Tag Archives: good character

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Measuring Leadership

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A multitude of behaviours are needed to be a successful leader.  The balance exercised around which actions to use, how and when is key to achieving success.

Leadership behaviour and being in a leadership role can be distinctly different.  In in leadership roles the expectation is you will exercise the optimal balance, but being in the role does not guarantee that will be the case.

Use leadership behaviours anywhere, anytime.

Behaving in a way that results in others perceiving you as a leader is not context, location or role specific.  The only distinction is the outcomes are achieved because of the way you behaved.

Unfortunately the outcomes leaders inspire and are accountable for initiating  can be good (e.g, Martin Luther Kings achievements) or bad (e.g. Adolph Hitlers achievement) but the leadership behaviour accountable for the achievement (good or bad result) is actually the same behaviour.

Behaviour

Being a successful leader is always associated with strong behavioural skills.  The key behaviours of communication, empathy, self awareness self confidence and self motivation are practices that can be executed at a variety of levels of competence.

Typically, if you think of a leader you know and admire and consider their behaviors together with the level at which they practice these behaviours, it will most likely be very skilled.

The Ultimate Level of Leadership

Leadership is not necessarily aligned with your role and having a leadership role is not indicative of anyones level of leadership skills.  A powerful measure of whether others considered you a great leader during your lifetime is not what you achieved during your life,  but rather how many people attend your funeral.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Integrity

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The level at which we each practice personal integrity, that is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, can be subjective and hard to measure.

We each invision what ” a person of good character” means within the context of our personal filters. That being said, there are accepted commonalities that define moral behavior across your geographic culture or even the human race in general.

For example thou shalt not murder a fellow human is a mostly universal belief across regions, races and religions.

It is the interpretation, recognition and acceptance of exceptions to this moral principle that create the dilemmas (i.e., except when a war is going on or it is enforcing a law or singular belief, and so on)

Practicing Personal Integrity

From an integrity perspective, our personal behaviour should be able to consistently allow us to answer yes to these simple questions:

  • Is it right?
  • Is  it fair?
  • Would others (a majority) answer yes to those questions?

This is a simple self “litmus” test you can perform, before acting, to help you set and the follow  your own morale compass (don’t overlook question 3 as it is the zinger.)

Rules, Laws and other Constraints

Society creates boundaries, both tangible and intangible, often governed by consequences as a way of standardizing behaviour to meet the cultures minimum requirements.

While adherence to these more detailed and sometimes restrictive rules cannot be ignored, just following these standards does not equal high integrity.

My basic test of three questions can be a great assistance to your confidence levels as you try and choose behaviours that could be held to a high moral standard.