Positive Leadership: The Qualities of the Most Successful US Presidents

Knowing the traits that forged the best U.S. presidents could have helped US voters grasp what's necessary to succeed in the Oval Office. Here are some interesting historical perspectives on the key qualities needed for success:

• Show vision. The best-rated presidents conveyed the direction they wanted to take the nation. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, fixtures at the top of historical rankings, exuded that quality of setting a futuristic tone. Thus Washington shaped the presidency, and Lincoln reshaped the nation. Ronald) Reagan had it too. His concept that it was possible to win the Cold War was visionary. Almost no one else, in or out of government, thought there was any prospect of that.

• Have self-confidence.  Washington was secure enough to recruit the greatest minds ever assembled in a Cabinet: future high-ranking Presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, plus Alexander Hamilton. The first president knew he needed their help to shape the nation. Lincoln, a one-term congressman, had no problem deferring to or overruling his secretary of state, William Seward, who many thought was more qualified to be president.

• Be humble. It's not just that Lincoln had the ability to reject advice from more qualified people. It's that sometimes he listened to the advice, took it seriously and changed his mind. The 16th president could acknowledge that he very well might be wrong on issues. That attribute prevented Lincoln from making the catastrophic mistakes that someone who lacked humility might make. Washington and Lincoln were secure enough that they didn't feel they were the smartest people in the room. The same could be said of Harry Truman. The 33rd president called George Marshall the greatest man in the country and that if the former Army chief of staff could take the presidency, he'd resign in a minute.

• Character does matter. The top-ranked presidents who were most upstanding were Lincoln, Washington, Reagan, Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

• Be diverse. Career politicians were less capable as president when rated against men who entered office with varied backgrounds. Some soldier-presidents — such as Washington, Eisenhower, U.S. Grant and Truman, with their sense of management were highly capable presidents. The ones who didn't plan on being president from the time they were little tended to excel! For example, political ambition came to Ronald Reagan late in life and Washington thought he'd die a soldier. As it turned out, the general won the Revolution and became the father of the USA.

Positive Leadership: The Qualities of the Most Successful US Presidents

Positive Leadership: What is Your Ecological Footprint?

Chip Conley is the founder of Joie de Vivre Hotels, California's largest boutique hotel collection, which includes more than 30 properties. 

In this extract from a Stanford Graduate School of Business article he talks about the values that are important to him in business.

'You can see who’s most powerful in a society based on who has the tallest buildings. Two hundred years ago it was cathedrals. Fifty years ago it was a government building. Today, in most urban areas, the power rests with business and skyscrapers. Business is the most powerful influence in the world today. Fifty-four of the 100 most powerful entities in the world today are companies, not countries. That means it is that much more important that businesses take a conscious capitalist perspective to make a difference in the world. I’m a big believer in that on a global level. Businesses are finally asking, what is our ecological footprint? I also believe businesses need to look at their emotional fist print on their employees.

Our work is the most predominant use of our time. We spend more hours in our working life than our family life. Yet for many people their working life leaves an emotional fist print as if they're getting punched. It creates anxiety, anger, and a sense of being abused. That can have a contagious effect on their family, friends, and everybody around them. How do we measure that? Fifty years ago we had no idea we could measure our ecological footprint. How can we start measuring and managing what’s most important in life?'

For more, see: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/power-of-noble-experiments.html

Positive Leadership: What is Your Ecological Footprint?

Positive Leadership: Values Drive Our Behaviours

To live intentionally, you must surface your values – not the ones you think you should have, but the ones you really do have.

Our values are our deeply held beliefs about what is right and good.

Values drive our behaviours, whether we are conscious of them or not.

Many people adopt the values articulated by their parents, organisations or institutions. But when they are not also conscious of their own personal values and the connection between their values and what they espouse, they are often only superficially committed to them. The values support a self-image of who they want to be, not necessarily who they are, and don’t hold up during times of stress. This is one of the reasons we see values breached so often – where we are surprised by the incongruous behaviour of someone we respected.

We are all values-driven. The question is whether it’s consciously or unconsciously.

When you are conscious of your values:

• You can challenge beliefs that no longer serve you.
• You can make intentional choices about your actions, rather than being driven unconsciously by them.
• You can be intentional about choosing relationships with people who share our values. 

To surface your personal values, take time out for reflection. Identifying your values is not a mental activity – we care deeply about our values and become emotional when we connect with them.

Ask yourself questions like: 

• What do I care deeply about?
• What would I stand in front of the bus to defend?
• What do my actions say about what I really value?

If you believe something is a value but it’s not guiding your behaviour, it’s not a real value … it’s simply a “good idea.”

Positive Leadership: Values Drive Our Behaviours

Positive Leadership: Achieving Your Goals

To achieve your goals, you must leave your comfort zone!

Positive Leadership: Achieving Your Goals

Positive Leadership: What Does A Win Look Like?

How do you keep score? How does your team keep score? What does winning look like? Are these questions you immediately have an answer for, or do they make you stop and think? Do you have an answer at all? We believe this is one of the most critical factors in human engagement. We think it’s true at home, at work and even where we play.

The best leaders help people understand what a win looks like and how to get there. Wins come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few principles to consider as you help your team and yourself answer the important question: What constitutes a win?

A win must be quantifiable. How will you measure your progress? How will you know if you win? Unclear victories can demotivate even the strongest individual and team. As a leader, you may need to create milestones that can be measured and achieved to boost the energy of your team. A win defined as 10 new customers this month is better than we need more customers.

A win should require a stretch. Yes, there is such a thing as a “cheap win” – a victory that was achieved with little effort or thought. These are not the type we are advocating. These wins generally don’t help people grow or feel long-term satisfaction. A win that requires people’s best efforts are inherently motivating.

A win needs to matter. Small visions stir no man’s soul; neither do wins that don’t matter. You probably shouldn’t consider it a win if you show up for work. What will really contribute to your growth and/or the growth of your organisation? The answer is a candidate for a win. A Win: Raise revenues by 10% at year-end to avoid layoff.

A win should build confidence. What are the wins that will help you do this? Think about wins for individuals and the team. What is challenging but not insurmountable? What could serve as a stepping-stone to bigger wins?

A win should be achievable. Have you ever tried to accomplish the impossible? These situations are not win-win – they are lose-lose. The organisation and the individual both lose. If a win is achievable, it can motivate performance.

A win should ultimately serve the larger good. Most appropriate wins help the individual, but the best ones also help the team, the organisation or beyond. People long to be part of something bigger than themselves. As leaders, when we can help connect the dots between the immediate task and the larger good, people love it!

Think about the next 30 days; 90 days; 12 months – what does a win look like for you? What does a win look like for your team? Perhaps you’ll want to establish several. Don’t wait. The sooner you define them, the sooner you can pursue them. Enjoy the journey!

Positive Leadership: What Does A Win Look Like?

Positive Leadership: Make Others Better

As leaders, our purpose should be to strive to make others better.  

We walk our talk and lead by the example we put forth in our actions, thoughts and words in everything we do.

As leaders, we must strive to ensure to make others better by encouraging others to find their own voice, not holding them back because we fear their capability or wisdom. To make others better means we are holding ourselves to our word, our truth and being honourable in all that we do. Sometimes, we can make others better in spite of what we are doing; even if we are not the best ourselves, we influence others. 

To be a better leader, we must be a leader who believes we are making others better in a positive way.

Positive Leadership: Make Others Better

Positive Leadership: Cultivating #Leadership Success

Here are some guidelines to cultivating leadership success across an organisation:

Make It a Priority: Acknowledge the risk, and put a formal action plan in place. Start by clearly defining the behaviours and skills which make a successful leader in your organisation.

Look Beyond Performance: Have a full picture of the leadership potential across your organisation and don’t restrict that view to only those you think are high potential. Do not confuse ambition with ability.

Replace Subjectivity with Objectivity: Gut instinct won’t do. Using scientific data, benchmark your people against competitor talent and identify leadership shortages to avoid succession risk.

Be Pragmatic & Proactive: Don’t wait for yearly review cycles, instead, employ development interventions at the point-of-pain with individual employees or across departments. This includes where and when to spend learning and development budgets throughout the company.

Cast a Wider Net: Take a global view of where your leadership talent is located and be prepared to use creative strategies to source talent across borders to fill leadership gaps.

Positive Leadership: Cultivating #Leadership Success

Positive Leadership: How to Build a Business

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg talks about her experience in building two of the largest tech businesses in Silicon valley - 'Think Big, Hire Big, Plan Big!'


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Positive Leadership: How to Build a Business

Positive Leadership: The Importance of Trying

Positive Leadership: The Importance of Trying

Positive Leadership: The Leadership Challenge

Jim Kouzes, along with his co-author Barry Posner, has written what is celebrated throughout the world as the definitive book on becoming a leader - The Leadership Challenge. Here he speaks with PBS host Barry Kibrick.

Positive Leadership: The Leadership Challenge

Positive Leadership: Ideas for CEOs To Communicate Their Message Better

Creating a durable, attractive message that can be distributed widely internally and externally is all important for any CEO today. Here are some ideas:

Start with a broad internal communications strategy. Different companies communicate in very different ways with their people. Some executives share their thinking primarily through voicemail or by e-mailing in the style of “note from the corner office.”

Never sugar-coat the news. Certain rules always apply when conducting meetings with employees. Always tell them the good, the bad, and the ugly. The “everything is great” approach should be avoided.

Always commend and salute your people. It’s easy when the numbers look very good, but even in years when overall results are not good, it’s important that somebody somewhere, is doing a great job that deserves to be highlighted and praised. It provides a measure of uplift even when the news tends to be sobering across the entire enterprise.

Try interactive. Try a new exercise to connect more effectively with employees. For example, a chat room conversation with the CEO. These interactive efforts are not only enjoyable but extremely useful for a CEO. You find things you can take away from each session. Employee ideas are genuinely helpful.

Make certain members of the senior team are on the same page. High quality executive communications isn’t just the responsibility of the CEO. Your senior leadership team to a man and woman must fully subscribe to the corporate mission and be able to articulate it effectively.

Keep it simple. Leonardo da Vinci said that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Who could argue?

Understand this well: not every plan you write down on the whiteboard is going to work. That’s a fact of business life, and no one is immune to the occasional misstep. A lot of people don’t understand that basic precept. They may believe that any sign of failure means the sun won’t be coming out tomorrow. But the basic lessons of communicating with those who work for you—delivering an easy-to-digest message, repeating it frequently as possible, sticking to the facts and the truth and not sugar-coating anything –provide an informational transparency that both illuminates the issues and consolidates support for strategic and tactical missions.

Positive Leadership: Ideas for CEOs To Communicate Their Message Better

Positive Leadership: Networking

Enhance your career with our top five networking tips: 

• Be prepared
• Study the room
• Don’t be afraid of rejection
• Say goodbye and move on
• Don’t try and sell, teach or schmooze!

Positive Leadership: Networking

Positive Leadership: C.K. Prahalad on Leadership

The late C.K. Prahalad was more than an academic; he was one of the foremost business thinkers of our time.

Coimbatore Krishnao -- CK -- Prahalad was born in the town of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. He studied physics at the University of Madras (now Chenai). He worked as a manager in a branch of the Union Carbide battery company, before continuing his education in the United States, and earning a PhD from Harvard. He has taught in India and America, eventually joining the faculty of the University of Michigan's Business School, where he holds the Harvey C Fruehauf chair of Business Administration.

Positive Leadership: C.K. Prahalad on Leadership

Positive Leadership: Choice, Chance, Change

Positive Leadership: Choice, Chance, Change

Positive Leadership: What Makes @TeamSky Special?

What makes Team Sky special is that they keep riding that line! 

And if you don’t know what the line is...

This is the line,

The line between winning and losing,

Between failure and success,

Between good and great,

Between dreaming and believing,

Between convention and innovation,

Between head and heart,

It’s a fine line,

It challenges everything we do,

And we ride it every day.

For more, see: http://www.facebook.com/TeamSky/info

Positive Leadership: What Makes @TeamSky Special?

Positive Leadership: ‘Rules’ for Being a Champion

Firstly, let us explain what we mean by being a champion. We do not mean winning a race or a tournament. There is so much more to being a champion than just winning. Before you can win you already have to be a champion in how you practice, train, conduct yourself and how you behave. If you do these things properly (the process) then you'll achieve your goals (the outcome.

You can only control what you do; not what anybody else does.

Rule #1: Champions Choose to Work Hard

This is very true for all walks of life and not just in a sporting context. You only get out of something what you put into it! After all, 'practice makes permanent'. You can't expect to improve and achieve your goals/dreams if you don't work hard at it.

Rule #2: Champions Practice Intelligently

Putting lots of hard work into mindless practice sessions with no feedback is as useful (if not more destructive) than doing no practice. Length of sessions is crucial, doing shorter practice sessions with total focus followed by breaks between changing activity is more productive than just going at it 100% for hour upon hour. Good practice needs continual feedback.

Rule #3: Champions Live in the Present but Have a Clear Picture of the Future

It is important to stay in the present when it comes to winning. Not to dwell on the past or dream of the future but to have a clear focus of what you are doing right now and not let any failures or setbacks affect the long term goal. To know what you need to do at the current time you must have a clear picture of what you are trying to achieve and what it will look like when you have achieved it.

Rule # 4: Champions Always Want to Learn

The most successful people are eager to learn as much as possible, before deciding what to use and what didn't work for them.

Rule #5: Champions Never Give Up

For a new skill to become automatic it takes quite a great deal of practice and dedication. If something doesn't work first time doesn't mean it won't with practice.

Rule #6: Champions "Just Do It"

If not now, when? How many times have you said to yourself, "I'd love to be able to....." and then done nothing about it? If you have a goal to achieve go about achieving it! Don't just sit around talking about doing it, actually go and do it.

Rule #7: Champions Enlist Help

Champions aren't afraid to ask for help (have a coach) to make them better at something.

Positive Leadership: ‘Rules’ for Being a Champion

Positive Leadership: Leave Your Legacy

Stanford University Communications has partnered with three Stanford Alums to create the institutional messages that will run during 2012 Stanford Athletics television broadcasts. 

The series is based on a film the students made called "#leaveyourlegacy" that they created to show their appreciation for the University. Garrett Gunther (MS '12), Kris Cheng (MS '12) and Dominique Yahyavi (BS '11) combined their skills in story-telling, design, engineering, and cinematography to create these beautiful images that tell the story of Stanford students and their dedication to excellence and innovation. The words are from a speech given by Ray Lewis to the Stanford Men's Basketball team just before their victorious NIT Championship game on March 29, 2012.

Positive Leadership: Leave Your Legacy

Positive Leadership: The Power of Networks

In this RSA Animate, Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing, explores the power of network visualisation to help navigate our complex modern world.

Listen to the full talk: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/the-power-of-networks

Positive Leadership: The Power of Networks

Positive Leadership: Heroic Leadership

After flying to an altitude of 39,045 meters (128,100 feet) in a helium-filled balloon, Felix Baumgartner yesterday completed a record breaking jump for the ages from the edge of space, exactly 65 years after Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier flying in an experimental rocket-powered airplane.

Felix reached a maximum of speed of 1,342.8 km/h (833mph) through the near vacuum of the stratosphere before being slowed by the atmosphere later during his 4:20 minute long freefall. The 43-year-old Austrian skydiving expert also broke two other world records (highest freefall, highest manned balloon flight), leaving the one for the longest freefall to project mentor Col. Joe Kittinger. 

For more on this heroic example of teamwork and excellence under pressure, see:   

http://www.redbullstratos.com

Positive Leadership: Heroic Leadership

Positive Leadership: The True Essence of a CEO

When you hear of CEOs, you are probably inclined to think of perks and corner offices. You might also consider the adjectives “greedy, aloof and egocentric”. While in some cases this is warranted, we wonder about how much we like to glorify the role of a CEO.

For centuries people have been intrigued by the idea of power. We see the stereotype portrayed in bestselling books and movies. And countless studies have certainly supported the belief that people in power are created equal. 

Winston Churchill said: the price of greatness is responsibility. That is what we believe is the true essence of a CEO – the responsibility to your employees, customers, community and shareholders. Yes of course, being a CEO gives you the platform to affect change, to make something happen that you otherwise did not have the ‘power’ to do before. But it is the responsibility that is of most value. Nothing is pre-conceived and there is in fact a long road to earning that responsibility.

Being appointed the CEO by a board of directors or shareholder does not make you a leader, but leading is a CEO’s primary responsibility. A CEO is really only empowered and fueled by the confidence that he has earned the trust of his colleagues.

Trust plays a crucial role in the success of a business. And Stephen M.R. Covey believed this. He wrote a book called Smart Trust to highlight how leading companies that have built high-trust relationships with their employees and customers, consistently outperformed non high-trust companies up to three times. 

The typical stereotype of a CEO will continue to make headlines. But as the world changes we need to document better examples and inspire other leaders to take themselves off the pedestals, break down the barriers and tip the scale in the other direction. Whether CEOs are born or made has little significance. It is our firm belief that you are measured by the responsibility, honesty and integrity in which you lead.

Positive Leadership: The True Essence of a CEO

Positive Leadership is Pleased to Support the National Breast Cancer Foundation

Positive Leadership is pleased to support the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

Positive Leadership is Pleased to Support the National Breast Cancer Foundation

Positive Leadership: The Ten Commitments of Leadership

The Ten Commitments of Leadership

Clarify Values – Affirm shared values.

Set the Example – Live the shared values. Teach others to model the values.

Envision the Future – Imagine the possibilities. Find a common purpose.

Enlist Others – Appeal to common ideals. Animate the vision.

Search for Opportunities - Seize the initiative. Exercise outsight.

Experiment and Take Risks - Generate small wins. Learn from experience.

Foster Collaboration - Create a Climate of Trust. Facilitate relationships.

Strengthen Others - Enhance self-determination. Develop competence and confidence.

Recognise Contributions - Expect the best. Personalize recognition.

Celebrate the Values and Victories - Create a spirit of community. Be personally involved.

Adapted from The Leadership Challenge, How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organisations

Positive Leadership: The Ten Commitments of Leadership

Positive Leadership: Innovating on a Shoestring

Scott Anthony, president of Innosight, explains how to innovate when time and money are tight.

Positive Leadership: Innovating on a Shoestring

Positive Leadership: How Winners Achieve Success

How winners 'ACHIEVE' success:

A - acceptance; the ability to accept that you do not always succeed the first time and you must keep on trying until you do succeed.

C - criticism; the ability to receive negative feedback and use it positively to affect your performance. 

H - help; use a good coach to work towards your goals - it is not a sign of weakness or lack of ability to use a coach. 

I - inspiration; be inspired by other people. If someone who you often beat wins against you take inspiration that it means you are good enough to do the same.

E - evaluate; honestly take stock of where you are with your skills and then work on the aspects that need to be improved.

V - vivid; have a clear image of what you want to achieve, how you are going to achieve it and who you need to help you to do so.

E - equal; all people have the ability to do great things. Our future is not pre-determined for us. Genetics plays a role but hard work plays an even bigger role.

Positive Leadership: How Winners Achieve Success