Tag: blog

 After the final wording was approved on July 4, a handwritten copy was sent to the printing shop of John Dunlap, which overnight printed about 200 broadsides for distribution. In the days and weeks that followed, the Declaration was read to audiences and reprinted in newspapers across the 13 states.

Fast forward to the business climate of 2016: Like the delegates in 1775, today’s C-level executives are expected to be enlightened and courageous leaders who, despite a turbulent world, create a sustainable vision of their organization’s future. However, as they navigate unprecedented challenges and juggle expanding roles and responsibilities, the demands on the C-suite have never been greater.

In KPMG’s 2016 U.S. CEO Outlook Report, 69% of the CEOs surveyed said they are “concerned by the number of mission-critical issues that they have not grown up with or experienced previously in their careers that now require their leadership.” In addition, today’s CEO is expected to be change agent, coach, customer champion, company storyteller and more, all rolled into one.

And it’s not just the CEO role that’s transforming. More is expected of every C-level leader. No longer just functional heads, these executives are critical partners in guiding enterprise strategy and anticipating future talent needs. In fact, Fast Company predicts the advent of new C-level roles, including Chief Officers focused on Ecosystem, User Experience, Data, Privacy and Freelance Relationships, to name a few.

With technology, social activism, economic disparity and globalization disrupting business models and testing the capabilities, confidence and composition of the 21st century C-suite, strategic communication is essential to driving positive business results. It provides clarity, ensures alignment of decisions and actions, fosters trust and protects and preserves organizational culture. And, just as America witnessed with the broad dissemination of the Declaration in its earliest days, effective communication unifies and integrates people and processes in support of a clear purpose and direction. Making communication a strategic priority is, and always has been, an undeniable truth of great leadership.

 

 

• Both require choice – everyone has the capacity, but not everyone wants to be or should be a parent or leader;
• Both are entrusted to care for others – children or team;
• Both include an expectation of responsibility to protect us or pull us into the future… and a willingness to sacrifice what is theirs to save what is ours;
• And, both demand daily attention and consistency to achieve the desired outcome.

And according to Sinek, when it works, it’s magical.

My Dad had some of that magic. Born in 1925, Dad was a member of the “Greatest Generation” and came of age during WWII. Like many of his generation, he inherently understood the importance of honesty, humility and hard work as well as respect and compassion toward others. By most measures, his life was a success – happily married to the same woman for almost 50 years, adored by friends and family and admired by business colleagues across the U.S., loving father of four, and accomplished as a corporate executive and an entrepreneur.

Though he was a good storyteller and had knowledge of, and interest in, a variety of topics, Dad was a quiet, thoughtful man. He spent more time listening than speaking and rarely raised his voice with us – choosing instead to discipline our errant behavior with a serious, soft-spoken admonishment of “I’m very disappointed in you.” As children, we would sometimes compare Dad to E.F. Hutton, the namesake of a brokerage firm best known for its ‘70s and ‘80s ads that included the phrase, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” When Dad spoke, we listened.

Perhaps that’s why I so clearly remember a family dinner conversation one night when I was barely a teenager. We had just learned that Dad had been promoted at the company where he worked, but instead of relishing our praise or celebrating his achievement, he was dismissive of its significance. He good-humoredly said, “You can’t eat fried title.”

And, in just that one statement – and the discussion it prompted, Dad taught me (and presumably my brother and sisters) a multitude of lessons, among them:

1. One’s title is not a proxy for one’s worth.
2. People deserve respect for their actions, not their titles.
3. All titles are hollow without accountability.
4. For titles to bestow status, they must be accompanied by leadership… and at its heart, leadership implies a commitment to act in others’ best interest.
5. True leaders are humble, not self-congratulatory.

Sinek underscores these insights:

“The rank of office is not what makes someone a leader. Leadership is the choice to serve others with or without any formal rank. There are people with authority who are not leaders and there are people at the bottom rungs of an organization who most certainly are leaders. … What makes a good leader is that they eschew the spotlight in favor of spending time and energy to do what they need to do to support and protect their people.”

Just like a good parent.

“Everything about being a leader is like being a parent. It is about committing to the well-being of those in our care and having a willingness to make sacrifices to see their interests advanced so that they may carry our banner long after we are gone.”

I have your banner, Dad.

It’s not surprising that presidents and management gurus have been talking about this concept for the past 60+ years. Separating the urgent from the important is all about how we spend our time – and there is arguably no greater influence on, or measure of, our lives. We talk about time every single day. We organize our lives around it. We can never get enough of it. We can’t buy more of it. We can’t manufacture, genetically modify or clone it. And, until it claims us, every single one of us has the same number of hours every week: 168. That’s the same amount we had in 1954, and the same amount we will have in 2054.

But, the speed at which big changes are happening is accelerating, resulting in time compression or templosion. In 1954, the transistor radio was the most popular electronic communication device in history. It was revolutionary because it was pocket-sized and you could listen to music anywhere. The reign of the transistor radio lasted a full 20 years, until boomboxes and cassette players made it obsolete. Imagine a popular app or iPhone release or wearable tech item lasting 20 years!

Because time is finite and the world is moving faster than ever, we need to find ways to make it count. To sift the important out of the urgent. To capture the economic value of time.

The simplest way is through purpose.

Or significance, which is the dimension self-discipline strategist and author Rory Vaden adds to the standard urgent vs. important matrix. In Vaden’s work, urgency is how soon does this matter, important is how much does this matter and significance is how long is this going to matter. Instead of trying to fit more into your day, Vaden argues, think about how you can invest your time today to create more time and opportunity tomorrow.

Experts agree there is no better antidote to an unprecedented pace of change and hyper-competition than purpose. Today’s organizations cannot afford to operate without a bold, timeless vision; a clear and unwavering set of values and an ability to reinvent strategy on an ever-compressing timetable. These sound like relatively easy cures, but they require focus, leadership, consistency, curiosity, open-mindedness and strength of conviction . . . all of which can be hard to maintain when the very institutions and economic foundation that have shaped us are shifting right underneath us.

To make the most of our time, individually and collectively, we can organize our tasks into urgent and important boxes. We can layer in the notion of significance, evaluating a task’s relative value based on its duration of impact. These activities can bring us closer to productive, meaningful use of time.

We can take it a step further and literally track all our hours, as columnist Laura Vanderkam did for an entire year. Instead of validating the frustrating limits of 168-hour weeks, Vanderkam discovered a sense of abundance, brought about by seeing evidence of how much free time she actually had each week, and learning that tracking it nudged her to make wiser choices. (If this appeals to you, note that it took her three minutes a day to track her hours – or about 18 hours for the year.)

A less intensive twist on Vanderkam’s time tracking approach was recommended by Sheryl Sandberg in her recent Berkley commencement address. Sandberg’s New Year’s resolution was to write down three moments of joy before going to bed each night, and she credits this simple practice with changing her life. No matter what happens each day, she goes to sleep thinking about something cheerful. And we can safely assume that these moments of joy are connected to her purpose and values – making this activity a great way to stay in touch with what matters to you.

While there’s no getting around the fact that we each have 168 hours at our disposal every week, there are definitely ways to make those hours count – for ourselves, our organizations and the futures of both.

In Laura Vanderkam’s apt words, “Life is full, and life has space. There is no contradiction here.”