Leading in Tough Times Continued - OutofThisWorldLeadership.com

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The Advantages of Adversity

Good leaders understand that adversity and challenges are actually opportunities to rise up in leadership.

Adversity Introduces Us to Ourselves

Adversity creates an opportunity for self-discovery.

As the great Egyptian leader Anwar el-Sadat said, “Great suffering builds up a human being and puts him within the reach of self-knowledge.”

Adversity Is a Better Teacher Than Success

Oprah Winfrey advises, “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” Leaders can do that only when they have the right mind-set.

Adversity Opens Doors for New Opportunities

A mistake simply shows you something you didn’t know. Once you make the mistake, then you know it. As you face tough times, are you seeing the opportunities? Are you looking for ways to take advantage of them?

Adversity Writes Our Story If Our Response Is Right

Some leaders treat adversity as a stepping-stone, others as a tombstone.

Performance psychologist Jim Loehr says, “Champions have taught us how to take an experience and essentially write the story of its effect. If you see a failure as an opportunity to learn and get better, it will be. If you perceive it as a mortal blow, it will be. In that way, the power of the story is more important than the experience itself.”

Leaders, by definition, are out front. They take new territory and others follow them. Great leaders don’t merely send others out in times of trouble. They lead the charge. They’re more like tour guides than travel agents. They see opportunities, prepare to move forward, and then say, “Follow me.”

Lead People Through Sustained Difficult Times

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith asserted, “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time.” When a human being gets squeezed—you get what is inside—positive or negative.

To lead and serve people during difficult times:

Define reality. Management expert Peter Drucker said, “A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.” As Roots author Alex Haley observed, “Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”
Remind them of the big picture. Leaders are keepers and communicators of the vision. They bear the responsibility for always seeing the big picture and helping their people to see it.
Help them develop a plan.
Help them make good choices.
Value and promote teamwork. The Law of Mount Everest in The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork states, “As the challenge escalates, the need for teamwork elevates.” No team can win and keep winning unless everyone works together.
Give them hope. John W. Gardner, former secretary of health, education, and welfare, said, “The first and last task of a leader is to keep hope alive—the hope that we can finally find our way through to a better world—despite the day’s action, despite our own inertness and shallowness and wavering resolve.”

Truth is, leaders cannot delegate the solving of problems to someone else. They have to be active in facing challenges, breaking through obstacles, putting out fires, correcting mistakes, and directing people.

The Self-Leadership Challenge

Preparing Yourself for the Journey

You should also think about what kind of leader you want to be as you lead your team forward.

Faced with tough times, leaders instinctively start searching for a way forward. But they don’t always pay enough attention to their starting point.

We all must decide what values we will embrace—i.e., what we will live for, what we would die for. And if you’re a leader, those values that you embrace—and model—will also determine who follows you and why.

Servanthood: Leading Well Means Serving Others

The only worthy motivation for leadership is a desire to serve. Leaders who do not put people first will ultimately disqualify themselves as leaders, because their people will lose trust in them.

Purpose: Let Your Why Direct Your What

Once you understand your purpose, you need to prioritize your life according to that purpose.

Integrity: Live the Life Before You Lead Others

Relationships: Walk Slowly Through the Crowd

Effective leaders initiate. They communicate vision. They seek out opportunities.

Consistently Live Out Your Values

1. Embrace your values daily.

2. Compare your values to your actions constantly.

3. Live out your values regardless of your feelings.

4. Evaluate each day in light of your values.

Leaders who are honest with themselves know that they don’t have all the answers.

Positive working environments led by secure leaders allow team members to get the credit. Confident leaders experience genuine joy in the success of others. When others shine, so do they.

As Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric and author of Winning (see my summary here), said, “A leader’s role is not to control people or stay on top of things, but rather to guide, energize, and excite.” That’s what confident leaders do.

Wise mentors and wins can affirm your decisions and increase your courage:

Spend time with people who increase your courage
Find ways to get a few wins under your belt. Making a list of past victories can help you develop (or regain) confidence.
Quit comparing yourself to others. Comparison weakens courage rather than strengthening it.
Specialize until you’re special. People want to follow others who know where they’re going. A leader’s courage is contagious for followers. Together they are more likely to overcome adversity.

Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, asserted, “I’ve never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline.”

The Change Challenge

Becoming an Effective Change Agent

How do people overcome problems, challenges, and difficulties? They make changes. Improvement requires change. However, at the same time, most human beings resist change. That’s why teams need good leaders—especially in tough times.

The process of leading change requires the change agent to…find common ground. Look for common ground in the following areas:

Vision
Values: It’s difficult to travel with others very long if your values don’t align.
Relationships: Great teams have people who are as committed to one another as they are to the vision.
Attitude: If you are going to get people to work together for positive change, their attitudes need to be positive and tenacious.
Communication: For change to occur, communication must be open, honest, and ongoing.

Let Go of Yesterday So You Can Move Toward Tomorrow

Bill Gates, cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft, once said, “In three years every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make it obsolete or someone else will.”

Lead with Speed

Never underestimate the significance of early victories for giving people confidence to keep moving forward. Success nourishes faith in the change effort.

Without momentum, everything is harder to do than it should be. With it, everything is easier.

Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton says, “Achieving that goal is a good feeling, but to get there you have to also get through the failures. You’ve got to be able to pick yourself up and continue.”

Here are some tips for maximizing your ability to keep your commitment and clear a path forward:

Focus on choices, not conditions.
Be single-minded. Nothing stokes commitment like single-minded effort that results in achievement. English minister William Carey only completed an elementary education, but he learned to read the Bible in six languages, became professor of Oriental languages at Fort William College in Calcutta, and became a publisher of Bibles in forty languages and dialects for more than three hundred million people. Carey attributed his success to being a “plodder.” Describing himself, Carey said, “I can plod. That is my only genius. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.”
Do what’s right even when you don’t feel like it. Ken Blanchard says, “When you’re interested in something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”
Always strive for excellence. Long-term thinking says it’s better to take the time to equip people on the front end, because the return is great on the back end.

Helping others grow and develop brings joy, satisfaction, and energy to a leader, and it brings success to the team.

The Teamwork Challenge

Building and Improving Your Team

Here are some ways you can develop stronger relationships with each member of your team:

Place a high value on team members. What onetime national salesman of the year Les Giblin said is true: “You can’t make the other fellow feel important in your presence if you secretly feel that he is a nobody.” The solution is to place a high value on people. Expect the best from everyone.
Understand each person.
Give respect freely but expect to earn it from others. Giving people respect first is one of the most effective ways of interacting with others.
Make other people’s agendas your priority. Good leaders focus on the needs and wants of their people, and as far as it is within their power, they make their people’s hopes and dreams a priority.
Commit yourself to their growth.

The best way to add value to others is to…

Look for ability in others.
Help others discover their ability.
Help others develop their ability.

Author Stephen R. Covey asserted, “The basic role of the leader is to foster mutual respect and build a complementary team where each strength is made productive and each weakness made irrelevant.”

If you lead people who are falling short of their potential, you need to start asking why. Have you put them in their strength zones? Are you providing the training and resources they need to be successful? Is there something they need that you’re not giving?

You can model growth, encourage them, and try to be a catalyst for positive change. Here’s how:

Show them a vision for their better future.
Treat them not as they are, but as they could be.
Set them up for a win.
Create a culture of unity.
Promote full commitment.
Create an environment of encouragement and support.

One of the nicest things about teamwork is that you always have others on your side. It’s pulling together, not pulling apart. It’s many voices, one heart.

When people believe in themselves, they perform better. In general, people rise to the level of expectations.

Reframe Adversity and Failure as Opportunities to Develop Character

Author and apologist C. S. Lewis took that thought one step further. He wrote, “God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way.”

Remind Them to Stay Focused on the Team

Teamwork demands that we focus a little less on ourselves and a little more on how the team looks. You can do that by asking, “What’s best for the rest?” Help each other until the vision is accomplished.

Hold Team Members Accountable

Never go into one of these meetings angry. If you do, you greatly reduce your chances of success. Sit down and very clearly lay out what the issue is, giving specific, tangible examples of the undesirable actions or behaviors. Don’t be vague. Don’t use secondhand reports. And be sure to explain how their actions are negatively affecting the organization, the team, or you.

To bring accountability:

Meet privately ASAP to discuss their behavior.
Ask for their side of the story.
Try to come to a place of agreement.
Set out a future course of action with a deadline,
Validate the value of the person and express your commitment to help.

Sometimes the greatest value a leader can add to other people comes through telling them the truth, showing them where they can grow, and then helping them change.

There’s a chance that you will have to let them go. If you are having a hard time making that decision, ask yourself this question: “If I needed to hire new people, knowing what I know now, would I hire these individuals?” If the answer is yes—keep them. If the answer is no—let them go. If the answer is maybe—reevaluate in three months. If after three months you still don’t know if it’s yes or no, the answer is really no. Your emotions are making it difficult for you to accept a hard decision. Ultimately, as a leader, you owe it to the rest of the team to make these tough choices. That’s what you get paid for.

Good leadership is about leading with others, not just leading others. It requires collaboration. It requires inclusion.

The Motivation Challenge

Inspiring Your Team to Excellence

Check Your Motives

People have two reasons for doing anything—a good reason and the real reason. People do what people see. If you want dedicated, motivated, productive people on your team, you must model those characteristics. You can stay energized and on course by tapping into three areas:

Passion: Passion gives you two vital leadership characteristics: energy and credibility. When you love what you do and do what you love, others find it inspiring.
Principles: Successful leaders stay true to their principles—to their beliefs, gifts, and personality.
Practices: Successful leaders do daily what unsuccessful people do occasionally. They practice daily disciplines. They implement systems for their personal growth. They make it a habit to maintain a positive attitude.

Build and Maintain Trust

Author and pastor Rick Warren observed, “You can impress people from a distance, but you must get close to influence them.” When you do that, they can see your flaws. However, Warren notes, “The most essential quality for leadership is not perfection but credibility. People must be able to trust you.”

To gain the trust of their people, leaders need to be authentic. They must admit their mistakes. They must own up to their faults. They must recognize their shortcomings. In other words, they must be the real deal. That is a vulnerable place to be for a leader.

Retired admiral James Stockdale said, “When the crunch comes, people cling to those they know they can trust—those who are not detached, but involved.”

Here are three ways you can develop trust between you and your team:

Practice the Golden Rule (“Treat other people the way you want to be treated”).
Place high value on people. In Winning Management: 6 Fail-Safe Strategies for Building High-Performance Organizations, Wolf J. Rinke writes, “If you mistrust your employees, you’ll be right 3 percent of the time. If you trust people until they give you a reason not to, you’ll be right 97 percent of the time.”
Take responsibility for your actions. Winston Churchill was right when he called responsibility “the price of greatness.” It’s also the groundwork for opportunity.

You should hire motivated people. How can you identify motivated people? They usually have several of the following traits:

They exhibit a positive attitude.
They can articulate specific goals for their life.
They are initiators.
They have a proven track record of success. Look for these traits when looking for new team members.

That’s why we need to help people see the value of growing.

As a leader, you have great power to lift people up. Mother Teresa said, “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are endless.”

The words “I’m glad you work with me; you add incredible value to the team” mean a lot coming from someone who has the best interest of the team, department, or organization at heart.

If you become the chief encourager of the people on your team, they will work hard and strive to meet your positive expectations.

What he’s describing is empowerment. That’s helping people to see what they can do without your help and releasing them to do it.

The Strategy Challenge

Discovering New Ways to Win

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck said, “Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?”

Facing Tough Challenges

First, here are the don’ts:

Don’t underestimate the challenge. Robert H. Schuller authored Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do! As he put it, never underestimate a problem or your power to cope with it. Many people have faced the most catastrophic problems with a positive mental attitude, turning their problems into creative experiences. They turned their scars into stars.
Don’t overestimate the challenge. Cy Young was one of the greatest pitchers in Major League Baseball. After his career was over, he commented on the tendencies of managers to take their starters out of the game at the slightest hint of trouble. He observed, “In our day, when a pitcher got into trouble in a game, instead of taking him out, our manager would leave him in and tell him to pitch his way out of trouble.”
Don’t wait for the challenge to solve itself. Patience is a virtue in problem solving if you are at the same time doing all that you can to fix the situation. It is not a virtue if you are simply waiting, hoping that the problem will solve itself or just go away.

Nina DiSesa, who led the ad agency McCann Erickson in the late 1990s, observed, “When you step into a turnaround situation, you can safely assume four things: Morale is low, fear is high, the good people are halfway out the door, and the slackers are hiding.” Those things won’t improve on their own. They require intentional problem solving and active leadership.

Face the challenge. Understand the challenge. Evaluate the challenge. And appreciate the challenge.

As you evaluate challenges, try to maintain perspective, and always keep the end in mind. Maxwell recalled a sign on a farm fence in southern Indiana that captures this idea concisely. It read, “If you cross this field, you had better do it in 9.8 seconds. The bull can do it in 10 seconds.”

Be Willing to Take Risks

As Nobel Prize–winning writer William Faulkner said, “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”

Reality is your friend during high-risk times. Businessman and author (his book Leadership Jazz is summarized here) Max De Pree said that the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.
Good leaders learn to be comfortable outside of their comfort zone. Author and writing guru Steven Pressfield says this: “The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.”
Good leadership gives you a greater chance for success. The statement Maxwell is known for more than any other is this: Everything rises and falls on leadership. That is never truer than during times of risk. The size of the leadership must be equal to the size of the risk.
The bigger the risk, the more help you’ll need from others. To be successful, you don’t just need help; you need the right kind of help. What are the characteristics of the right people?
They like a challenge.
They are honest with themselves.
They play big. Nelson Mandela said, “There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that’s less than the one you are capable of living.”

Taking risks always requires personal courage. Writer Anaïs Nin said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” It’s been said that if you’re not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room. Risk is an important part of the strategy challenge for a leader.

Pursue a Winning Strategy

If you want to increase your chances for winning, take these ideas to heart:

Visualize the perfect outcome. Stephen R. Covey advised in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that we should always begin with the end in mind. Do you have a vision for what you want to accomplish? Have you created a mental model of perfection for what you desire to achieve?
Start working before you know how to achieve the vision. Most people want to start with one bold, certain leap. They want a big head start, a quantum leap. But quantum leaps are rare. If we’re willing to take one small step, ten small steps, one hundred small steps, then we may have a chance to make a leap later.
Fail fast, fail first, and fail often.
Stop doing what you’re not great at doing.
Tune in to your team every day.
Make decisions every day to move yourself and the team forward. Either something works or it doesn’t. Either it takes you forward, or it doesn’t. If you develop the habit of making quick decisions and trying new things, then evaluating whether or not they took you forward and adjusting as needed, you will make progress during tough times.
Continually reevaluate what could work better. Paul Martinelli says, “We have three options in life. We can be historians, reporters, or futurists. The historian wants to remind us of everything in the past and wants to filter everything in the future through that. The reporter is really attached to conditions and circumstances today, and that’s just the way it is. The futurist focuses on what hasn’t yet been done. He says, ‘There is more for us to do. We can do more. We can broaden our capacity. There is more of our potential we can take advantage of.’”

Professor Edward Banfield of Harvard University confirmed the importance of a future focus in his book The Unheavenly City. He called it a “long-term perspective,” and said that according to studies, it is the most accurate single predictor of upward social and economic mobility in America, more important than family background, education, race, intelligence, connections, or virtually any other single factor. To keep moving forward, think of the future, but act today.

The Communication Challenge

Getting Everyone on the Same Page

When most leaders think about communication, they focus on vision casting and giving direction. But communication is so much more than that—especially during tough times.

Make communication a conversation, not a monologue. Not only will you lift the morale of your team, you will get the best from them, and you will enjoy working together to find success.

Listening to Understand Demonstrates That You Value People

Author and professor David W. Augsburger says, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.”

Here is a list of questions that Maxwell developed to help him keep listening:

Do I have an open-ear policy? High Point University president Nido Qubein believes “most of us tend to suffer from ‘agenda anxiety,’ the feeling that what we want to say to others is more important than what we think they might want to say to us.”
Do I interrupt?
Do I want to hear what I need to hear?

Create an Environment Where Questions Are Welcome

A wise leader once told Maxwell, “Before you attempt to set things right, make sure you see things right.”

Creating an environment where people are willing to ask and answer questions leads to high morale and positive results. Here’s how you can do that:

Value each team member: Sam Walton said, “Asking and hearing people’s opinions has a greater effect on them than telling them, ‘Good job.’”
Value questions more than answers: Questions lead to thinking and discussion.
Value the potential of your team.
Value the improvement of a good idea: Author C. S. Lewis said, “The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.”

Ask the right questions like “What do you think?” to gather information, confirm your intuition, and assess someone’s judgment or leadership.

When You Speak, Be Honest and Helpful

If you care about people, treat them with respect, and build positive relationships with them, you actually have increased opportunities to have hard conversations with them that will help them to grow and perform better. Every person has problems and makes mistakes in the workplace. This can be particularly true when you’re working in tough times. As a leader, you have the responsibility and the privilege to be the person who helps them get through and get better.

Balance care with candor. Caring values the person while candor values the person’s potential. One of the secrets of being candid is to think, speak, and act in terms of who the person has the potential to become and to think about how you can help them to reach it.

Caring establishes the relationship while candor expands the relationship. Caring defines the relationship while candor directs the relationship. Retired army general and former secretary of state Colin Powell (and author of It Worked for Me in Life & Leadership summarized here) noted, “Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It’s inevitable—if you’re honorable.” If you want to lead people well, you need to be willing to direct them candidly.

The next time you find yourself in a place where you need to have a candid conversation, just remember this:

Do it quickly—shovel the pile while it’s small.
Do it calmly, never in anger—use the caring candor checklist.
Do it privately—you want to help the person, not embarrass him or her.
Do it thoughtfully, in a way that minimizes embarrassment or intimidation.

Do Whatever It Takes to Make the Complex Clear

Start with a clear and compelling vision. Define success. Describe each person’s part in achieving success, and share how success will be measured and celebrated.

The Decision-Making Challenge

Keeping Everyone on the New Course

Some leaders would rather act like the French revolutionary who said, “There go my people. I must find out where they’re going, so I can lead them.”

The Kinds of Decisions You Will Face

Courageous Decisions: What Must Be Done
Priority Decisions: What Must Be Done First
Change Decisions: What Must Be Done Differently
Creative Decisions: What Might Be Possible
People Decisions: Who Should—and Should Not—Be Involved

H. W. Andrews asserted, “Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man as unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right.” And as a result, you will become a better leader.

It would be wise to know and prepare for the following inevitable leadership pressures:

The pressure to make rash emotional decisions. Pressure ratchets up emotion, and strong emotions can make thinking foggy. But good thinking is what’s needed before any decision.
The pressure to deny the truth.
The pressure to take shortcuts. Someone once said that the longest distance between two points is a shortcut.
The pressure to abandon commitments. Molière said, “Men are alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they differ.” Pressure can make following through on commitments look impossible.
The pressure to bow to others’ opinions.
The pressure to make promises you can’t or don’t intend to keep.

Your Integrity: It Rises and Falls Based on the Code You Live By

There’s no such thing as business ethics or leadership ethics or the ethics that apply during tough times—there’s only ethics. Think about it. When people compartmentalize, using one set of ethics for their professional life, another for their spiritual life, and still another at home with their family, they build a house of cards. And it will eventually come crashing down. Ethics is ethics.

Every culture still seems to agree on one standard: the Golden Rule. A golden rule exists in just about every culture and belief system. Here are some of the variations:

Christianity: “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you.”
Islam: “None of you has faith until he loves for his brother or his neighbor what he loves for himself.”
Judaism: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.”
Buddhism: “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”
Hinduism: “This is the sum of duty; do naught unto others what you would not have them do unto you.”
Zoroastrianism: “Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others.”
Confucianism: “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you.”
Bahai: “And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbour that which thou choosest for thyself.”
Jainism: “A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated.”
Yoruba Proverb (Nigeria): “One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.”

This concept of treating people the way you would want to be treated is embraced by people from nearly every part of the world.

It’s easy to discuss ethics and even easier to be disgusted with people who fail the ethics test—especially when we have been violated by the wrongdoing of others. It’s harder to make ethical choices in our own lives. In the 1980s, former president Ronald Reagan quipped that when it comes to the economy, it’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job, but it’s a depression when you lose yours! Ethics is similar.

As you apply the Golden Rule to your life and make decisions according to it, remember this:

Decisions, not conditions, determine your ethics.
Wrong decisions leave scars.
The more people involved, the greater the pressure for conformity.
Inaction is also a decision.

To live an ethical life, you must hold to your principles as you make tough decisions. Edward R. Lyman stated, “Principle—particularly moral principle—can never be a weather vane, spinning around this way and that with the shifting winds of expediency. Moral principle is a compass forever fixed and forever true—and that is as important in business as it is in the classroom.”

Why Leaders Crack Under Pressure

They do what’s most convenient.
They do what they must to win. Harvard history professor Henry Adams stated, “Morality is a private and costly luxury.” If you believe you have only two choices—(1) to win by doing whatever it takes, even if it’s unethical; or (2) to have ethics and lose—you’re faced with a real moral dilemma. Few people set out with the desire to be dishonest, but nobody wants to lose.
They rationalize their choices with relativism. Many people choose to deal with no-win situations by deciding what’s right in the moment, according to their circumstances. The result is ethical chaos. Everyone has his own standards, which change from situation to situation. We often judge ourselves according to our good intentions—while holding others to a higher standard and judging them by their worst actions.

Ethics + Competence is a winning equation.

Remember Whom to Include

A leader’s job is not to know everything but to attract people who know things that he or she does not. One of us is not as smart as all of us.

Good leaders never take people out of the equation in anything they do. They always take people into account—where they are, what they believe, what they’re feeling. Every question they ask is expressed in the context of people.

If you want to be successful as a leader, you must think less in terms of systems and more in terms of people’s emotions. You must think more in terms of human capacity and less in terms of regulations. You must think more in terms of buy-in and less in terms of procedures. In other words, you must think of people before you try to achieve progress.

Build a Strong Decision-Making Foundation

Do your homework. Define the issue. Put it in writing if needed.
List your options and where they could lead. This will help you root out ideas that feel good emotionally but aren’t strong rationally.
Seek advice from the right people. Talk to the people necessary to make a decision happen, people with success in the area of consideration who have your interests at heart.

Listen to your instincts. Psychologist Joyce Brothers advised, “Trust your hunches… Hunches are usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.”

Abraham Lincoln said, “I desire to so conduct the affairs of this Administration that if, at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.”

Success is an uphill journey. People don’t coast their way to effective leadership. As billionaire oilman and environmental advocate T. Boone Pickens says, “Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader.”

Conclusion

Remember that John W. Gardner, former secretary of health, education, and welfare, said, “The first and last task of a leader is to keep hope alive—the hope that we can finally find our way through to a better world—despite the day’s action, despite our own inertness and shallowness and wavering resolve.” Hope is the foundation of change.

Crisis offers the opportunity to be reborn. Difficult times can discipline us to become stronger. Conflict can actually renew our chances of building better relationships. It’s not always easy to remember these things. But as leaders, we must remind people of the possibilities and to help them succeed.

Maxwell concludes, “As I’ve often said, everything rises and falls on leadership. If you have been trusted to lead, you have an opportunity to raise people up through tough times. I hope you will embrace that challenge.”

May you demonstrate good leadership in tough times, as you shoot for the stars!