Welcome to my very first newsletter!
Every two weeks, I will share with you my musings about Leadership, the Balanced Scorecard, my most recent blogs and interesting articles that I have happened upon. My aim is to help you develop as a leader in all spheres of your life, and to help you open to the possibility, and the practice of living the most magnificent life of your choosing.
Do enjoy! Please share widely! And of course, I welcome your feedback!
To be a great leader – “All You Need is Love”
It is no accident that I am publishing this newsletter on Valentine’s Day, the day when millions of people celebrate LOVE!
You see, I believe that love is the foundation of great leadership. Before you can practice the skills of leadership, you must truly love the people whom you lead. And most importantly, you must love yourself. In my view, love is the missing ingredient in organizations that cause employees to feel disconnected, disgruntled and frustrated and lack loyalty.
In my work facilitating strategy development and implementation over the past 20 years in private, government and non-profit sectors, I have been privy to deep discussions about LOVE as an organizational core value. Some people shy away from it, with comments such as “Love has no place in the workplace”, reflecting concerns about the blurring of love and sex and issues of sexual harassment. Others warm to it, positing that fundamentally, love is the ONLY core value. And others try to find medium ground and call it something else – caring, compassion, empathy, fairness.
Are there examples of leaders who lead without love? I am sure you can think of many. But let me ask you – do YOU want to be one of them? Or do you want to be the leader who is known for caring for those whom you lead, for helping them to grow and develop, for being firm and fair, for being there to support them when they face challenges and to lead the celebrations when they are successful? When you lead like that, leadership is a joy! I know …. I have done it. And I wouldn’t have it otherwise.
To remind you of the lyrics of that beautiful Beatles song (click to view): “All You Need is Love”…watch the video and sing along.
THE BALANCED SCORECARD: A great tool to Make LOVE a key part of your Business Strategy
The Balanced Scorecard is an excellent tool to consciously bring LOVE into your strategy. The Balanced Scorecard shows the cause and effect relationships between four critical perspectives – Learning and Growth, Internal Processes, Customer and Financial. The BSC makes clear the “Human Capital” required to flawlessly deliver processes that delight customers and yield financial results that satisfy shareholders.
The Learning and Growth Perspective addresses the foundation of your strategy: the people and is defined in 3 broad areas of Human Capital Readiness:
- Required skills to deliver the strategy
- Tools and information
- Organizational Culture
It is in articulating the culture that you have an opportunity to be intentional about the Core Values of your organization, what they mean, how everyone will behave and how you measure progress towards them. It is here that, should you choose, you may establish love as a core value, and here that you measure it. Sound Machiavellian to measure love? Well, consider that Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously penned her Sonnet #43 in the 18th century “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. Little did she know that this question would not be far off from a 21st century management tool that has had great impact on millions of organisations worldwide!
TAKE ONE ACTION
- Think about the people you lead – at work, home, play, worship.
- Today, tell one of these people how much you appreciate them or something they have done
- Repeat with someone else the next day, and the next and the next…
INTERESTING LINKS
Here are a few of the interesting articles I have found this week:
“Just Call Someone Already” – in this HBR blog, Dan Pallotta reminds us of the lost art of simply calling someone, rather than relying so heavily on e-mail. Today – choose to call one person instead of sending an e-mail click to view
“Secrets of the America’s Happiest Companies” – Lydia Dishman outlines what some of the happiest companies in America do to boost morale AND profits (yes, there is a link): click to view
