, we immediately think in terms of inferiority and superiority, subordination and domination..God made clear from the start that men and women are equal in dignity, value and worth..[submission] means to yield to another in love..The three persons of the Trinity are equally diving..Yet the Son submits to the Father..this doesn't mean that God the Father is dominating and that God the Son is cruelly forced into compulsory subordination. Rather, the Son gladly submits to the Father in the context of close relationship..submission is not a burden to bear..Onlookers will observe a wife joyfully and continually experiencing her husband's sacrificial love for her..the world will realize that following Christ is not a matter of duty. Instead, it is a means to full, eternal, and absolute delight..the first sin occurred..as a response to a gender-specific test..the man sits silently by-- like a wimp..the man has the audacity to blame his wife..the first spineless abdication of a man's responsibility to love, serve, protect, and care for his wife..Sure, through a job a man provide[s] for the physical needs of his wife, but..that same job often prevents him from providing for her spiritual, emotional, and relational needs..He never asks how she feels, and he doesn't know what's going on in her heart. He may think he's a man because of his achievements at work and accomplishments in life, but in reality he's acting like a wimp who has abdicated his most important responsibility on earth: the spiritual leadership of his wife..The work of Satan in Genesis 3 is a foundational attack not just upon humanity in general but specifically upon men, women, and marriage..For husbands will waffle back and forth between abdicating their responsibility to love and abusing their authority to lead. Wives, in response, will distrust such love and defy such leadership. In the process they'll completely undercut how Christ's gracious sacrifice on the cross compels glad submission in the church..Headship is not an opportunity for us to control our wives; it is a responsibility to die for them..[Husbands], don't love our wives based upon what we get from them..Husbands, love your wives not because of who they are, but because of who Christ is. He loves them deeply, and our responsibility is to reflect his love..the Bible is not saying a wife is not guilty for sin in her own life. Yet the Bible is saying a husband is responsible for the spiritual care of his wife. When she struggles with sin, or when they struggle in marriage, he is ultimately responsible..If we are harsh with our wives, we will show the world that Christ is cruel with his people..God's Word is subtly yet clearly pointing out that God has created women with a unique need to be loved and men with a unique need to be respected..Might such a wife be buying into the unbiblical lie that respect is based purely upon performance? So wives, see yourselves in a complementary, not competitive, relationship with your husband..we cannot pick and choose where to obey God.
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David Platt (A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture in a World of Poverty, Same-Sex Marriage, Racism, Sex Slavery, Immigration, Abortion, Persecution, Orphans and Pornography)
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Commitment and responsibility are key elements of leadership. Anybody who wants to lead is, in fact, saying, 'I want to take on more responsibility.
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Sébastien Richard (Lead Like a Superhero: What Pop Culture Icons Can Teach Us About Impactful Leadership)
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A man must take responsibility, according to your culture and the limit of your pocket. Don't try to show off when you have nothing left.
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Mwanandeke Kindembo
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Almost nothing builds trust like a leader’s accepting responsibility, and almost nothing destroys it as quickly as blaming others for one’s mistakes.
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Samuel R. Chand (Cracking Your Church's Culture Code: Seven Keys to Unleashing Vision and Inspiration (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series Book 54))
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The larger the organization grows, the greater the amount of energy that needs to be invested in being responsive to people inside and outside the team.
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Samuel R. Chand (Cracking Your Church's Culture Code: Seven Keys to Unleashing Vision and Inspiration (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series Book 54))
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Culture is an organization's response to internal and external political influences
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Larrie D. Ferreiro
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You might be tempted to appoint a “chief culture officer,” but that would just rob the leadership team of one of its most vital responsibilities. Culture does not change in a “one and done” event, nor is it something you can relegate to your Human Resources department. From long years of experience, we know that the leadership team must shoulder the responsibility of shifting culture. Developing the leadership competency to accelerate the change effectively and then sustain the culture over time is the never-ending role of leadership. You can exclude no one. Culture building will and must involve every single leader in your organization.
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Roger Connors (Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results)
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Of course, the speed at which any society embraces these strategies will always be a product of the interplay between politics, culture, and leadership. Culture shapes a society’s political responses, and its leadership and politics, in turn, shape culture. What exactly is culture? I like this concise definition offered by BusinessDictionary.com: culture is the “pattern of responses discovered, developed, or invented during the group’s history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment. These responses are considered the correct way to perceive, feel, think, and act, and are passed on to the new members through immersion and teaching. Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable.” One
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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True empathy is about validating your employees’ experiences and being considerate of their needs without absolving them of the responsibility of dealing with their own issues—or facing the consequences of their actions.
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John and Katie McCann (Leadership & Culture: Why Managers Fail and Leaders Prevail: The 5 Essential Leadership Skills for Creating a Culture of Belonging that Drives Performance and Loyalty Within Your Organization)
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Companies should utilize the CSIPP™ framework whenever they face crises. The 12 elements of CSIPP™, or Crisis Solution Internal Philosophy and Practice, include:
1. Immunity (Immune Systems): Organizations, akin to living organisms, possess inherent vulnerabilities. The CSIPP™ framework advocates for the establishment of proactive and self-regulating systems within an organization which autonomously identify, respond to, and mitigate threats, thereby enhancing the organization's resilience and adaptability.
2. Surveillance: Organizations need to cultivate a culture of informed awareness. This entails the implementation of judicious surveillance mechanisms to gather both internal and external intelligence. Such insights empower organizations to preemptively identify potential risks and opportunities, enabling more agile and effective decision-making. Data serves as the lifeblood of CSIPP™. It is imperative that organizations prioritize the collection, analysis, and interpretation of relevant data. This data-driven approach facilitates evidence-based decision-making, informed risk assessments, and the optimization of crisis response strategies.
3. Decisiveness: Decisiveness is particularly important during times of crisis. Leaders must be able to gather and synthesize the data, and make quick and definite decisions to move the organization forward.
4. Capital Reserves/Liquidity: Financial preparedness is a cornerstone of crisis management. Organizations must maintain adequate reserves of liquid capital to navigate unforeseen challenges. Moreover, they should proactively identify internal assets, both tangible and intangible, that can be readily redeployed in times of crisis.
5. Communication: Effective communication is pivotal during a crisis. Organizations should establish a comprehensive communication plan encompassing all stakeholders - employees, customers, investors, and the community at large. This plan should ensure timely, transparent, and accurate information dissemination, fostering trust and mitigating the spread of misinformation.
6. Response: The ability to respond swiftly and decisively is critical in crisis situations. Organizations must develop well-defined response protocols that outline roles, responsibilities, and escalation procedures. Regular drills and simulations can enhance preparedness and ensure a coordinated response.
7. Risk Evaluation: A continuous process of risk evaluation and assessment is essential. Organizations need to proactively identify, analyze, and prioritize potential risks based on their likelihood and potential impact. This enables the development of targeted mitigation strategies and contingency plans.
8. Leadership: Strong and decisive leadership is indispensable during a crisis. Leaders must be able to make difficult decisions under pressure, communicate effectively, and inspire confidence in their teams. A clear chain of command and delegation of authority are vital for effective crisis management.
9. Readiness (Drills/Training): All individuals likely to be involved in crisis response should receive comprehensive training and participate in regular drills. This ensures that they are familiar with their roles, responsibilities, and the organization's crisis management protocols.
10. Post-Crisis Analysis: Following a crisis, it is crucial to conduct a thorough post-mortem analysis. This involves evaluating the organization's response, identifying lessons learned, and implementing corrective actions to improve future crisis management efforts.
11. Nuanced Adjustment: Crisis management is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Organizations need to be adaptable and flexible, adjusting their strategies and tactics as the situation evolves.
12. Protocol: Clear and well-defined protocols are the backbone of effective crisis management. Organizations should establish a set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) that outline the steps to be taken in various crisis scenarios.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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The terms gavia and buyan are related to windhorse. They build up or tear down windhorse, depending on how they are used. Both are based on the idea that each person has the responsibility to help keep the world in balance, to avoid causing harm to people or living things as much as possible, and to act to bring greater happiness to all living things. Gavia is the doing of things to benefit the community as a whole, such as volunteer service, contributions to culture, or taking a position of responsible and benevolent leadership. A shaman may accumulate gavia by his service to the community in which he works and by preserving, teaching, and adding to shamanic traditions. Buyan is related to personal behavior, the way one relates to other people and with the natural world. Buyan is created by acts of generosity, healing, and respect for nature and other humans, living things, and the spirits. Buyan and gavia can be regarded as being like a bank account: They can be added to or depleted according to one’s actions. They are depleted by selfishness, hatred, personal filthiness, and disrespect for the natural world, living things, and the spirits. Acts that increase buyan and gavia are like deposits in our spiritual bank account, adding to our personal power and good fortune.
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Sarangerel (Chosen by the Spirits: Following Your Shamanic Calling)
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Organizations are set up by and large to support an ideal type of worker, what I call a prototype, to succeed.
And research consistently has shown even across geographies, and across different cultures, that this is by and large a man. So, this tends to be somebody, you know, when we think of a manager, we think of somebody that’s male, but not only that, but they tend to have sort of masculine attributes. So, white, middle class, heterosexual, sort of able-bodied male.
But importantly it’s also someone that’s willing to engage in sort of dominant, assertive, aggressive, competitive, exclusionary behaviors to get ahead. And they are willing also to make work the number one priority, so that means it’s also somebody that’s free from dependent care responsibilities.
The problem with prototypes is people who tend to succeed in organizations are people who best fit the prototype. You fit in almost by default, you walk in, and it’s easier for you to access networks, it’s easier for you to be sponsored, it’s easier for people to see you as a leader just simply because you match in their mind what good looks like when it comes to leadership.
But the reverse is also true. So, the more ways that you differ from this ideal standard, the more challenges you’re going to experience trying to advance at work. And this is true for both men and women, which is a really important point to make. The barriers are not just something that women experience, men also experience challenges to that.
And so, what the system has got wrong is that since the beginning of time, since organizations have been around, they’ve pretty much been hardwired with this ideal standard in mind. In many ways, what we’re rarely getting right, or rarely trying to fix around the system, is how we value difference. So, can we create an environment where different types of individuals can succeed.
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Michelle P. King
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Some of the best leaders I know tend to foster a culture of accountability and responsibility. Encouraging individuals to take ownership of their actions builds trust and promotes a sense of ownership.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
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Leading with integrity and accountability is the cornerstone of ethical leadership, serving as a guiding principle that shapes decision-making, fosters trust, and cultivates a culture of responsibility within organizations.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
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In governments, businesses, and civil organizations alike, leadership has typically revolved around maintaining control rather than fostering empowerment. Leaders are often seen as gatekeepers, with decision-making concentrated at the top and little room for meaningful input from those most directly impacted. This top-heavy style reinforces the idea that solutions rest solely in the hands of those in authority, rather than empowering individuals to take initiative or address challenges within their own spheres of influence. The outcome is a passive culture where people are hesitant to act without explicit approval, perpetuating a cycle that limits progress and innovation. One of the key reasons behind this leadership approach is Africa’s colonial past. During colonial rule, governance was authoritarian, with decisions concentrated in the hands of a small elite; often made up of foreign administrators, while the majority of people were expected to follow orders without question. After gaining independence, many governments inherited this governance style, fostering a view of leadership as a tool for dominance rather than service. Political leaders, many of whom were former freedom fighters or revolutionaries, often saw their authority as an extension of their role in the fight for independence. This reinforced the notion that leadership was the privilege of a select few, rather than a responsibility shared collectively.
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George K'Opiyo (Rethinking Leadership in Afria: Reflections on Dependency and Learned Helplessness)