Servant-Leader: Humility

The place of a servant-leader is one of humility. Without it, we often find that we're going to get our priorities in the wrong order. Maybe not at first, but if we're not mindful, we'll find that we're not really where we should be.

C.S. Lewis indicated that the first step in acquiring humility is to realize that we are proud, "If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."

Harry Joiner wrote, "Humility involves dying to oneself -- Sacrificing oneself to a higher good or yielding to legitimate authority. Quite often it means doing what you don't want to do. sometimes it means going down with the ship so that others may live. And always, it means killing the egotistical, self-centered person inside all of us who wants to be comforted, petted and admired. Humility is a Godly thing."

Some suggestions for practicing humility in the workplace:

• When you're in a contest of will with another person, just stop talking and let the other person be in the limelight.
• Ask others how you are doing. It takes humility to ask the question, and even more to consider the answer.
• Share credit for success with others. By doing this, you set an example of humility that inspires others to follow suit.

Here are some ways that a servant-leader can communicate humility in their organization:

• Invite feedback. Prepare your employees so they won't just tell you what you want to hear. Leaders must make it safe for their people to offer criticism as well as advice.
• Encourage dissent. Accepting dissent is a lesson in humility, you will also get other points of view, which are valuable.
• Turn mistakes into lessons. Don't cover up mistakes in order to look good, admit them. Publicize them as a way to learn from them. It takes humility to admit a mistake, and you can turn that into a success if you learn from it.
• Expect humility in others. If you show humility, you can ask and expect others on your time to do the same.

The dictionary reveals humility such as "the quality or state of being humble"; and humble is defined as "not proud or haughty, not arrogant or assertive, unpretentious, modest, or low in rank." Humble and humility are both derived from the Latin word humus, meaning "earth," a reminder that humility can be fertile soil for a fruitful life.

A humble servant-leader, will bear fruit.

Setting goals, and reaching them.

I've recently gone through Zig Ziglar's, How to Get What You Want.  Zig of course speaks to one of the primary keys to reaching your goals is to first to set your goals.  If you have no destination to journey towards, you'll arrive nowhere very quickly.

Once you have a goal, you focus on it and set measurements.  Make them goals you can reach and work a plan to get there, one step at a time.  You have to avoid putting it off.  Procrastination will take you places you don't want to go every time you engage in it.  It will give you results you do not want, every time you procrastinate.

Inside your goals, create smaller, measurable segments that you can use to see that you're making positive progress on your overall goal.  With this you can use that to fuel your drive to get further towards reaching your goal because there is progress.  Without the ability to see that you're getting traction, it's easy to get lost in emotions that won't help you reach your goals.

Striving towards your goal is a conscious process, something you must engage in every single day.  Even if today you say that it isn't your day to work on that goal.  Every day you must put a conscious effort towards that goal.  This keeps the goal in the forethought of your mind, so it's never lost, but is ever present, until you reach it and set your next goal.

The more times you set a goal before you and then reach it, the more often you will find that setting and achieving the next goal is easier than you thought it would be.

QBQ - Being Personally Accountable Again.

Very recently I listen to QBQ: The Question Behind the Question and found that it was a very appropriate follow up to the last book, Who Moved My Cheese? The two seemed to compliment one another very well.

QBQ is focused on getting us to change our way of thinking in primarily the work environment. Of course it's something we should probably use in many other parts of our lives. It draws us away from negative thinking, moves us from asking questions that lead to the Blame Game, and puts our focus back on how to correct the problem.

We tend to ask Inappropriate Questions in our job, the root of which is to push blame from ourselves onto another source. What we should be doing is asking questions like, 'How can I change this?' Or 'What can I do to achieve this goal?'

It is when we stop putting our energy on things like blame, and turn our energies towards moving forward, pressing on, and getting past the negative things that bog us down, that we'll free our personal resources from those debts to build other resource-wealth. If my time and emotions are tied up in being unhappy because the company won't train me, or my manager won't give me the tools I need, or what-not.. then those parts of my personal resources are indebted to those pursuits. If I get out of that I can start moving forward and using the tools I have to get things done, or putting together my own sort of plan for training. When we do these things, often we will find that more tools will come our way, that training will begin to materialize.

It's not easy being personally accountable. It takes practice and repetition. The concept is even a little old-school. But with time, it can become part of who we are. If you knock over a glass of milk at the dinner table, you don't just cry over it, do you? You may want to, but as adults we sometimes just hang our head a little and go get a towel and wipe it up. It's our mess, we made it, we should clean it up. And when our children do it, we dash into action, trying to keep it from spreading far and wide, leaking over the edge of the table. And while there we are, holding back the flow of errant milk, we say, 'Go get a towel!' Thus we show by our action, while helping them, that they too need to be personally accountable to clean up their own mess.

This isn't a new idea. We all ran for a towel when we were younger, didn't we? We just have to move that old habit back to a more prominent place in our way of thinking and our way of life.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Today I began trying to put into practice things I've known all along. I listened to the Audiobook version of Who Moved My Cheese? And I must say that the story it tells is spot-on for our current day and time.

One of the key things that resounded for me was, 'What would I do if I wasn't afraid?' Now, isn't that really a powerful thought to keep in mind in a world of work that's frought with fear, uncertainty and doubt? So many are fearful of the economy and having a job, let alone continuing their career right now.

What would we do if we weren't afraid of what was going on around us? Zig Ziglar once said, "Failure is an event, not a person." How true that is. No person is truly a failure, only that which we do or try and then fail at. We must learn that failure is also not a destination, but rather a pothole in the road that we travel towards a destination of success.

If that pothole causes us to blow out our tire on this trip, well...I guess it's time to roll up our sleeves and change the tire so we can get down the road. Isn't it?

When our cheese gets moved, we have to go find more cheese out in the maze again. Yeah, it's a little daunting and leaves us fearful, but we've been in the maze before. How do you suppose we found the cheese we've been nibbling on all these years?!