Get the resources needed to get the job done.

A leader's job is to facilitate the team's success. Being sure available resources are sufficient for success is, in turn, the leaders responsibility. There may be others on the team who have tasks and assignments related to resource development, but if the resources are not there when they are needed, the leader has not gotten the job done.

If the train runs on coal, the leader better have continuous access to the coal mine. If success depends on new ideas, the leader will be well-served by cultivating a close relationship with a guru. If success depends on creativity, exceptional talents, and specialized skills, the leader must commit to recruiting and retaining only the brightest and best people for the team. a proactive leader knows not having enough of the right resources when they are needed is the surest route to failure, and fail he will not. …

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Be skilled at using informal strategies to get things done.

a proactive leader certainly is talking from experience. There are formal policies, procedures, and ways things are to be done. It is also true they sometimes do not work and situations come up where there is no formalized approach that will get from here to there in the time available to get there. Now and then though, people take this to mean they can ignore the rules, not pay attention to the formal processes. This definitely is not a proactive leader's point. The informal approach supplements formal procedures and is not a substitute for them.

People also sometimes see the informal approach as a convenient way to bypass the chain of command, to shortcut processes they think take too long, to shop around for the decision they want, or to avoid jobs they do not like. This is not what a proactive leader has in mind either. For a proactive leader, the informal approach is simply one more strategy available to him within the formal context.

a proactive leader wants his team to use informal strategies, to talk with each other, to informally innovate when they need to, to avoid being too rigid about the rules when something unusual comes up that does not quite fit into the established procedures. They are responsible people who can and are expected to use their good judgment and common sense. a proactive leader liberally uses informal strategies himself, but you can have too much of a good thing.

Being skilled at using informal strategies includes knowing when to use them and when formal is best. If informal strategies are used too much or inappropriately, things become disorganized, efficiency and quality suffer. If they are used too little, the team becomes rigid and inflexible, creativity and innovation disappear, and the team loses its cutting edge. On a proactive leader's winning team, the real skill in using informal strategies is in finding and maintaining the balance.

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Understand and tap the knowledge, skills, and resources of everyone.

You are not surprised?

That old cat is already out of the bag?

This proactive leader's secret is no secret anymore?

a proactive leader is a sponge who goes around soaking up whatever serves his team's purposes. Everyone's knowledge, skills, and resources fit right in with his absorption strategy.

Here is what you may not know. a proactive leader is also a master at finding the specific know-how, particular skill, or perfect resource for the immediate purpose, whatever the need happens to be. He knows someone who either has or can get exactly what the doctor calls for, so to speak. When the success puzzle requires a new or unusual piece, a proactive leader reaches out, pulls it in, and slips it into place. What's more, it is miraculously an exact fit, not just what the doctor ordered.

Share the loving touch with people who are special to you every chance you get.

Acceptance is the first ingredient in the loving touch. It lets special people know you accept them as is, don't want to change them, don't want them to change. You then blend in affection, knowing too much applies to many things but never to affection sincerely offered.

As you mix the ingredients with love and sincere good will, gentleness is the secret technique the masters have perfected and you refine in ways conveying the uniqueness of your loving touch. It's the perfect complement to being fully involved in the moment, without distraction, without reservation.

You have almost got it just right, are nearing perfection, but it still needs a dash of this and a pinch of that. the special spices bringing out the rich flavor of the loving touch. They are spontaneity and playfulness. Your loving touch is always there, only awaiting a gesture, a feeling, the slightest of signs it's wanted and valued. It sparkles with joy, enthusiasm, and that indescribable but familiar extra in a child's laughter, a lover's smile, in the magical connection when special people share the loving touch.

You likely know Theodore Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” He also said, “The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided, but never hit softly.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson counseled, “There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer,” and Oscar Wilde added, “Moderation is a fatal thing, nothing succeeds like excess.”

“Put a grain of boldness into everything you do.” You will do well to follow this advice from Baltasar Gracian who also said, “He who finds Fortune on his side should go briskly ahead, for she is wont to favor the bold.” …

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There is a Swedish Proverb that advises, “Fear less, hope more, eat less, chew more, whine less, breathe more, talk less, say more, hate less, love more, and all good things are yours.” This is all very good advice, but for today, focus on breathing.

Svatmarama, the yogi, instructed, “When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life. Therefore, one should learn to control the breath.”

 As the famous Anon. pointed out, “A healthy mind has an easy breath.”

If you are doubting, the words of Andrea Boydston tell you all you need to know, “If you woke up breathing, congratulations!{{pause=0.3}}{{pause=0.3}} You have another chance.” Accept the wise counsel of Thich Nhat Hanh, “Smile, breathe and go slowly.” “For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth.” (Sanskrit Proverb)

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Robert Southey said, “It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn,” and Baltasar Gracian said, “Good things, when short, are twice as good.” Shakespeare also touted brevity, “Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.

Even Thomas Jefferson joined the keep it short chorus, “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” No less an authority than William Strunk, Jr. sang along, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

As surprising as it may be, Mozart, himself, warbled along, although he was definitely a dib off key, “My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.”

Chopra, Deepak. The Soul of Leadership: Unlocking Your Potential for Greatness. New York: Harmony Books, 2010.

We all have a still place inside us that is the source of everything that gives our lives meaning. This is the soul, and it is the place great leaders turn to for their inspiration, and for the answers to all their important questions.

Leaders and followers co-create each other. Followers express a need, and the leader supplies a response.

Just as individuals grow from the inside out, so do groups. The group's needs must be met wherever they are. Sometimes a group needs a parent or protector, at other times a motivator, healer, or spiritual guide.

The outcome of any situation is defined in advance by the vision that goes into solving it.

The responses shared by leaders and followers are built into us, guiding us to evolve and progress. The soul is aware of how to unfold our evolution to produce the highest and best outcome in any situation. …

Needs are designed to evolve, and a leader must be aware of this in order to foresee the future of the group and anticipate its needs. In rising order the group's needs are for safety and security, achievement, cooperation, understanding, creativity, moral values, and spiritual fulfillment.

For every need, a leader must play the right role. The need for security calls for a protector; achievement calls for a motivator; cooperation calls for a team builder; understanding calls for a nurturer; creativity calls for an innovator; moral values call for a transformer; spiritual fulfillment calls for a sage, or seer.

Leading from the soul means giving of yourself. It means you supply trust, stability, compassion, and hope. You spend time investing in relationships with those who turn to you for answers.

No matter how complex and confusing a situation looks, leadership is possible when you are comfortable with uncertainty. Once they see the hidden spiritual order that lies beneath what seems to be chaos, inspired leaders thrive on uncertainty.

The title tells the story. Let's spend a few minutes thinking about just why some of us are usually up-tight and feeling frantic while others of us are usually relaxed and feeling good about ourselves and how things are going. There are lots of reasons but a couple of things are pretty common factors. When you have finished listening to the discussion, take a few extra minutes to relax and enjoy the music.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Although Longfellow's pronouncement has superficial plausibility, it's merely an example of polar logic. One pole is what you feel capable of doing and the other is what you have already done. The judgment reduces to can and did. You judge yourself based on can and others judge you based on did, according to Longfellow. The reality is that such judgments rarely reduce to either can or did, for you or for others who judge you.

Look first at can. If this is a judgment you make about yourself, is it reasonable to make it without considering did? Relying exclusively on what you think you can do, without considering what you have done, places no value on prior experience. It also acknowledges an inability to learn. Alternatively, if you consider did to the exclusion of can, your behavior is simply repetitive. and you will need to take Albert Einstein's observation to heart, Insanity. doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Look next at did. If others are expecting change, improvement, innovation, or new approaches and strategies, you aren't the person they need. They can only expect you to do again what you did before. Unless can is considered, nothing new or different ever happens. The conclusion is that can and did aren't separable. They are the head and tail of the coin of progress. …

How then should one approach success? What is the best strategy for blending did and can? Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out, a man can do as he will, but not will as he will. The message is that you can't simply will things to happen. You have a wide range of options for doing but no magical powers. Alexander Graham Bell said, The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion … It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider - and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation - persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree.

The basis for judgment is now clearer. You and those who judge you focus on both did and can. Success is a blending of the two sides of the coin. and if your goal is to get a thumbs-up from you and from others, you need to get high marks on this short quiz. – Good luck!

1. Are you carefully advancing, step by step?

2. Is your mind becoming wider and wider?

3. Are you persevering in what you know to be practical?

4. Are you concentrating on succeeding?

Sure, it's simply a variation on the old story, Nothing succeeds like success.

Charan, Ram, Stephen Drotter, and James L. Noel. The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

There is little acknowledgment that different levels of leadership exist and that people need to make skill and value transitions at each level. Relatively few organizations are thinking about the core competencies and experiences necessary to be successful at each level.

When you define potential as the kind of work someone can do in the future, it becomes easier to see it as a dynamic concept. This future work potential is based on accumulated skills and experience as evidenced by past achievement, ability to learn new skills, and willingness to tackle bigger, more complex or higher-quality assignments. The more people achieve, the more learning takes place; willingness to tackle new challenges increases as current challenges are met.

Cashman, Kevin. Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life. Second Edition. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2008.

The best way to take action for ourselves is through coaching. For self-coaching or coaching others to have a lasting, transformative impact, three interrelated pathways need to merge: Awareness, Commitment, and Practice. If all three are present and operating, breakthroughs will occur and growth will be sustained. If any one of the three is absent, the results will dissipate over time.

He indulged himself in the self-exploration. He listened to the feedback and looked for ways to understand and to apply the information to his career, team, and life. He explored deeply his core meaning and purpose. He projected a new vision for a more authentic life and for more authentic leadership, one that was congruent with his real values. He began to read and reflect more. He shared his insights with others. He began to open up with people at work. He began to admit his strengths and weaknesses to others. He began to ask for their help and to value their contributions. He stayed the course. …

It [awareness] may include keeping our attention on a newly clarified talent we have brought into focus. Or it may involve the more painful process of acknowledging that a behavior is unintentionally self-defeating or affecting others in a life-damaging way. Awareness encompasses the inner discipline of looking within ourselves to shed light on our strengths and our growth challenges, and the outer discipline of observing ourselves through our own eyes and the eyes of others, as we engage in making an important behavioral shift.

Building Commitment begins with comprehending the consequences of our actions. However, it is not enough only to understand intellectually that if we continue on the same course, we're going to fall short of our goals, hurt ourselves or others. We have to feel it. When we have a deep emotional connection to the impact of a behavior, our life can change permanently.

Building Practice entails devising new, disciplined ways of behaving to enrich our life and the lives of others.

Delegation is, for a proactive leader, a critical key to his success. He knows leadership superstars have elevated effective delegation to an art form. In fact, success with delegation is the single most important factor separating leaders who achieve their mission-specific goals from those who do not.

Try this. Design a one legged stool. One end of the leg must be attached to the stool and the other end can touch the ground at one single point but cannot be in the ground or supported by anything else. The stool must be functional, serving the usual purpose of being a place for a person to rest those weary bones.

It is actually fairly easy. Get a board and attach the leg to it. Set the stool up and sit on it. So long as you are sitting on it, your stool works fine. The problem is that if you get up, your stool falls over. You have to do the work of the missing legs yourself, which works fine if you have nothing else to do and are willing to sit on the stool forever.

Now if you are not quite up to eternity on the stool, you will need to make other arrangements, you have to delegate. …

Since a proactive leader is not about to spend his life sitting on the stool, he has three rules for getting others on the team to pitch in.

First, he appropriately delegates tasks and duties. You see he does not pass on his responsibilities. He is still responsible for the team's success, but others on the team can and should help carry the load. This cannot be a whomever happens to be around process. a proactive leader is careful to only delegate to people who have the skills and know-how to get the job done, they have to be up to it.

Second, a proactive leader does not delegate a job to someone and then try to manage it himself or second-guess the person who was assigned the job. His reasons here are important.

a proactive leader is not going to sit on the stool and is not about to hover around just to be sure the job gets done or it is not screwed up. If he needs to do that, he might as well sit on the stool himself. More importantly, second guessing and a hands-on approach with delegated tasks would mean he did not have much confidence in the person given the assignment. If that is where it is, a proactive leader screwed up. He delegated inappropriately, he picked the wrong person to hold up the stool.

Third, a proactive leader always delegates enough authority so the person can get the job done. This does not mean he gives anyone an unlimited, free reign. What each person does must fit with everyone else's activities. The team needs to work together as a team. At the same time, each team member needs the freedom and authority to do what needs done.

a proactive leader does not get into Mother, may I. It certainly is not a Check with me at every step along the way for authorization, approach for a proactive leader's team. Those on the team are competent, make good choices and decisions, and can be trusted to do the right things right. If this is not true, a proactive leader needs to reexamine who is on his team and think about who may need to be replaced. Nonetheless, not to give people the authority they need to get the job done would mean that he does not quite trust, does not really believe. It would also mean he is still holding up the stool instead of getting on with getting on down the road.

Start your journey with E. E. Cummings who said, “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” Then invite Samuel Johnson to join your trek. He is the one who said, “There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.” You should let Friedrich Nietzsche come along too, for he said, “At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth, and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”

Julius Charles Hare also has some advice qualifying him to serve as your traveling companion, “Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.” It was your fellow traveler, Samuel Johnson, who said, “Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.”

With that in mind, find room in your party for John Mason. You need his wisdom, “You were born an original. Don't die a copy.” “Rabbi Zusya said on the Day of Judgment that, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.” (Walter Kaufmann) Just be sure you are not asked why you hadn’t been you. …

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According to Orson Scott Card, “This is how humans are. we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.” Wonder if this is true

If so, there are things you believe just because you believe it and others that you believe simply because you’ve never given any thought to not believing.

Add this to Felix Cohen’s observation, “Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories,” and you are left with a discouraging conclusion. Most of what you think is true and factual, most of what you really believe, is little more than one more theory, just another personal opinion.

There is an important glitch here. Most everyone else also chooses belief over non-belief, subscribes to one more theory, another personal opinion. That then becomes their belief, the principle according to which they live. Of course, since you really believe, you are right and they are wrong. The way you choose to live is good and right, and the way they choose to live is wrong and unjust.

Here is a suggestion that might lessen the tendency to discount everyone else’s perspective. Pick one principle you use to govern your life. Assume you are wrong, that this cherished principle is invalid. How would that change your world, your perception of you and your actions?

While you are contemplating this alternative reality, keep in mind most of the people in the world are certain that your valued principle, your most cherished belief is wrong.

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“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.” Christopher Morley’s point is certainly worth pondering, for as the famous Anon. observed, “It would not be at all strange if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident of the nineteenth century. It is as Iris Murdoch argued, “The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”

“When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it,