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Great
leaders care about quality. Even more, they do what it takes
to make sure their organization excel.
A
vivid example of that is David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue airlines.
In an interview in the May 2004 edition of Fast Company
magazine, he acknowledged that he sometimes assists JetBlue
staff to help clean a plane after a flight. He said,
"I
was vacuuming one of the planes that had just been reconditioned.
The carpet comes out. It's part of a complete make over. The
plane was two years old, but it looked brand new. When I came
across this big clump of gum, I wasn't happy about it. The
carpet was maybe two weeks old. I got down on my hands and
knees and picked at it with a plastic fork . . . I got most
of it up with the fork. But I had to use a piece of ice on
the last bit. After I froze it, it chipped right off."
A
CEO cleaning gum off the carpet? While it wouldn't be a very
efficient use of his time every day, that incident is a good
illustration of a leader who wants his organization to be
the best. No wonder JetBlue is one of the rare success stories
in a struggling industry.
What
about your organization? Cleaned any gum lately?
Michael
Duduit, Editor
michael@leaderlinks.com
www.michaelduduit.com
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Leaders
must be ready to respond to change
In
a fascinating article in this month's Leader
Links (adapted from the book Heroic Leadership),
Chris Lowney discusses the leadership skills that characterized
the Jesuits and enabled them to exert such a profound influence
on western culture. One of those skills, Lowney says, was
a readiness to respond to change.
"Loyola
described the ideal Jesuit as "living with one foot raised"
— always ready to respond to emerging opportunities. Self-awareness
is key to successfully living with one foot raised. A leader
must rid him- or herself of ingrained habits, prejudices,
cultural preferences, and the "we've always done it this
way" attitude — the baggage that blocks rapid adaptive
responses. Of course, not everything is discardable baggage.
Core beliefs and values are nonnegotiable, the centering anchor
that allows for purposeful change as opposed to aimless drifting
on shifting currents. The leader adapts confidently by knowing
what's negotiable and what isn't.
"Our
generation has been dizzied by seemingly unending change.
Within the last fifty years, a handful of humans has stood
on the moon; the Earth-bound majority learned to e-mail friends.
The early Jesuits faced equally profound changes. Voyages
of discovery had more than tripled the size of the settled
world then known to Europeans. Asia and the Americas had begun
to appear on the world map — the European version of the world
map, that is — first in sketchy outline but with increasing
definition over the early decades of the sixteenth century.
In Europe, a Protestant reformation sparked by Martin Luther
had in one generation ended Roman Catholicism's monolithic
domination of Christendom, winning broad support for new religious
ideas and practices.
"While
the Vatican sputtered in its efforts to halt unwelcome changes,
Loyola's Jesuits plunged headlong into this changing world.
In Europe, Vatican officials were condemning the vernacular
Bibles and prayer books used in Protestant worship; outside
Europe, Jesuits were compiling groundbreaking translating
dictionaries for Tamil, Japanese, Vietnamese, and a host of
other languages so that they could present their message in
local languages through local culture. While a lumbering institutional
church squandered nearly a decade in preparations for the
Council of Trent — where they would galvanize strategic responses
to the Protestant threat — nimbler Jesuits pursued their strategic
agenda with greater speed and urgency. Within a decade of
identifying higher education as a key priority in the 1540s,
they had opened more than thirty colleges around the world.
"How
did the early Jesuits make themselves so immediately and totally
comfortable in a world that had probably changed as much in
their lifetimes as it had over the previous thousand years?
Jesuits prized personal and corporate agility. They were quick,
flexible, open to new ideas. The same set of tools and practices
that fostered self-awareness, Loyola's Spiritual Exercises,
also instilled "indifference," freedom from attachments
to places and possessions, which could result in inappropriate
resistance to movement or change." (Click
here to read the full article.)
Click
here to learn more about the book Heroic Leadership.
Deal
with the important, not the urgent
In
his column in the April 2004 edition of Fast Company,
Seth Godin notes that too many of us spend our time dealing
with the wrong issues: "There are two ways to catch a
plane. The first, which happens to be the most common, is
to leave on time, do your best to park nearby, repeatedly
glance at your watch, and then start moving faster and faster.
By the time you get to security, you realize that you're quite
late, so you cut the line ('My plane leaves in 10 minutes!'
you shout). You walk fast. As you get closer to your gate,
you realize that walking fast isn't going to work, so you
start to jog. Three gates away, you break into a run, and
if you're lucky, you barely make the flight.
"The
second way is to leave for the airport 10 minutes early.
"The
easiest way to deal with change and with all the anxieties
that go with it is not to deal with it at all. The easiest
thing to do is to allow the urgency of the situation to force
us to make the decisions (or take the actions) that we'd rather
not take."
Godin
goes on to point out, "Smart organizations ignore the
urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues
are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff,
the urgent will take care of itself."
To
read Godin's full column (and it's worth reading), click
here.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81/sgodin.html
Speaking
of change . . .
In
a recent Turning Point Commentary, David Jeremiah shares:
"A cartoonist in the New Yorker drew a picture
of a small town general store with this banner in the window:
'Going Out of Business, Slowly but Surely.' Many churches
and organizations go out of business slowly but surely because
they resist change. You might not like change, but I'll bet
you can think of something worse — stagnation!"
"I'll
go anywhere as long as it's forward." (David Livingstone)
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From
this month's Leader Links
In
an article adapted from the book The Marine Corps
Way, the authors observe that one of the keys to
successful leadership in the Marines is the willingness
of leaders to place a high value on the welfare of those
serving under them.
"Marine
leaders prioritize the accomplishment of the mission
first, the welfare of their Marines second, and their
own personal needs third. This willingness to place
the welfare of those in their charge before their own
needs inspires and reinforces not only the higher levels
of performance necessary to accomplish the mission but
also unselfishness, initiative, and trust.
"Enhanced
unit performance is an obvious motivator for this altruistic
behavior, but Marine leaders take care of their Marines,
first and foremost, because it is the right thing to
do. When a leader assumes the helm of a given unit,
he wastes little time in getting to know each and every
Marine — names, hometowns, family members, personal
interests — in an effort to gain intimate familiarity
with the individual psychologies that constitute the
unit. When meals are served, the lowest-ranking enlisted
Marines eat first, and the highest-ranking officers
eat last, so that each level of leaders ensures that
Marines more junior are fed first. When Marines stand
guard duty on weekends or holidays, their leaders often
sacrifice their own personal time to check in and see
how they are doing. When their Marines experience personal
or administrative problems, leaders work relentlessly
to achieve resolution. When leaders discover that an
individual Marine is struggling, they make time in their
busy schedules to help that Marine improve his performance
and provide counseling in private as necessary."
(Go
to www.leaderlinks.com
to read the full article. Click
here to learn more about the book The Marine
Corps Way.)
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"Leadership
is the art of getting someone else to do something you want
done, because he wants to do it." (Dwight D. Eisenhower)
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