91 - Integral Leadership

Good morning.

Welcome to October.  We’re entering the 8th month of the pandemic.  People and businesses have found thousands of new ways to work, but we’re still struggling to stay afloat.  American and United are laying off thousands of workers today since new aid packages are still stalled in congress. 

Congress needs fixing, so I’m going to encourage you all to vote against those in both the house and the senate who have been there too long.  I’ll let you decide what “too long” means.  A lot of people cry out for term limits, but we the people have always controlled the length of the terms of our elected leaders.  We have the chance to limit terms with every election.  Please vote next month.  I plan to take advantage of early voting to avoid crowds. 

Now, let me get back to what this time is supposed to be for…elevating your performance.

I started this series on July first.  The theme for July was Love, and I tried to bring that focus into the topics I shared and the way I shared them.  In August, the theme was Learn, and last month it was Let Go.

Love, Learn, and Let go are the three critical decisions leaders need to make to drive their behavior in the workplace.  Love is the decision to be a servant leader and place the needs of your people above your own.  Learn is the decision to be a Level-5 Leader, focusing on developing people for future responsibilities.  Let Go is the decision to lead through Short-Interval Leadership, where you’ve fully empowered people, but stay engaged with them to Challenge them, Support them, Correct them, and Encourage them through gemba walks and management by walking around and through effective visual management systems so they will have the information they need close at hand to allow them to make better decisions.

Once I learned all the stuff behind these three decisions and summarized them, I built them into a new leadership model that I call the Integral Leadership Model.  I wrote about it for the first time in my book “Leadersights:  Creating great leaders who create great workplaces.”  Here I organized these into overlapping zones to indicate that leaders need to be operating in all zones at once, rather than progressing from one to the other.  That’s what I mean by Integral in the Integral Leadership Model.

But there is a fourth zone I discovered, or that I realized was very real for us.  It involves charismatic leaders.  I studied what attracts us to charismatic leaders and concluded that they make us feel connected through their confidence and certainty when they talk to us.  The fourth decision leaders need to make is to Connect with others. 

Connect is the theme for us this month.  This month, I’ve built a schedule that will allow me to focus on making progress on a new book, but I’ll tie all of these into this general theme of Connecting.  I hope you find it useful.

Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.