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Intentional Leadership — Month 11 — Initiative

What is Initiative?

The power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do.

It is the drive to make things happen, and it is yet another crucial ingredient in the recipe for creating a strong leader. When leaders have initiative, they make things happen, they create momentum, and they propel their teams/organizations forward, even in the face of resistance and obstacles. Without initiative, one would achieve nothing. Yes, it’s important to have dreams, vision, strategies, action plans…yet, without taking the initiative, nothing would happen.

I find this to be a fairly common stumbling block with some of my coaching and mentoring clients. They know they are stuck. They recognize the need for change. Sometimes, they even know what they need to change…but often feel helpless or unmotivated to take action. The key is to have clarity around the “why” so you then can find your “way” and take intentional action.

Consider the story of Margo, a director in a high-tech company who was feeling somewhat discontent in her work and aware that it would be time for her to make some kind of move to a different position soon, as that was the culture within her company. We worked together for several months and over the course of that time, Margo chose to focus on several areas: improving communication with her team, improving communication with her manager, and understanding what next step she needed to take — within or outside the company — that would allow her to function in her strength zones, continue to grow as a leader, and express herself creatively.

Throughout the course of our engagement, I functioned sometimes as a coach, sometimes as a mentor, and sometimes simply as a sounding board. Margo defined the areas of focus, identified the challenges and obstacles, discovered her own answers, and took action to make the changes she needed to make to move herself and her team forward. She took the initiative and she was consistent in implementing the new practices that would allow her to move forward.

Today, she has a new sense of purpose, greater clarity around her role and future plans with her company, and has discovered a creative outlet that allows her to continue on her path of self-discovery and personal expression.

It’s a process; getting to that point took a few months. Growing into her potential will be a life-long journey, but the point here is that she recognized some needs and took the initiative to learn, think, grow, and move herself — and as a result, her team and organization — forward on a new path.

This month we will focus on initiative and how it plays out in our lives as leaders. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s an entirely different thing to make it a reality. Without initiative, nothing would happen.

So, before we get started on this month’s study and exercises, I encourage you to spend some time pondering these questions:

Do I proactively take the initiative to get things started, or do I wait until circumstances force me to do something?

If I wait for external forces to move me forward, what is the basis of my hesitation: Fear, lack of knowledge, laziness…?

How have I overcome fear, lack of knowledge, laziness, etc…in the past to enable myself to move forward?

How have I gained momentum by harnessing the power of taking initiative?

Who do I know who frequently, proactively takes initiative to get things moving and what can I learn from them?

I look forward to exploring this month’s topic with you, and hope you will share your thoughts, insights, and feedback as we continue on our Intentional Leadership journey.

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Intentional Leadership — M10 Strategy — Wrap-up

For the past four weeks, we’ve been focused on Strategy, and now it’s time for this month’s wrap-up. Hard to believe! And we have only two months left on this Intentional Leadership Journey.

In an early blog post, I shared the story of my encounter with a young man working at the MAC counter in a mall I was shopping in. We got to talking and I shared that I had moved to the mid-west from Washington State and he talked about how he hoped to live in Seattle one day, soon. My response was that “hope is not a strategy,” which startled him back to reality, I think. He said he’d never thought about it that way. I asked how he thought he would get to Seattle — realize his dream — if he didn’t have a plan and take some action. We talked for a while longer, and as I left the store I could see the gears in his mind turning and turning…

Without a plan, our dreams will vanish. As a leader, we must be able to develop an actionable strategy for our team’s/organization’s vision to become a reality. And while it’s certainly crucial to your future success, having a strategy isn’t enough. Once you’ve cast the vision and engaged your followers, you must develop the strategy and then move forward to the next step: Execution. Great leaders don’t simply have a plan, they make it happen!*

So what does a sound strategy entail? It needs to be clear enough to give direction and flexible enough so you can adapt to changing conditions and unforeseeable events along your journey. As we’ve discussed, the only constant is change. If you aren’t moving forward — and I mean intentionally moving forward with a destination in mind — you are falling behind; in today’s world, that will result in the demise of your organization.

My mentors have told me — and I share it with my clients, as well — that leaders must deliberately and consistently set aside time to work ON their business, not just stay mired in the daily effort of working IN their business. I encourage my clients to schedule in “think time” as often as they need it — some do it daily, some weekly. Whatever the cadence you need, you need to do it and you need to make it a priority. In fact, I have some clients who have told me that when our coaching or mentoring engagement has concluded, they have maintained what they’ve referred to as the “Sacred Laura Time” (meaning our coaching/mentoring sessions were high priority and not to be messed with) as their thinking time, as they were already in the habit and had trained their colleagues and staff that they were engaged in important work during that time.

Be mindful, as you develop your strategies, to take into account the strengths of your team/organization, and work that knowledge into your plans, which will give you and even stronger chance of success down the road. The best strategies exploit an organization’s finest qualities.* In this way, you can prioritize your limited resources and use them to the most advantage for your organization.

As we conclude this month’s focus on strategy, spend a little time with your journal and reflect on what you’ve learned.

How are you thinking about strategy differently?

What steps do you need to take now to fully engage your organization, leverage their strengths, and propel yourself forward?

Are you disciplined enough to develop and stick to your strategy, even in the face of inconvenient circumstances and conditions?

Your answers to these questions will dictate the nature of your influence in the years ahead.

“See” you tomorrow, when I’ll introduce next month’s topic. In the meantime, have an intentional day.

 

*From the Intentional Leadership book by Giant Impact. 

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Intentional Leadership — D5, W4, M10 — Strategy

Good morning and Happy Friday! It’s been kind of a soothing week here, soft rain…kind of nice, actually. The trees continue to change color, although the rains have caused a lot of leaves to fall, so we have a lot of naked trees, already!

I’ve been thinking about strategy a lot this week, as I suspect we all are, since it’s our area of focus this month. In fact, I spent some time reading about it just yesterday, as I’ve recently completed the StrengthsFinder assessment, and my strongest talent/strength is strategist. The description depicts one who quickly picks up on patterns, envisions the diverse paths one could take, quickly considers the various consequences, culling options all the while, eventually landing on the most effective path to the desired outcome.

It’s a timely concept as I have been working towards a significant transition in my life and it is coming closer…in fact, I’ll be able to share more details with you very soon. As I’m in this “wiggly” space, I am, in fact, very much in a strategizing mind-set. And, as I don’t believe in coincidence, this month’s focus on strategy has been a little more thought provoking for me than some of the other topics we’ve covered to-date.

Having reached this turning point, finally, I intend to “celebrate” this afternoon by treating myself to a scoop of Hershey’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream (it is suspiciously nearly exactly the same as Baskin Robbins’ Peanut Butter and Chocolate…which isn’t available locally!) on my way home…and then we begin the weekend.

As usual, mine will be a mix of work and family time. I need to go back through some bookkeeping (not my strong suit and I’m learning a new system) and make some corrections. We’ve been invited to an “end of summer” party at a friend’s house. Some writing time, some resting time, and yoga. I am also looking more seriously at what’s going on the next couple of months — not just holidays but also end-of-year activities and planning for 2014.

How will you spend your weekend?

What thought have you given to the next 2-1/2 months?

Have you taken an inventory of your accomplishments and your progress-to-date towards your 2013 goals?

What can you do this weekend to prepare yourself for the week and weeks ahead?

What can you do to nurture yourself this weekend?

Who else needs your time and attention?

What have you been putting off that you just finally need to tackle?

However you spend it, I hope it’s intentional!

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