Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’ve often thought that the best leaders are both right-brained and left-brained people.  They are creative and analytical; feeling and thinking; out-of-the box and pragmatic.  What pulls the two extremes together, as MLK stated, is faith.

Synonyms of faith are confidence, trust, conviction, belief, devotion, loyalty, and assurance.  As I paused this week to remember and recognize Dr. King, I was once again struck by his uncanny ability to articulate a vision—which we can still quote nearly five decades later—and his faith to take the first step when he wasn’t able to see the whole staircase.

I’ve facilitated a strategic planning process for many organizations; the process typically begins with developing a vision.  Then what happens next fascinates me.  We start to develop goals or initiatives or priorities or whatever term you want to use.  These are five or so priorities that need to be accomplished over the coming three years to reach their vision.  When we start to put a timeline to each of the various priorities and then add objectives, a vast majority of the priorities/objectives end up with a timeline to be completed in the next three months and sometimes it stretches into the next year.  It’s very rare that anything is identified as being accomplished in the next two or more years.

Why do I find this fascinating?  Well, if the vision can really be accomplished in the next few months then is it really all that visionary?  Or, if our vision is really visionary, do we only have enough faith to take us up the first couple of steps?  When we’ve reached those first few steps, will we keep going?  In my experience, this is where I’ve seen many organizations simply stop.  They accomplished what they could identify as the first few steps but there’s still a lot of staircase to go before they reach their vision.  Do they have the faith to not only take the first few steps but to keep going beyond the steps they can see today?

Many of the individuals and organizations we’ve come to admire are those who didn’t stop working their way up the staircase. Even when they had made their way up the steps they could see at the beginning, they didn’t stop there, they kept going.  Thomas Edison had more than 1,000 failed attempts to create the incandescent light bulb before he succeeded at realizing his vision.

The Apple III was considered a complete failure.  They went back one step to Apple II, reevaluated their plan to phase it out and continued on with its development.  It’s been estimated that roughly half of the major ventures Steve Jobs engaged in simply didn’t pan out.  The magnitude of his failures, and his ability to recover from them, demonstrates what can be realized if we keep making our way up the staircase.

Nelson Mandela spent 18 years in prison, but that didn’t cause him to waiver in his vision.  After his release, he plunged himself wholeheartedly into his life’s work, striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier.  He kept going.

We may never see the entire staircase, but if we allow faith to be part of the equation, we may make it farther up the staircase than we ever thought possible.

Relax as we face this fact together: When those who report to you disappoint you, it’s probably your fault.  ~Patrick Lencioni

I recently read an article by Patrick Lencioni entitled Humble Yourself at Work.  It’s one of those articles that stays in the back of your mind and kind of nags you during specific instances when you realize the author was right about their assessment.  Patrick points out that we all like to say that we aspire to be humble leaders, but unfortunately, aspiring to be humble usually doesn’t get us there.  As I’ve learned over the last number of years, humility isn’t something you can aspire to; it’s something you have to go through.  In other words, there’s usually a little (or a lot) of pain that accompanies the journey to humility.

Patrick provides a wonderful, and probably hard to accept (that’s the humility part), illustration.

I don’t really teach my sons to misbehave. It’s not as though I sit down and give them instructions on how to provoke their brothers, break dining room chairs, or talk back to their parents. But I must have done something to give them the idea that it would be okay to do those things—or more likely, that the consequences for doing so wouldn’t be significant.

In that moment of realization, I have a choice: I can either humble myself enough to acknowledge that the first person I need to address if I want to change my son’s behavior is me, or I can go on venting about how ornery he is and watch the orneriness continue.

The same thing happens to me—and to all leaders—at work. On a bad day, we often find ourselves complaining about something people in our organizations are doing. We turn to our colleagues on the leadership team (or our spouses) and vent. “The mid-level managers in this company are terrible at giving constructive feedback to their employees.” That’s just one of the common complaints I hear from executives.

Now, if we’re lucky enough to have a colleague on the management team, a consultant, or a spouse who is upfront with us—or if we are somehow struck with a blinding ray of humility in that moment—we will realize that we’re ultimately complaining about ourselves. As a consultant, my favorite way to remind leadership teams of this inescapable conclusion is to ask them: “How many of the people you’re complaining about report to someone outside of this room?”

Many times when I think of being a humble leader, the first example that comes to mind is admitting when we’re wrong, which does require a dose of humility.  But I think Patrick’s example of owning the fact that when our reports disappoint us, it’s our fault, takes humility to an entirely new level of character building.  As leaders, are we willing to address ourselves (and our behaviors) first, when others disappoint us?

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.  ~Cavett Robert

This time of year there’s no shortage of articles telling us why new year’s resolutions don’t stick and what we can do about it.  In fact, almost all—92%—of people who set new year’s resolutions don’t succeed, according to University of Scranton research.  But I know that won’t stop me from making resolutions, yet again.

I scanned a few articles about making resolutions stick and most didn’t tell me anything new, except for one idea I found intriguing.  Carolyn Gregiore, Senior Health & Science Writer from the Huffington Post said to ask, don’t tell.

This suggestion was based on a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology that explored the “question behavior effect.”  “They found that when people were asking a question about a new habit they’d like to adopt – such as, “Will you start meditating?”  or “Will you run every morning?” – those people were 14% more likely to follow through on that behavior.

We could write down our resolutions in question form, maybe leave a post-it note with a question about our resolutions on the fridge or bathroom mirror.

I’d like to take this idea one step further and ask leaders to consider applying it to your organization’s strategic goals.  Strategic plans aren’t exactly new year’s resolutions, but there are certainly similarities.  They both tend to be a vision of the future we want to create, they both typically have measurable goals, and they are time bound.  So maybe it’s not surprising that according to author Daniel Prosser, 87% of organizations fail to execute their strategy each year.

87%, 92%, both percentages do not bode well for our ability to execute on goals or strategies we’ve put before ourselves.

What might it look like if leaders applied this psychology of questions to strategic plans?  Here’s a simplified attempt to add the words “will we” before goal statements and change them to questions.

Statement: Reduce expenses.

Question: Will we reduce expenses?

Statement:  Increase employee retention.

Question:  Will we increase employee retention?

Given our waning collective track record for achieving goals, a shift of 14% follow through if leaders put goals into question form seems fairly substantial.  So what do say, will you achieve your goals in 2016?

Your day can be made much better when you choose to think selflessly and intentionally celebrate others.  ~Hannah VanderWeide

I recently had the privilege of meeting Hannah, the young woman I quoted today.  She’s in her mid 20s and spent some time traveling around the U.S. following her college graduation.  (Her “gap year,” something my generation is still trying to comprehend.)  During that time she blogged about her travels and concluded her journey with a list of about 20 things she learned.  One of the 20 that especially stood out to me was this quote, “Your day can be made much better when you choose to think selflessly and intentionally celebrate others.”

I would say that “choosing to think selflessly and intentionally celebrate others” is a form of showing gratitude.  Expressing gratitude more frequently is certainly a virtuous New Year’s resolution and one worthy of consideration for all leaders.  If you think gratitude isn’t “leader-like” or a high priority given a leader’s precious time, here are a few individuals, in addition to myself, who beg to differ.

Author and consultant, Mark Sandborn, said “Expressions of gratitude—notes, gifts, words, acts of service, and the like—re-fill our tanks.  I wonder how many leaders realize that gratitude builds their psychological and spiritual reserves.”

David Horsager, author of The Trust Edge, wrote on Forbes.com, “My own academic research on trust has revealed not only that gratitude makes a difference but that people don’t require big gestures, just heartfelt ones.  Simple but genuine thank-yous or small, handwritten notes of appreciation can mean the world to people.”

Borrowing from Harvard Business Review and some of my own experience, here are three ways to show gratitude in 2016.

Send a specific handwritten thank you note.  Two words here are especially important; hence, they are in italics: specific and handwritten.  Handwritten notes take more time and effort; therefore, the act itself is more heartfelt than a quick email or text.  Telling people specifically why you are grateful makes it genuine instead of generic.

Send something fun or personalized. What do they like?  Maybe a book in their area of interest, tickets to a concert or event, gift certificate to a restaurant or coffee shop, or simply a card that was undoubtedly selected for them.  It doesn’t have to be over-the-top, just show that you paid attention to who they are.

Tell them, specifically, why you are grateful.  This gets back to being specific but instead of writing, walk down the hall or pick of the phone and actually tell them.

Unfortunately, we can all use a periodic reminder to show our gratitude, and the beginning of a new year is a great time to be reminded. HBR writer, Evan Baehr says, “Small, regular practices of gratitude can change your life—you’ll be healthier and sharper, as will those around you.”

Leaders: begin 2016 with expressions of gratitude!

Twas the day before Christmas and all through the office executives were counting their profits and losses. The finances were posted on the intranet with care, in hopes that bonuses soon would be there. 

The bosses were nestled all snug in their high-priced threads, while visions of more danced in their heads.

In the spirit of the holidays and year-end it reminded me of how much we focus on, or obsess over, more.  We expect our corporate vision statements to express how we want to achieve more, we write New Year’s resolutions that describe how we will do more, and as we balance our checking accounts we long for just 10% more so that we can be really happy.

It’s interesting that while our culture tends to be fixated on how we can get more, more is not always everything we assume it’s cracked up to be.

In Jim Collins’ book How the Mighty Fall he determined (through extensive research) that stage two of how the mighty fall is the undisciplined pursuit of more.  More scale, more growth, more acclaim, more of whatever those in power see as “success.”  Collins says, “Discontinuous leaps into areas in which you have no burning passion is undisciplined.  Taking action inconsistent with your core values is undisciplined.  Investing heavily in new arenas where you cannot attain distinctive capability, better than your competitors, is undisciplined.  Addiction to scale is undisciplined.  To compromise your values or lose sight of your core purpose in pursuit of growth and expansion is undisciplined.”

It is not my intent to end the year on a low note, in fact, it’s the contrary.  As we make plans for a new year, for both ourselves and our organizations, what if we were to think beyond more?  What would our visions and goals for 2016 look like if they didn’t start from the vantage point of more?

Tom Rath and Barry Conchie co-authored Strengths Based Leadership.  Their research uncovered what employees are really looking for in their leaders, and you guessed it, it’s not the pursuit of more.  What employees want and need from the most influential leaders in their lives is: trust, compassion, stability, and hope.  Seems much more aligned with the holiday season, doesn’t it?

Twas the day before Christmas and all through the office, executives were envisioning their dreams and their promise. To model trust, compassion, hope, and stability by not withholding their own vulnerability.

Employees are trusting their compassionate leaders, while visions of hope and stability make them believers.