Stephen Covey on Leadership and Management

Posted on November 6, 2018 by admin

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks a lot about leadership. The following is an excerpt from the book that examines the difference between leadership and management. Covey considers both important but also stresses the importance of knowing what each one involves and when to use them. 

Habit 2 is based on principles of personal leadership, which means that leadership is the first creation. Leadership is not management. Management is the second creation, which we’ll discuss in the chapter on Habit 3. But leadership has to come first.

Management is a bottom-line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and  Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

You can quickly grasp the important difference between the two if you envision a group of producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. They’re the producers, the problem solvers. They’re cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out.

The managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure manuals, holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies, and setting up working schedules and compensation programs for machete wielders.

The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”

But how do the busy, efficient producers and managers often respond? “Shut up! We’re making progress.”

As individuals, groups, and businesses, we’re often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don’t even realize we’re in the wrong jungle. And the rapidly changing environment in which we live makes effective leadership more critical than it has ever been — in every aspect of independent and interdependent life.

We are more in need of a vision or designation and a compass (a set of principles or directions) and less in need of a road map. We often don’t know what the terrain ahead will be like or what we will need to go through; it much will depend on our judgment at the time. But an inner compass will always give us direction.

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A Different Kind of Saturday

Posted on November 5, 2018 by admin

This past Saturday was one of the busiest for me in a long time. I spent time with a lot of friends doing several events in two different cities. I’ll share the highlights of those events with you in this blog post. 

The first event of the day was checking out the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida. I normally play some kind of sport with a group of active friends on Saturday mornings, but since admission to the museum is free on the first Saturday of each month, we decided to go there instead. We walked around inside the museum for a while, admiring the art and enjoying each other’s company, before heading outside to spend some time in the gardens by the river. This was a much calmer and quieter Saturday morning than I’m used to, and I enjoyed the change of pace. I hadn’t been to the museum in years and it was nice to go back, especially with friends. After we had spent a couple hours there, I hopped in my car and drove about 45 minutes to St. Augustine for the next event.

Before Saturday, I had only ever done one escape room, and since I enjoyed that one, I scheduled one for Saturday afternoon. There are several escape rooms in or around Jacksonville but Escape U is considered to be an especially good one, so we decided to go there. I didn’t have to be there until 2:25 but I left around noon to have lunch with a friend at The Press. We made it there in plenty of time to enjoy the food and have a nice conversation before walking to Escape U, which was, conveniently, two doors down in the same plaza as the restaurant. Everyone showed up before our allotted time, and, once we had signed the waivers and listened to the explanation/rules, we went in to the room and got started. The room we chose was “Save the Fleet”, which involved unlocking two doors to get from outside a lighthouse into the living area and then into the control room, restoring the power, and sounding the foghorn three times to keep incoming ships safe, all while dealing with “ghosts”; two girls gave us clues if we got stuck and their angry father tried to stop us from completing our mission. We had an hour to do this and we did it with almost 18 minutes to spare. Escape U also gave a grade based on how well we did and how many clues we used, and we were excited to find out that we “graduated” with an A- (which was better than I thought we did). We celebrated, took some pictures, did a little swing dancing demonstration for the person who worked there, and then headed back to Jacksonville for more excitement.

Porchfest, an annual music festival that features bands playing in the historic district of downtown Jacksonville, started at 1:00 on Saturday afternoon and ran until 9:00 that night. A few people swung by there before going to the escape room but I didn’t get there until around 4:45. Once I got there and found my friends, we spent most of the remaining day hanging out, dancing, listening to the music, and having fun. I had missed most of the bands that day but got to see two great ones before Porchfest ended. This gave me a chance to practice dancing to blues music, which I only started doing on Thursday night. I’m far from being good at it but I did all right and it was nice to be able to dance to a different kind of music than I normally do. When there was just over an hour left of the festival, I walked over to my car, got some gas, and headed home.

My day was packed, but those were only a few of the many events going on that day. I don’t know why that Saturday was so busy; maybe everyone saw that it was free months ago and decided to book all their events for it. Either way, I’m glad I had such a full day. Normally I take it easy on Saturdays (once I’m finished with the morning sports event, that is), but it was nice to have a day full of great things to do with my friends. I had fun everywhere I went and enjoyed a very different, and very good, kind of Saturday.

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Small Victories

Posted on November 4, 2018 by admin

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved playing with LEGO sets. Most of the LEGO sets I’ve had have been pretty simple, but a few of them have been more complex. This caused me no despair, however, as I followed the instructions and completed the project one brick at a time, each brick representing one small victory on the road to a larger victory. I realized at some point that winning small victories that add up over time into large victories is how I’ve gone about nearly everything in my life. 

When I’m trying to change a habit, I find it helpful to gradually rid myself of it using small victories rather than trying to cut it out immediately. For example, I’ve mentioned before how I stopped taking my phone into the bathroom while I shower, but I didn’t talk about how I did it. At first, I extended the amount of time between getting out of the shower and checking my phone. Once that became easy, I started leaving it in another room and checked it shortly after getting dressed. Over time, I got to the point that I could wait as long as I wanted before checking my phone without feeling like I was missing out. Knowing myself, I believe this was a much better system than trying to quit cold turkey. 

Another example is the way I wrote papers in school. When I didn’t procrastinate and write them all the night before they were due (which I did more often than I should have), I would space them out and work on them a bit each day. Typically I would have a paper planned out either in my head or in outline form, write the opening and closing paragraphs first, and then write one or two paragraphs a day for the body until I finished it. That saved me the stress of trying to get it all done in one go and gave me plenty of time to check and polish my work as I went along. 

For my last example, I’m going to talk about planning group events, which is something I’ve done several times this year. The first one I planned was a total flop; nobody went to it, not even me. But it familiarized me with planning events and getting people interested in them, both of which are vital for having successful group events. My first successful event consisted of inviting friends to the local park for World Juggling Day 2018. A good number of people showed up and everyone either had fun juggling or enjoyed watching others juggle. I’ve since done one juggling event each month and, with the exception of one that got rained out, they’ve all been successful. After that, I planned a day at the beach in a state park. That event involved everyone paying an entrance fee, driving a lot, and overall a lot of opportunities for problems, but it went quite smoothly. In September, I organized a watch party for the movie Airplane! with a smaller group of friends. I had to buy the movie, get permission from some friends to host the party at their house, reschedule the event due to an unforeseen incident, and do my best to invite people who I thought would enjoy the movie instead of finding it off-putting; this one was also a success. And lastly, I just did an escape room this weekend with eight other friends. For this event, I had to pick the location, decide on a room, book it and pay for it up front, avoid inviting too many people (the place we went has limits how many people can be in one room at a time), and figure out a way for everybody to arrive on time so we didn’t miss our slot. This was the most complicated event I’ve planned so far and it went off without a hitch. I think my experience planning small, simple events and steadily progressing to larger, more complex events was invaluable in making this one work so well. 

Small victories give me a sense of accomplishment, strengthen my discipline, and make it easier to win increasingly larger victories. Additionally, breaking big tasks down into smaller, more manageable ones helps me avoid getting overwhelmed and gives me progress that I can track, which acts as motivation to continue. Thinking about my experience with this has proven to me the truth of what the Bible says in Luke about being “faithful in a very little”. I now have confidence that I can accomplish what I want in life as long as I know what I’m getting into, have a plan, and spend enough time winning the small victories that come with just about everything worth doing. 

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Points About Leadership from Think and Grow Rich

Posted on November 3, 2018 by admin

Napoleon Hill includes a segment in Think and Grow Rich called “The Major Attributes of Leadership”. I found those points to be consistent with my ideas about leadership as well as examples of what I consider to be good leadership, so I wanted to share them with you (the italics have been transferred from the book). Without further ado, here they are.

  1. Unwavering courage based upon knowledge of self, and of one’s occupation. No follower wishes to be dominated by a leader who lacks self-confidence and courage. No intelligent follower will be dominated by such a leader very long.
  2. Self-control. The man who cannot control himself can never control others. Self-control sets a mighty example for one’s followers, which the more intelligent will emulate. 
  3. A keen sense of justice. Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of his followers.
  4. Definiteness of decision. The man who wavers in his decisions, shows that he is not sure of himself, cannot lead others successfully.
  5. Definiteness of plans. The successful leader must plan his work , and work his plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans, is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later he will land on the rocks.
  6. The habit of doing more than paid for. One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness, upon the part of the leader, to do more than he requires of his followers.
  7. A pleasing personality. No slovenly, careless person can become a successful leader. Leadership calls for respect. Followers will not respect a leader who does not grade high on all of the factors of a pleasing personality. 
  8. Sympathy and understanding. The successful leader must be in sympathy with his followers. Moreover, he must understand them and their problems.
  9. Mastery of detail. Successful leadership calls for mastery of the details of the leader’s position.
  10. Willingness to assume full responsibility. The successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers. If he tries to shift this responsibility, he will not remain the leader. If one of his followers makes a mistake, and shows himself incompetent, the leader must consider that it is he who failed.
  11. Cooperation. The successful leader must understand and apply the principle of cooperative effort and be able to induce his followers to do the same. Leadership calls for power, and power calls for cooperation. 
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Consistency

Posted on November 2, 2018 by admin

Who do you think will become better at any given skill: someone who has a natural talent for that skill but hardly ever practices it or someone who has no natural talent for it but practices it every day? Except for a few exceedingly rare cases involving people with exceptional natural talent, the person who consistently works at a skill will eventually become better at it than the talented person who almost never works at it. 

It’s better to spend a few minutes every day working on a skill than spend several hours on it every once in a while; it’s also easier to do this since consistent practice brings steady improvement, which acts as a great source of motivation to continue, and working daily on a skill rather than every so often means less time is needed to maintain it or improve it. Further, once practicing something each day becomes a habit, it requires less thought and willpower to work on it.

A different, though still important, aspect of consistency is behaving consistently in all areas of life. Now of course there will be times that behavior changes for understandable reasons (lack of sleep, sickness, emotional ups and downs, etc), but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the people who act friendly some of the time but reveal their true face in other situations. These people are manipulative and adjust their behavior to the situation so they can get others to do what they want. What they should do instead is work on self-improvement so they can be the best possible versions of themselves and then act accordingly in whatever situation they find themselves. They don’t have to do exactly the same things and say exactly the same things wherever they go, but their behavior should be in line with some aspect of their best self. 

Consistency is critical, whether it’s regularly practicing a skill or behaving similarly (in a good way) in every area of life. I’ve worked at both off and on over the years; my life is much better whenever I’m on the ball with them. As with everything else, I often don’t live up to my own expectations but I’m trying to be easier on myself and accept victories wherever I find them. I’ve seen progress, which is encouraging, and I’ll be satisfied as long as I keep doing my best and getting better as I go. 

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Review of The 5 Love Languages

Posted on November 1, 2018 by admin

The 5 Love Languages is a great little book by Gary Chapman. Chapman goes into a lot of detail about various aspects of relationships, with a special focus on communication and “love languages”. According to Chapman, a love language is a method of showing and receiving love. The love languages discussed in the book are words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.

Everyone has one primary as well as one secondary love language. When someone regularly receives love via their primary love language, they will feel appreciated and their “love tank”, as Chapman calls it, will be overflowing. This is easy to do when couples share the same primary love language. In those cases, they will communicate and receive their love for each other just as easily as two people who share the same native language communicate. 

However, if someone one goes for an extended period of time without receiving love via their primary love language, they will feel upset and unloved; their love tank is empty. This can happen unintentionally when couples have different primary love languages. Someone who primarily receives love through affirming words may not feel loved (or not feel nearly as much love) if their partner primarily shows love them love through acts of service. Figuring out which primary love languages you and your partner have and learning to “speak” to each other in those languages (which Chapman explains how to do in the book) is helpful for avoiding this situation and reviving dying relationships. 

Although The 5 Love Languages is primarily about romantic relationships, the wisdom it contains can be applied to all types of relationships. Learning how to best show love to your family members, friends, and anyone else close to you can help make bad relationships good and good ones great. I’ve used a lot of information from the book to learn more about myself and improve my interactions with those close to me. My primary love language is words of affirmation and my secondary love language is physical touch. This makes perfect sense, considering I love warm hugs and saying uplifting things to others. Further, whenever I go for a while without receiving either of those, I begin to feel unappreciated. I never noticed those aspects of myself before I read this book, and those are just a couple of useful things I’ve learned from it. Everyone interacts with other people at some point and The 5 Love Languages offers a lot of great insight on how to make those interactions count. I highly recommend checking out this book. I think you’ll love it.

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Mindset

Posted on October 31, 2018 by admin

I’ve learned a lot over the past year, especially in the area of self-improvement. If I could sum it all up in one simple phrase, it would be this: mindset is everything. There are a lot of different life hacks I use every day and they all involve controlling my mindset. I’ve found that I can turn a situation around by simply looking at it differently. If I’m enjoying myself and start thinking of things to dislike about the situation, I’ll find a lot of them and begin to get down. Likewise, I can find good things in a situation that I dislike and I’ll begin to enjoy it. In both cases, I find what I expect to find. 

This leads to a neat little life hack I use to stay positive when someone around me is being negative. I can find something good in any situation and use that to counter their negative points. My intention in doing this is to keep myself in a good mood, but sometimes it puts the other person in a good mood as well. If I’m in a situation I want to improve, I can do so more effectively by looking at it in a positive way than a negative way; looking at it positively makes it feel like making a good situation better, while looking at it negatively makes the situation feel hopeless and any potential changes seem pointless.

Would you rather stay stuck in a bad mood or switch over to a good mood? Personally, I’d much rather switch to a good mood. I still get stuck in negative mindsets sometimes, but now I can avoid most of them in the first place and usually succeed in getting out of them as long as I have the will to do so. The only exceptions are the rare cases in which I feel the need to fully experience a negative emotion before I can move on in a healthy way. In most of those cases, that need arises because I’ve been suppressing certain feelings rather than working through them as they arise. 

Some resources that help me control my mindset are The Power of Now, The Power of Positive Thinking, The Four Agreements, The Magic of Thinking Big, and How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Each one of those contains several useful life hacks that I use to reframe situations and improve my mood. The right mindset makes it easy to accomplish what I set out to do, avoid doing things that are wrong or cause more problems than they solve, talk about nearly anything with just about anyone, and work through situations that may otherwise be stressful. I wish I’d learned and internalized this stuff years ago, but I’m glad to know it now and I hope it helps you as much as it’s helped me. 

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Personas

Posted on October 30, 2018 by admin

Are you truly yourself around other people or do you just act like “yourself”? Do you create a persona of how you want others to see you and wear that persona like a costume whenever you go out? Do you find yourself acting how you think you should based on how others see you instead of acting based on how you feel? If so, it’s perfectly understandable. To put yourself out there, to wear your true face, is to risk being rejected. Wearing the persona provides a degree of protection; it hurts less if others reject the persona instead of rejecting you.

Your persona may be largely based on you. Certain aspects of your personality, things you do whether you’re around other people or by yourself, subjects you’re interested in, etc. In this case, the persona is less of a disguise and more of a covering which reveals select parts of you while keeping others hidden. Most people probably have this kind of persona rather than one which is completely fabricated and contains no aspects of themselves.

However, even if your persona is not far off from you and you didn’t intend to create it or use it, how do you talk to anyone about this? If you’ve been unintentionally hiding behind a persona around other people, then the thought of revealing your true self feels strange, as if you’ve been dishonest without meaning to do so. This isn’t typically taught in schools, at home, or anywhere else in life, so there aren’t many resources out there about how to effectively have this conversation.

What do you do about revealing aspects of yourself that you normally keep hidden? If you are known for being funny and upbeat, do you keep acting that way even when you feel down or do you let your true feelings show? Maybe you’re always there for others when they need help; when you need help, do you ask for it, keep helping others even if you’re secretly hurting, or stay quiet and try to help yourself? It should be easy to open up to friends and be vulnerable around them, but actually doing so is difficult, especially if you haven’t done it before. I wish I had easy answers for these questions and issues but I don’t. I don’t have any kind of answers here. If you have some, I’d love to hear them.

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My Rules

Posted on October 29, 2018 by admin

There are several rules I do my best to follow. Some of them are in line with my concept of morality and others are simply useful in everyday life. I sometimes break them because I’m fallible, but I mostly abide by them. The self-improvement work I’ve done has made it easier to follow these rules and has even pointed me toward several of them. I’ve thought about how I live my life and figured out which rules I most often follow, so without further ado, here they are. 

  1. Do to others as you’d have them do to you. The Golden Rule, and for good reason. Nearly everything about interacting with other people fits within this rule, it’s easy to remember, and it requires me to see things from others’ perspectives instead of just my own. There are some cases in which it doesn’t work, but it works perfectly far more often than not. If someone made me keep one rule and abandon the rest, this would be the one I’d keep. 
  2. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This one comes from Stephen Covey’s classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  Listening to what others have to say and making sure I understand it teaches me much more than sharing my thoughts with them. Additionally, I’ve found that people are more willing to hear my take on something once I’ve heard them out. All of Covey’s habits are solid, and this is one of the best. 
  3. Improve every day. Even after factoring in time for sleeping, working, eating, and driving, I still have time each day to use for self-improvement. Just spending a few minutes a day bettering myself is better than doing nothing because I don’t have as much time as I’d like.  I’ve found meditating, praying, and reading to be powerful tools for self-improvement. Learning new things and practicing them every day has brought me much closer to the place I want to be in life as well as the person I want to be. 
  4. Be honest. I believe honesty is morally right as well as useful in every area of life. Trust is essential in all relationships, whether they be familial, friendship, romantic, business, or anything else. Lying breaks that trust, sometimes irreparably, and drives people away. Telling the truth garners respect and strengthens trust, especially when it’s difficult or inconvenient to do so. There are ways to tell the truth that work better than others, but I’d rather clumsily tell the truth than smoothly tell a lie. 
  5. Look for ways to help. No matter where I go, there is always something I can do to make that area a little bit better. I could spend years writing out all the different ways of helping people. Here are some of them: being a shoulder to cry on, giving somebody a jump start, volunteering for a good organization, or simply holding the door for someone. I never know what a seemingly small gesture might mean to another person (unless they tell me later on) but I know how much I’ve appreciated the gestures that others have given to me, so I’m always on the lookout for ways to pay it forward. 
  6. Take chances. If I don’t pursue something, I’m almost surely not going to get it. Even if I don’t get exactly what I want, I usually end up getting something close to it, and sometimes I do get exactly what I want. I’ve had so many amazing experiences from simply saying “yes” even when I was scared or didn’t know what I was getting into. My experiences have taught me a lot of valuable lessons, and although I didn’t particularly enjoy some of them or even hated them at the time, I’m still grateful for the lessons I learned. I don’t always get what I want but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing I did my best to get it. Better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. 
  7. Dream big. If I try something small and fail, I’ll have almost nothing to show for it; if I fail while trying something big, I’ll have learned a lot of useful things in the process and may even succeed at accomplishing something else instead (such as a smaller version of what I had in mind or a certain part of it). Some of the best experiences in my life have come from dreaming big and believing things will work out against all odds and expectations from others. I’d much rather dream of doing something big and find out through experience that it won’t work than think it won’t work and never try it. 
  8. Don’t think too much. This is one of the hardest rules for me to follow. Until last year, I wouldn’t have believed it to be possible to stop thinking or have much control over my thoughts. Ever since I first listened to The Power of Now and started practicing presence, however, I’ve discovered the benefits of thinking less: less anxiety, greater comfort around other people, easier conversations, more creativity, and a much easier time sleeping, to name a few. It’s difficult to change a lifetime of overthinking, so I still think much more than I should, and a lot of my thoughts are still negative, but I’ve definitely made a lot of progress since I started and can only see things getting better moving forward. 
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Review of How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Posted on October 28, 2018 by admin

Scott Adams, best known for creating the popular Dilbert comic strip, wrote a book several years ago called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. In the book, Adams goes through his life story and lays out the strategies that he believes have brought him success. He fits a lot of interesting stuff into the book, from overcoming a major voice problem to effectively managing energy to making healthy food taste delicious, and breaks down how he does each one of these (and more) as he goes. 

While many people talk about the importance of having goals, Adams considers systems to be much more useful. One problem he has with goals is that they involve working at something for a long time and being dissatisfied until that thing is completed. Even then, the satisfaction from completing it is short-lived, and the search for a new goal begins. Another problem is that a particular goal may seem like a good idea at the start but, with so many changing variables in this fast-moving world, it may turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth. Instead, Adams suggests doing things and learning skills that increase your chances of ending up in a good place. This way, you’re constantly working on something at which you can succeed every step of the way (such as doing some form of activity each day, even if it’s as simple as walking the dog, rather than trying to follow a specific exercise regimen) while simultaneously increasing your usefulness. Adams reasons that having good systems and routines in place makes you more likely to run into good opportunities and be able to make good use of them when you find them than pursuing specific goals. 

One of Adams’ most interesting ideas to me is the “talent stack”. The talent stack consists of useful skills that mesh well with each other and provide more value together than they do separately. For example, Adams uses several related skills in creating comics, including drawing, writing, and humor. He says that there are plenty of people who are more talented than he is at each of those things, but he’s good enough at each of them to make comics that people want to read, and his comics wouldn’t work if he were seriously lacking in one or more of those abilities. Some of the skills he thinks everyone should know and would make you much more likely to be successful wherever you go in life include public speaking, accounting, business writing, conversation, persuasion, and a second language. Someone who is decent at each of those skills stands a better chance of being successful than someone who is excellent at only one of them, much like in the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.”

Adams adds just enough humor and Dilbert comics in places where the material might otherwise drag a bit to keep things fun; this, along with Adams’ ability to tell a good story (a skill he explains how to do in the book, by the way) makes How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big a real page-turner. I normally read just one chapter of a book each day but I ended up reading a few chapters daily of this book, partly because they’re so enjoyable and partly because many of them are quite short. The sheer amount of useful life hacks in the book as well as its great humor make this one of the more enjoyable and useful self-improvement books I’ve read, and I highly recommend you check it out.

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