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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

First And Most Important

I was working with a manager who was unfamiliar with making personal commitments. He had a gift for “management” and “leadership.”

He has a host of imaginings about what can go wrong. He hasn’t been much on results.

Finally, I got him to list each potential problem that concerned him on a failing project and write his solution for every one. Meanwhile, his team was going ahead, hacking out the underbrush and creating a solution to the problem that had stopped him.

After six pages, he realized his problems weren’t likely to occur. He isn’t going to forget them, but he agreed to stop talking about them while other people are doing work. Severely limited his management communication.

I asked him what he had learned?

He said, “First and most important, what can we get done with the time and resources we know we have?” Then he said he had just realized that forward progress creates new options.

That’s a big win for me.

There are three stages to integrity.

First, is the belief that by making no promises, you can maintain perfect integrity.

Then, when no one wants to play with you, you can make appropriate promises and sweat hard to make them happen.

Finally, since life is a rodeo, ostentatious mastery is making the promises that should be made and harnessing the miracles necessary to deliver. That creates your following.

Which church do you attend?

Tips 4 The Big Chair – You’ll like it a lot!

2 comments:

A-6Dude said...

Excellent! Great post, Dick.

Unknown said...

The hierarchy of integrity is great!

The first level is posthumous goal setting.

The second level is winning trust - establishing personal credibility.

The highest level is personification of a person's word is their bond - making and keeping promises is not simply a goal, it's a way of life.

Great post - thanks.