Tag Archives: Lominger

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Is Your Main Thing Really Your Main Thing?

“The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.”  Stephen Covey

 

What is your “main thing”? What is it that you do so well that people are willing to pay you for it? If you are not doing your main thing, or what you do best every day, chances are you are frustrated and even disengaged at work. According to Gallup annual poll, only 31.5% of US employees were engaged at work in 2014. That means that 68.5% of the US is not engaged in their work! As business leaders, this should scare us!

My main thing is leadership. Specifically: strategy, process and structure, and communication. Today, I do that from a business point of view by setting business strategy and vision, building processes and structure to implement that strategy and then communicating to the organization through this process. Prior to business leadership, I did the same thing from a project management perspective and, earlier, from an engineering and construction perspective.

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Use Your Gifts To Build A Life You Can Be Proud Of

“A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before great men.” Solomon

This is one of my favorite all time quotes. It is also one of the pearls of wisdom that kept Nelson Mandela inspired with hope while he spent 27 years incarcerated as a political prisoner in South Africa. It is an ancient proverb that is about 3000 years old. I am amazed that this stellar advice was recognized and documented so many years ago and it is just as valid today just as it was way back then.

In today’s world of increasing speed, complexity and globalization it is critical that we understand our gifts or strengths. We need to understand these strengths and leverage these whenever and wherever we can. This takes a lot of work and a lot of honesty. It takes effort to determine where we have strengths and to admit where we are weak. It takes effort to determine how to take our strengths and leverage them properly into the work that we do. It can be painful to admit our areas of weakness and bring people around us to bolster those weak areas. However, if we do not do this then we are selling ourselves and our businesses short. You will never reach your full potential as a person. You or your business will never reach its potential unless you can get yourself and the whole organization operating in their areas of strength and offering their strengths where others are weak.

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Who Wants Clarity Around Organizational Leadership Behaviors?

I have written about the Business Compass tool in a number of blog posts recently. The Business Compass is a tool that can be a very powerful way of communicating your organization’s;

1)  Vision

2) Mission

3) Values

4) Strategic and Operational Priorities

5) Brand Promise

6) Leadership behaviors

I have defined all the components of the Business Compass except for Leadership Behaviors in past blog posts. So, what are Leadership Behaviors?

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The Dreaded Performance Assessment

I am not sure who dreads a performance assessment more, the employee on the receiving end or the manager that has to prepare and deliver the assessment! I have seen assessments done many ways over the years and I have never found one that I really like.

I recently read Bob Lutz’s book Icons and Idiots: Straight Talk on Leadership after seeing him speak at a PMI breakfast in Calgary. The book is an interesting read full of stories and situations that Lutz worked through during his long career in the auto business. He has a lot of good leadership lessons buried in the book but the most interesting thing I got out of the book was the performance assessments that he provided for people he worked with and reported to.

The model is very simple, fits on one page and is easy to complete (download the Performance Assessment Excel template of this tool from the Business Tools page on this site). It does not involve complex psychological models and performance dimensions. It consists of the following 10 elements;