I hope you had a great festive time during this holiday season. We can make this season an expansive time of the year when the holidays can give us the time to pause, relax, and have the quietness we need amidst the celebration and feasting.

William James said that "the art of being wise is knowing what to overlook." 

In this season, embracing the new year and letting go of 2021, my wish for all of you is to find what to overlook quickly so that your new year becomes fresh, not an extension of the past, whether good or bad.

To do this requires not just the usual introspection but the consider elements that had to be eschewed for the lack of its value to your life and to what you hold dear. As I heard many times, we need to travel light.
Anything that seems like a burden that is unquestioned or underexamined must become our current inquiry.

To translate this with on-purpose leaders whose organizations' survival (or viability) might be at stake next year. Learn not to insist on certainty. Don't sell out your capacity to give and be of service even when you're experiencing your own challenges. And don't give in to the apathy and despair that are easily tempting to succumb to. 

With great wishes for 2022, let's hope for better times. Comfort to those who are afflicted, and challenges to those comfortable. Most of all, peace and strength in the new year. 

A lot of executives and managers in on-purpose organizations are too much of a care-taker to become real leaders in their organizations and networks. As Drucker said, too much fire-fighting and problem-solving will elide your impact as a leader to become more strategic and effective.

This care-taking habit stems from their personal and organizational ideation that to be a great leader is to be all at all costs. When pressure mounts. the care-taking role is inadequate, at best palliative. Great leaders are able to bring out diverse skills, competencies, and responses that correspond best to diverse situations. 

How do you transfer all your talents, skills, and empathy from a care-taking role to successfully leading your team? 

1. Delegate and empower your team to make effective judgement calls and be accountable for them.

2. Say no to being the fount of all knowledge pertaining to your organization and its day-to-day functioning. Share all the information and go home on time.

3.  Elevate to leading by demonstrating effective management techniques and influencing and building a good company culture. Stay off from the mundane and other practical issues that's not worthy of your executive time nor energy.

You will never be regarded as a leader if you will remain in a care-taking capacity with all your steam lost in the labyrinth of everyday issues. Being a leader, is leading now and taking charge with  the future with strategic thinking and managing. Don't be the superhero that's not needed at all!
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Leaders and managers, stop auditioning and lead boldly. 

There will not be an announcement saying, "You're next to promotions, here's the baton." It is up to you to figure it out. At the end of the day, the best leaders and managers do not wait for an external green light signal. Most often, I find in my 20+ years of career in jobs and consulting, that it's always too late. 

Waiting for the green signal from others leave you more vulnerable to external validation and external success metrics imposed on you. It is better to trust your judgement and keep on building your competencies. The right opportunity will come and when it comes, you're ready for it.

In matters of decision-making, the same principle follows. Don't explore a certain future with the intention to seek out certainty. Explore your organization's future with the intention of embracing ambiguity and being effective at cruising along such complexities in your strategic environment. Ambiguity is a friend, not an enemy to curse or throw rocks at!

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I just said today that ethics trumps talent in a class.

One said, "so it's okay to hire mediocre but good people in your organization.'

Talent is so overrated and that hiring managers are beginning to look at not just the 'soft side' of competence but the overall adaptability and mindset of the person they are looking to hire.

At the end of the day, the worst corporate scandals are committed by people who are have no qualms circumventing the laws of the land to suit their motives and agenda.

This is not a zero-sum game either. There has been a shift towards hiring employees who do not have the perfect CV or educational background but have the right mental, emotional, and intellectual fitness for long-term growth. Good enough is better than someone that can't be trusted to make major decisions for the company, whose integrity is questionable or consistency suspect. 

At the end of the day, when ethical dilemmas arise in the workplace, which always happen, in micro or macro way, we hope and pray that the one making the decision has the moral and ethical code he/she lives by daily.  We hope that our HR managers can stand up for what's right in a given situation. We hope that our executives truly exhibit transformative leadership.

Ethics is the cornerstone in our businesses and organizations. It's the rudder in a turbulent, volatile and ambiguous world we live in. It's the compass, without which we will become a civilization without a heart and soul. ​

Organizations with individuals who are full of egos are heading towards an internal sabotage, if not abated. 

These individuals who have talent but lack empathy and self-awareness, no matter how valuable they are in the organization are running on a limited bandwidth.

When push comes to shove, their talent can't be depended on when a serious adjustments and adaptations are required from everyone in the organization.

When strategic thinking is required, they tend to reason out why things can't be done in the organization versus having a mindset of openness and flexibility.

Misaligned teams and Boards do not ever accomplish more than they intend to do.  They can be the proverbial 'stumbling block' to serious attempt at steering the organization to a better direction.

If there are too many fragile egos in the room, prepare to use more than fair share of wisdom and insight.

You need an expert strategy advisor to help you navigate the politics in your organization.

Let me help you get to where you want to go. 

Convert selfish egos to productive work. 

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There's no paucity of resources in growing under challenging times. Growing, though runs the risk of getting into all sorts of complications.

On-purpose organizations should aim for simplicity, not just in operations but in strategy.

The moment the strategy gets lost in the minds of stakeholders in the organization, confusion and frustration set in. 

I was working for a non-profit organization a few years ago where a grand vision was unveiled only to be reduced to a few doable 'strategic chunks' at the end of the honeymoon phase between the Board and the new managers. No resources and incentives were set in place to fuel the commitment to action. It became one of those 'false starts.'

High on good will, the leaders lost it by failing to bring down the vision into its elegant simplicity, which means showing the first key steps to making it real in the lives of customers and seeing progress through. 

Simplicity is far from failure work and simplistic notions. By working on simplicity, organizations with scarce resources and under-pressure to provide value for less can support their mission with greater clarity and effectiveness. 

People are not necessarily afraid of change. It’s the journey that gets to them, most of the time.

Show them that the future is that good that incentives for switching outweigh the perceived or imagined problems.
 
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