Friday Leadership Highs and Lows

March 5, 2010 by Art Petty · Leave a Comment
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!

Tags: Ego, Humility, Leadership Highs and Lows, Personal Accountability, practical lessons in leadership

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