Your core values influence how you view the world and how you interact with others. It’s key that we understand our own core values as part of our series on personal leadership.

I read a quote on page 46 of The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner

Here are the values that I spoke about:

Some questions for you to consider as you determine your core values:

I mentioned this document that contains a list of values and may be helpful in determining your core values.

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It’s the new year and an important time to consider ourselves first, so that we can better lead others. This week, I begin a series on personal leadership that will take us through the month of January.

Here are a few resources that I mentioned in this episode:

Leadership from the Inside Out by Kevin Cashman

Story of Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

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As leaders, we need to support learning right after it happens. In this episode, I’ll review fives ways you can do this as a leader.

1) Provide opportunities

2) Review the actions taken

3) Inquire about what they are thinking, feeling, or noticing

4) Correct the flight plan

5) Use encouragement

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Helping people utilize new skills they are learning is an essential skill for all leaders. In this episode, I’ll examine four ways you can do this as a leader.

REFRAME

RECONNECT

RENEW

RETURN

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Frances, one of our listeners, contacted me this week to say that she has $700 in a “use it or lose it” budget within the next week and wanted some advice on what to do. Since many of these resources would be helpful to all of us, it’s the topic for this week’s show.

Two overarching rules to keep in mind before you do anything:

Books

Publications

Professional Associations

Professional Journals

Extended Education programs at local universities

Software education

Massive Open Online Courses

The Great Courses is great for lectures and classes from top professors as well, as long as you’re OK getting lots of catalogs from them

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This week I was listening to the HBR IdeaCast and a recent interview with Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson about her book: 9 Things Successful People Do Differently*.

I’ve also been reading Get Rid of the Performance Review! by Samuel Colbert

Examples of actual ineffective goals:

SMART Framework

Examples of more effective goals, utilizing the SMART framework:

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“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 2

Four stories from my career of leadership lessons I’ve valued:

McDonald’s and the value of humility

Orientation and the value of excellence

My first job and the value of consequences

My friend and colleague and the value of love

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Bonni is the host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Dean of Teaching and Learning and Professor of Business and Management at Vanguard University, and my life partner. Prior to her academic career, she was a human resources consultant and executive officer for a publicly traded company. Bonni is the author of The Productive Online and Offline Professor: A Practical Guide*.

What do we mean by a strong culture?

In Organizational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein (2004) defines culture as, “…a pattern of SHARED BASIC ASSUMPTIONS that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to PERCEIVE, THINK, and FEEL in relation to those problems” (p. 17).

We accidentally referred to Schein’s book in the episode as “Making Sense of the Organization” which is actually a book by Karl Weick and also an excellent read on organizational culture, though the Schein book is an easier read, so we recommend that first.

We discuss Schein’s three indicators of culture:

We also referenced the model below from The Character of a Corporation by Goffee and Jones:

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Courage (n) as defined by Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary: Mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty

Eleanor Roosevelt is famously attributed to having said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.”

“If you’re the king of your world, you’re playing in the wrong world.” -Unknown

5 Pieces of Advice:

1) Have a mentor – for me, it’s been my wife (and past managers)

2) Educate yourself on the issues – for me, it’s reading and RSS feeds

3) Surround yourself with people who will empower you.

4) Have direction – a personal vision

5) Lean into discomfort

Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

Bonni is the host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Dean of Teaching and Learning and Professor of Business and Management at Vanguard University, and my life partner. Prior to her academic career, she was a human resources consultant and executive officer for a publicly traded company. Bonni is the author of The Productive Online and Offline Professor: A Practical Guide*.

You can’t create a shared vision without having your own vision first. It’s inappropriate for us to be dependent on others or independent from them. Rather, we need to have relationships of interdependence. Bonni mentioned a clip from the movie Spartacus which captures the power of interdependence:

Two key elements of a shared vision:

We discussed four steps for leaders to take when creating a shared vision:

A few books that we mentioned on this episode:

We also mentioned Linda Krall, our favorite strategic illustrator

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