Growing Up Globally Aware in America-A Key to Your Children’s Future Success
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading the Generations, Life and Business, Social Commentary, Values
Note from Art: I don’t often write about parenting, but it is most definitely leadership…and you/we are most definitely responsible for raising tomorrow’s leaders. It’s time we stepped up our game a bit on diversity and global education.
As if parenting isn’t challenging enough for most of us, there’s another task to add to a list that doesn’t seem to lack for things to do. This one may require foregoing a few soccer games, conducting some more of those “talks” and putting the effort forth to create new educational opportunities and family experiences
I’m talking about ensuring that our future generations of leaders grow up globally aware and highly familiar with the rich and complicated level of diversity, customs, practices and subtle and significant variations across cultures, countries and religions.
Six Reasons Why this is Really Important?
- The last time I looked, everything that we understood as children of the 70’s and as parents of the 90’s children has changed. Our context is steeped in the world of our parents and of our youth. Tomorrow on this pale blue dot called earth does not look like yesterday.
- The global economy is more interconnected and infinitely more complex to navigate and compete in than ever before.
- The stakes for jobs, careers and even the prosperity of countries and regions are now very, very real.
- The world of work involves collaborating and cooperating and building bridges with people across cultures, religions and geographies. You must be a boundary and culture spanner to survive and succeed.
- The people your children will be both collaborating with and competing against are well-steeped in languages, cultural issues and understanding and they are most definitely aware of the opportunities. They are also aware of the relative ignorance of their American counterparts on these issues.
- The world of work involves identifying and successfully competing in far away places that don’t look like Most Towns, U.S.A. This requires insight, knowledge, context and skills that our parents would not understand.
The Problem: We Don’t Think Globally
Most of us…and especially our children have no context for where things come from…how they got there and what the implications are for the entire value chain backwards from the retailers to somewhere in the world where the materials and labor came together. We buy and consume mindless and heedless of our connection to a complex global economic value chain and ecosystem.
My observation is that there is a naïve idealism born of parental sheltering in some of our youth that life unfolds easily and predictably. You go to school, a good job waits for you on the other end and you exceed the life achievements of your parents. For a reality check, see also the note that everything changed.
An initial instinct is to point at our education system and wonder what they can do to solve this issue. School is an important part of the opportunity to improve, but the primary responsibilities for adding a global dimension to our children’s life experiences is ours as parents. Easy words, I know.
Seven Ideas for Helping Improve Your Child’s Global and Cultural I.Q.
1. Make a conscious effort to teach your children about the broader world at an early age. This transcends looking at maps and involves actually spending time studying different cultures and creating related experiences including trips to libraries, restaurants, museums and different types of cultural events. And yes, this means you might be challenged to learn yourself. Remember, you just need to stay one lesson ahead of your child.
2. Teach your children about economics and politics and help them stay abreast of current global events. Discuss these at the dinner table.
3. Encourage reading activities or create reading lists that draw on global authors and sources. Your librarian will be happy to help you with this.
4. Increase the emphasis on learning foreign languages (plural) at a young age. Don’t wait for 7th grade Spanish. There are resources available on the web or via other service providers and tutors. Yeah, this takes money and time. So do soccer, hockey, football, dance, music lessons etc.
5. If your financial conditions allow, skip the third trip to Disney and go somewhere that requires travelling over an ocean. Spend time reading and preparing for the visit and try to build an itinerary that includes something other than the usual tourist stops.
6. Host an exchange student. Better yet, do this several times.
7. At the right age, encourage your children to become exchange students or to take advantage of study abroad programs.
The Bottom-Line for Now
It’s easy to get lost in this big country and in our daily family lives in our communities and lose track of the world around us. It’s more important than ever to create a broader global consciousness in the minds of our children or they are in for a rough wake-up call. The distance from soccer field in Sometown, U.S.A. to expectant job seeker and erstwhile professional is very short, and global preparation is now a prerequisite for survival and success.
Friday Leadership Highs and Lows
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Life and Business, Professional Growth, Social Commentary, Values
The High with a Leadership Low: Leaders, Have You Seen Your Humility Lately?
One of the highlights for me of the past few academic years has been the invitation from Sarah Sullivan, a Lead Business Instructor at McHenry County College to guest speak in her Creative Leadership class. Sarah teaches this class in the school’s Academy for High Performance, and as the name implies, it is filled with highly motivated, experienced adults that are hungry to learn and not afraid to question.
What makes this guest speaking experience particularly enjoyable is the fact that Sarah has used my book (with Rich Petro), Practical Lessons in Leadership-A Guidebook for Aspiring and Experienced Leaders, as part of the class, so I’m on tap to both explain the genesis of the book and to support the premise that leadership is a profession and expand on the additional guidance that Rich and I serve up over our 200 pages.
This week’s session included two highlights. The first was the opportunity to re-engage with an outstanding group of professionals that survived my class in Global Business late last year. I’ve rarely encountered a sharper and more engaging group of adult learners!
The other highlight was a comment at the end of our session that should make all of us stop and pause. While I don’t remember the exact wording, this insightful individual offered that she understood the emphasis in leadership writing and speaking on great leaders as humble leaders fiercely committed to their firm’s success and the success of their team members, (think Jim Collins, Level 5), she found herself wondering where all of these leaders were. In her opinion and based on significant experience, she had observed that the oversized egos of most leaders get in the way of any genuine humility.
I suspect that her observation can serve as a safe generalization for the experiences of many individuals in the workforce. Sad but true.
How Low Can You Go: Milton Bradley (the baseball player, not the game company), Your External Locus of Control is Showing.
I tend not to comment on sports or athletes here for a number of good reasons, including the fact that almost everyone knows more about sports and current events in sports than I do. Nonetheless, the local Chicago television news this morning continues to trumpet a story on former Cub, Milton Bradley…a highly paid player that the Cubs brought to Chicago for a King’s Ransom of a salary, only to watch this player turn in a miserable year and earn the media label: Clubhouse Cancer. While I’ve not heard that phrase or label before, it doesn’t sound positive!
Now that he is no longer part of the Cubs, he has lashed out with a line of reasoning to the effect that he had been good in prior years, he did not do well in Chicago and therefore it must be Chicago’s fault.
Ponder.
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Enjoy your weekends! I’ve got to get a jump on next week’s Leadership Caffeine post. Monday is not far behind!
Join the Management Excellence Newsletter List And You Might Win A Book!
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Education, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: this is shameless promotion and good clean fun. I’m working hard on extending the variety of vehicles that I publish original leadership and management content in, and the Management Excellence e-newsletter is soon to launch. I would love to have you as a subscriber and this is a fun way of stimulating some subscriptions.
First some background, and then the promotion description. I’ve long threatened to start an e-Newsletter, but have been short on execution. A good friend of mine recently referenced it as my “Unicorn” project…something frequently talked about but never seen.
Well, stop the presses, because there’s about to be a unicorn sighting. OK, actually, I cannot produce a unicorn, but the Management Excellence e-newsletter is getting set to launch.
No Reconstituted Blog Posts in this Newsletter…Original Content Only
It’s important to me (and to you) to ensure that there is a distinction between the newsletter and the blogs (Management Excellence and Building Better Leaders), so you have my promise of original content only. The focus remains on providing great, practical and actionable ideas for leadership, all things management and for you in your career.
As an aside, many of you already subscribe to the blog via e-mail. This is different.
Program Updates and Promotions Yes, But Kept to a Dull Roar in the Sidebar:
I have every intention of sharing updates on the latest courses and programs and pitching the current and forthcoming book, but I promise to keep it isolated in the sidebar. Ignore or click-on it as you see fit. The core of the newsletter is the content.
Your e-Mail Information is for the Management Excellence Newsletter Only!
You have my word!
Enough Context…Here’s the Promotion:
- The book in this promotion is mine with Rich Petro, entitled: Practical Lessons in Leadership-A Guidebook for Aspiring and Experienced Leaders. You can visit Dan McCarthy’s “Great Leadership site to see his thoughts on the book, or, catch Wally Bock’s (Three Star Leadership) review on Amazon, along with several others.
- I will randomly pick 4 new subscribers that sign up for the Management Excellence newsletter between today 12/12/09 and midnight Chicago time on Wednesday 12/16/09, to receive a free copy of the book.
- Thanks to the great coverage of the Management Excellence blog from the editors of SmartBrief, many of you joined the list between 12/7 and 12/11. I will draw one of your names as well.
The fine print:
- U.S. residents only. Sorry folks outside of the U.S. Due to shipping costs and complexities, I am keeping this one close to home.
- The promotion closes on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at midnight Chicago time.
- The promotion is only open to new subscribers as of 12/12/09, with the noted exception for those that joined during the past week.
- If you win, by opting in, you are providing me permission to send an e-mail to you to obtain shipping instructions.
Here’s How to Win:
- Visit either the Management Excellence or Building Better Leaders blog sites (same database/same ME Newsletter for both) and find the header in the far right column labeled “e-Newsletter Mailing List.”
- Follow the instructions and make certain to confirm your registration when you receive the confirmation e-mail request, and you’re in!
- If your name was picked, you will receive an e-mail from me asking for shipping instruction.
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OK, enough channeling of my inner PT Barnum today. I look forward to serving you with the Management Excellence Newsletter and I truly appreciate and value your readership.
Now, back to work on next week’s Leadership Caffeine post!
-Art
A Friday Time Out to Say Thank You
I’m way overdue to provide some thanks to a number of great people and organizations that I’ve worked with or that have supported me over this past year, and the deep freeze here in Chicago is no excuse for delaying this post any longer. Nor is the fact that I’m horribly behind on holiday shopping (the economy is waiting!), not to mention that my wife and brother both have birthdays within 6 days of Christmas. (Parents, in the future, better planning please!)
I turned up the heat a bit, refilled my coffee cup and pried myself away from this week’s all consuming collaboration on my next Building Better Leaders program (mentoring plus distance education) entitled Leadership and the Technical Professional, and here are just a few of Thank You’s that I would like to extend.
My Thanks!
-Thank you to the editors at SmartBrief for including a number of my posts in their great bulletins during the past week and over the past year. I particularly enjoyed contributing to their 2009 Leadership Review and was in some great company with Wally Bock (Three Star Leadership), Dan McCarthy (Great Leadership) and others. If you don’t subscribe to one of their many bulletins, you are missing out on an outstanding opportunity to stay informed and gain access to great content.
-Speaking of Wally, I am thankful for his great support and for his frequent inclusion of my posts in his great feature, “Midweek Look at the Independent Business Blogs. The best part of the inclusion is that he puts me in good company with some of my favorite business bloggers.
-We have a great resource in my county called the Shah Center for Corporate Training, affiliated with our community college. This organization, its Director and team do an outstanding job bringing all manner of professional training to businesses and non-profits all year long. I was honored to write the cover article for the Q1 2010 issue of their publication, CATALYST, and noticed the other evening that it had published. My article is perhaps timely given the state of our economy, and I encourage you check out the pdf version of “Rethink, Renew and Recover,” as well as take a look at the expanse of what this great organization provides to our community. They are certainly a model to learn from.
-My recent collaboration partners, Chris Colbert, Joe Zurawski as well as the team at DigiSage (web development/hosting) have all been in overdrive helping on various projects, including the Building Better Leaders launch. Joe and I will launch the new technical leadership program in early January, and Chris is working evenings to help out. The DigisSage team never sleeps.
-Thanks to one of my favorite bloggers, Mary Jo Asmus of Aspire Collaborative Services for collaborating with me on two, “Two Voices” posts.I’ve rarely worked with anyone as creative and frankly as fun to work with as Mary Jo and I look forward to more opportunities for us to pool our thoughts. Of course, her pool of thoughts is much deeper than mine, so I am the beneficiary in this arrangement.
-Thank you to my Twitter and all of my blog readers. Who would have imagined that the world of social networking would lead to so many amazing and productive new relationships! I’m working with a dozen or so great professionals and organizations that I’ve met through blogging or on Twitter and look forward to some great new ventures in the upcoming year.
-Thank you to the great professionals, deans and department chairs at DePaul, The Illinois Institute of Technology and McHenry County College that have invited me to participate in serving their students and communities as a management and leadership educator. Thanks as well to my students! The secret here is that when I’m teaching, I’m learning. The pleasure is all mine.
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Saying “Thank You” is always in style, and all too often, we let the pace of life get in the way of these two simple but important words. For anyone reading, please accept my sincere thanks. Now it’s time for you to pay it forward.
Leadership Caffeine: A Leader’s List of Thanks-Giving
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Life and Business, Management Education, Middle Management, Values, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: I’m getting a jump-start on my Thanksgiving post in the hope that you have the opportunity during this holiday-shortened work week to reach out and say “Thanks” to those that you have the privilege of leading and serving.
The Leader’s List of Thanks-Giving:
- Be grateful for your unique chance to serve others.
- Be thankful for the patience and forbearance that your colleagues and team-members show as you learn over time and through trial and error what it truly means to lead.
- Give thanks for your chance to learn from others.
- Pay honor to those that came before you and took the time to pass along their wisdom…even if you didn’t realize how valuable it was until much later.
- Be in awe of the opportunity that you have in front of you to positively impact lives in ways that few other jobs or professions provide.
- Be inspired to motivate, coach and teach those that invest valuable time in their lives and careers with you.
- Give thanks for the opportunity that you have to create value for your organization. You might not engineer new products or services, but the people that work for you enable others to perform their jobs creating or building or supporting at high levels.
- Be grateful that you were given or developed the patience to cope with the daily stresses and strains of leadership and to keep reminding yourself that it is all worth it in the end.
- Give thanks for your chance to participate in the journey of a lifetime.
- And most of all, just give thanks by speaking up and remembering that a well-placed, heartfelt “Thank you” is one of the most powerful and important of all leadership tools.
And yes, please accept my sincere Thank You for your readership and conversation. I am truly grateful for you.
-Art
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