According to Ira Chalef, courage is the ability to step forward through fear. One of the manifestations of courage is pushing beyond your comfort zone.

I require every student in my social business and personal branding courses at The University of Nevada to make a brief “about me” video to post on their blog at the end of the semester. Considering how little guidance I give them, some of my students have produced impressive videos. Kendra Wilson’s video busting the myths about snowskating is the best one I’ve seen so far.

But my favorite video was made by Caitlin Durkin. Before I even hit the “play” button, I knew it must have taken tremendous courage for Caitlin to make this video. She pushed WAY outside of her comfort zone to do this, and I admire and respect that kind of courage.

Sure, it’s just a video, and not a perfect one at that. But I think it demonstrates that Caitlin understands that if she wants to have courage in the “big” things in her life and career, she has to find courage in the small, seemingly insignificant details of routine assignments. Caitlin could have sat at her kitchen table in front of a laptop and recorded a video that was “good enough.” Instead, she took a one hour drive to the shores of Lake Tahoe and spent considerable time recording this video while strangers wandered by and stopped to watch what she was doing.

Caitlin flexed her courage muscle and gave herself permission to shoot for excellence. I am very, very proud of her. As you watch the video, please feel free to shout out loud “hell yes!”

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I’m off to day two of the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit that I am attending via satellite broadcast at Grace Church in Reno. Day one set a high bar, with speakers like Seth Godin, Len Schlesinger, Brenda Salter McNeil, Steven Furtick, Bill Hybels and the amazing Cory Booker. I can honestly say its one of the best events I’ve ever attended and has far exceeded my expectations.

On my way in, I’m going to stop and buy a cup of Starbuck’s coffee because Bill Hybels asked everyone attending the conference to do so.  Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, was scheduled to speak at the conference today, but he canceled because of a petition signed by about 700 people protesting his decision to speak at this Christian church.  In his extremely gracious response, Bill Hybels said he was going to try to meet with the group protesting Schultz’s appearance so he could better understand their grievance, and he asked us all to buy a cup of Starbuck’s coffee and send Howard Schultz a note of encouragement.

Folks, that’s gracious leadership.

No one could ever accuse Howard Schultz of being a coward. His record speaks for itself; however, I do think he made the wrong decision in this case, one that reflects a lack of integrity, courage and foresight. But you know what, we all make decisions that others disagree with. When you are the CEO of a global company, it just comes with the turf. Good people sometimes make bad decisions.

I will keep drinking Starbuck’s coffee because I like it, I think they treat their people well, and their people usually treat me well when I visit. But I will think of both Bill Hybels and Howard Schultz differently from now on.

I’m also going to go buy one of Patrick Lencioni’s books this weekend, because he is stepping in at the last minute to replace Howard Schultz on the schedule today.

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The topic of tonight’s #leadfromwithin chat on Twitter was foresight. The hour long discussion was led by Lolly Daskal and Greg Waddell, and hundreds participated.

I talk about foresight in my MBA classes on Organizational Behavior as part of our class discussion of leadership. I share with my students this quote about foresight from Robert K. Greenleaf’s 1977 book:

This is the central ethic of leadership.  The failure (or refusal) to foresee may be viewed as an ethical failure, because a serious ethical compromise today (when the usual judgment on ethical inadequacy is made) is sometimes the result of a failure to make the effort at an earlier date to foresee today’s events and take the right actions when there was freedom for initiative to act. The action we label unacceptable in the present moment is often really one of no choice. (Greenleaf, 1977, emphasis added)

Foresight is a learned habit, not a mystical gift that only a few oracles possess. Foresight is the discipline of systematically thinking through the unintended consequences of every decision you make. It requires the wisdom to purposefully surround yourself with people that you know won’t always see things the way you do and will have the courage to challenge you when they disagree. It requires the humility to admit publicly when you failed to foresee an unintended consequence of a decision and the grit to continually learn from your mistakes. Foresight demands real accountability and integrity.

Leaders that are more intent on telling than on listening care about themselves more than they care about you. I’ve learned from experience that foresight is not a high priority for leaders lost in the fog of their own hubris.

As the central ethic of leadership, leaders covet the development of foresight for the benefit of those they’ve been given the privilege to lead.  Leaders that fail to assume responsibility for developing the discipline of foresight will eventually forfeit the moral authority to lead.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Much has been said about how important relationships are for effective leadership. It’s true that leadership requires influential relationships with others to get things done. Yet it’s also true, and maybe even more significant, that it’s only through right relationships with others that we are even able to fully see what really needs to be done. Right relationships are interdependent, covenantal partnerships, not dependent contracts.

Interdependent relationships with courageous others help us better see things for what they really are, rather than we want them to be. Right relationships help leaders discover innovative opportunities, avoid strategic myopia, and select purposeful courses of action that others can support with enthusiasm and authenticity.

Can you see right relationship? Interdependent relationships should be REAL – characterized by responsibility, expectations, accountability, and learning:

• Responsibility: unless and until you assume full responsibility for your own behavior and results, you force others to assume responsibility for you. It is your responsibility to perform your job with ethical distinction and to care about what you do, who you do it with, and who you do it for. Personal responsibility is the foundation of interdependence.
• Expectations: healthy, interdependent relationships are characterized by mutual expectations that every party in the relationship recognizes as legitimate. To be a partner, you must care about the expectations others have of you, and you must have the courage to share with others the expectations you have of them. Expectations provide the framework for interdependence.
• Accountability:  interdependent partners first hold themselves accountable for personal responsibility and reciprocal expectations. They then hold themselves accountable for enabling others to assume responsibility and exceed expectations. Finally, they hold others accountable for performing as promised and for caring about their work. Accountability is the glue that secures interdependence.
• Learning: interdependent relationships change and continuously improve over time as partners learn how they can assume more responsibility for themselves and how they can better enable others to assume the fullness of their roles. Learning and growth are the fulfillment of interdependence.

Can you see yourself in REAL relationships? Being REAL in our relationships with others is a skill we have to develop even if others never invite us to be REAL or treat us the same way. We are responsible for our behavior, not how others respond to our behavior. How well are you doing establishing REAL relationships with others at work?

Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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In 1994, I was a Staff Sergeant in the United States Air Force stationed at Fairchild AFB, just outside of Spokane, Washington. I served 8 years in the USAF and loved it. I did not have a combat job, so even during the first Gulf War I was never deployed to a war zone. But during 4 days in June, 1994, I and the rest of the folks stationed at Fairchild AFB experienced the death of 10 people from our community.

On June 20, 1994, Dean Mellberg shot 5 people at the Fairchild AFB Hospital before he was himself shot by Senior Airman Andy Brown (click here to watch a video of Andy Brown being interviewed in 2008). Brown was a security policeman on bike patrol that day when the shooting started and he responded. After seeing Mellberg and ordering him to stop, Brown took him down with his 9mm pistol from 70 yards away. That is an incredibly difficult shot, but if Brown had not been successful, many more could have died that day.

The shooting took place right behind the neighborhood I lived in. I can remember rushing home and seeing some guys I knew from the security police in sniper positions on roofs in our neighborhood. I can still remember the blood stains on the pavement near the hospital visible from the walking path behind our house for weeks after the shooting.

Four days later, on June 24, 1994, my birthday, Lt. Col Bud Holland killed himself and 3 of our officers when he flew his B-52 aircraft beyond its operational limits, lost control, and crashed. Holland had a history of reckless flying, but a failure in leadership allowed him to continue to endanger himself and his crews. The crash was caught on video by several sources because it was a practice flight for an airshow demonstration – the last one before the B-52 wing was scheduled to be redeployed to another base. I clearly remember the sound and feel of the explosion from the crash, and standing outside my workplace that morning watching the plume of smoke from the fire.

It was a very surreal period of time. A few weeks before the hospital incident, I was part of the official burial team for a guy from our squadron that had committed suicide. I did not really know the guy, but he had few friends, so I volunteered to participate in his funeral when the call went out. Too much death in such a short period of time. I separated from the USAF in January of 1995 because I was an enlisted guy that had just earned a Master’s degree and I was too old to be accepted as an officer. It was time to move on.

I’m glad I served my country. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I will encourage my two children to make the same decision someday as well. On this Memorial Day, I am grateful for all that have served and continue to serve us, especially those that paid the ultimate cost for that service.

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Max DePree, the founder of Herman Miller, wrote some amazing things in his 1989 book, “Leadership is an Art.” Smack-dab in the middle of the book is a powerful chapter entitled “Intimacy.” Here are a few things Max says in that chapter that I just love:

Intimacy is the heart of competence. It has to do with understanding, with believing, and with practice. It has to do with the relationship to one’s work. (p. 53).

Beliefs are connected to intimacy. Beliefs come before policies or standards or practices. Practice without belief is a forlorn existence. Managers who have no beliefs but only understand methodology and quantification are modern-day eunuchs. They can never engender competence or confidence. They can never be truly intimate. (p. 55).

We find intimacy through a search for comfort with ambiguity. We do not grow by knowing all of the answers, but rather by living with the questions. (p. 57).

Intimacy arises from translating personal and corporate values into daily work practices, from searching for knowledge and wisdom and justice. Above all, intimacy arises from, and gives rise to, strong relationships. Intimacy is one way of describing the relationship we all desire with work. (p. 58).

Intimacy is not a leadership responsibility. We simply don’t select, develop, and reward intimacy in our leaders. I wish we would, but we don’t.

Intimacy is always discretionary. It will always be a choice that too few make because the road to intimacy travels through the land of excellence. As Robert Quinn says so beautifully, “The land of excellence is safely guarded from unworthy intruders. At the gates stand two fearsome sentries – risk and learning. The keys to entry are faith and courage.”

What’s keeping you from choosing intimacy at work? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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In his amazing little book, “On Bullshit,” Harry Frankfurt tells us that bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensible that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the truth or the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the thing he says describes reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. (55-56)

The liar has to recognize the authority of the truth before he willingly rejects it. The bullshitter does not reject the authority of the truth; rather, he pays no attention to it at all. The truth is simply not that important.

The fog of bullshit is dangerous to leadership because it entices us to abandon the pursuit of what is true and correct versus what is false and incorrect. Many of our differences, we are told, are merely a matter of perception; consequently, sincerity trumps objective reality.

Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself. (66-67)

Leadership’s quest for the “right thing to do” is based not only on the belief that there is a correct course of action that merits impassioned pursuit, but also that there is a wrong way that may seem right but must be vigorously opposed. Leadership must be as alert to and intolerant of bullshit as it is of lies.

We can all “just get along”, but not until every one of us agrees to never allow any one of us to force the rest of us to ignore or deny a lie. There is no way we can look each other in the eyes and trust each other when we all know we are standing knee deep in bullshit.

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How do you work with or around hateful people?

A reader I admire a lot asked me this question in a private e-mail. I’ve never blogged on this topic, so I didn’t have an answer ready.

Because of my communication style, not too many folks engage me in open confrontation over time. When people hate me, they hate me behind my back and seldom to my face. I think personality has a lot to do with how people both express disdain and react to the venom of others.

I confront ugly behavior when it happens openly to me. I don’t hold grudges, so I prefer to have issue focused conflict, then move on. I know others that do the exact opposite – they avoid issue focused conflict and hold personal grudges for years. Covert hatefulness is for me the worst kind.

I don’t hate people, but there are few behaviors that I loathe and my personality makes it impossible for me to hide my true feelings. I hate being lied to, and I hate selfishness, which is ironic, because to varying degrees we all lie to ourselves and others to try to hide the deepest roots of our own pride and greed.

So how do you deal with hateful people at work? Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comment section below!

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New and very well done research on servant leadership establishes a link between this employee-focused style of management and enhanced team performance. Servant leadership leads to employees feeling trust toward the leader, which allows them to take more risks when working in their team because they feel safe rather than threatened.

Striving for excellence and transformational change is risky. Risk and vulnerability create fear. Courage is the ability to move forward in the presence of fear. Your team will languish if it’s members are unable to find the courage to take reasonable risks to accomplish remarkable objectives.

Trust means that people are willing to make themselves vulnerable to us in a risky situation. Trust can’t cause the people we’ve been given the privilege to lead to have courage. Some will find the courage to act even if they don’t trust us, and others will evade courage regardless of how we behave toward them.

Trust creates the conditions where courage can find its fullest and most productive expression. Courage thrives on trust.

If you want those around you to be more encouraged and less discouraged, please consider changing the thing you have the most control over as a leader – your own behavior. You ultimately have no control over whether or not people will trust you, but you do have absolute control over how worthy you are of their trust.

Be darn good at what you do, consistently walk a talk that your people value, and care deeply about everyone that is affected by the choices you make. Strive to be more encouraging, and you too will be encouraged.

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Corporal Patrick Daniel “Pat” Tillman, Jr. was killed in the mountains of Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. I remember being enthralled and moved by his story – he left a million dollar career in the NFL to enlist with his brother Kevin in the Army. Stories of people with Pat Tillman’s conviction and strength of character are so very rare. I remember thinking Pat Tillman’s story was both enigmatic and inspiring.

At Tillman’s funeral, the following official account of his death was read:

Corporal Tillman put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire as he maneuvered his Fire Team to a covered position from which they could effectively employ their weapons on known enemy positions. While mortally wounded, his audacious leadership and courageous example under fire inspired his men to fight with great risk to their own personal safety, resulting in the enemy’s withdrawal and his platoon’s safe passage from the ambush kill zone. (Excerpted from Pat Tillman’s Silver Star Citation)

The problem is, this is not what really happened, and several people present at the funeral, including Lt. General Phillip Kensinger, knew it. Pat Tillman’s dying words were “I’m Pat fucking Tillman!” He yelled this several times as a warning to the people that were shooting at him and his buddies. Pat Tillman was shot and killed by members of his own unit, and the Army knew this before they gave him The Silver Star. Unfortunately, not only was his family lied to, but they are still fighting to learn the full truth about what happened to Pat and who was responsible for the cover-up.

I learned all this by watching the excellent documentary entitled “The Tillman Story.” You’ve probably not seen this film, but I would highly recommend that you take the time to watch it. This movie is powerful because it is told through interviews with Pat’s comrades that were present the day he was killed, and with his family, especially his father Pat and incredible mother, Mary Tillman. I’ll never forget the looks of disgust on the faces of Pat’s family as they sat in the back of the room during the congressional hearings and listened to senior military leaders, including Donald Rumsfeld, evade the truth about what they knew and when they knew it.

My image of Pat Tillman and what happened to him was a myth which this movie dispelled. He deserves to be more than a myth to us, and we all need to be reminded of the dark side of leadership that enables and sustains these self-serving illusions.

What do you remember about the Pat Tillman story? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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