The High Road Code

By Doug McAlister

The High Road Code is your guide to creating a more satisfying personal and business life!

Are you ready to get on a winning path in your life and career? The High Road Code is a book about ethics, personal branding, leadership in action and more. Taking the High Road isn't just about making principle-based choices. It's also about challenging yourself to be a fierce but honorable competitor who:

-- Develops and maintains a distinctive personal brand
-- Excels in his or her chosen field
-- Creates, develops and leads exceptional teams
-- Deftly handles office politics, common pitfalls and career changes
-- Builds a reputation for excellence that opens innumerable doors
-- Applies these same skills to enhance his or her family and social life.

The High Road Code is a short, direct guide to improving your business and personal life.

The process of cracking the High Road Code detailed in this book includes:

-- Understanding your personal integrity and ethical code (and how those factors interact with any formal codes that may be used in your job).
-- Creating your list of personal values.
-- Developing your personal mission statement.
-- Creating a vision of your leadership style.
-- Understanding and leveraging the "customer matrix" for your business and social roles.
-- Creating a plan for assessing a new work group that you are or will be leading.
-- A list of "guidelines for the High Road Traveler that will promote, market and sell your brand and help you achieve your goals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Feb 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780692920657

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Introduction

Cracking The High Road Code

The High Road Code is about winning the right way, in both your life and career. Cracking the code will require you to review your personal values and define the unique personal and business ethics that set you apart from the pack. It will also help define you as a Brand. Finally, cracking the High Road Code will help you create an efficient machine based on the unbreakable bond between your personal ethics, Brand and business.

Your Brand, and the perception thereof, already exists. The question is how does your Brand image align with the Brand you want to project? Your Brand, like any other, needs to be nurtured, protected, marketed and sold. You are the most important asset in your portfolio, and your Brand strategy should be managed as purposefully and intentionally as that of Apple, Mercedes-Benz, Rolex or any other high-profile brand competing in the global marketplace.

What’s in it for me?

The bottom line is this: Cracking the Code and Traveling on the High Road will help you focus on the variables that will maximize success with minimum distractions. It will help you:

Achieve your goals.

Gain the respect of your leadership, peers and direct reports.

Create a sense of pride in your work as you advance professionally and financially.

Have confidence in your decisions and actions because they are based on your personal operating principles.

The High Road Code is the product of almost 40 years of working my way from entry level to senior management sales and marketing roles in two of the world’s most recognizable companies: Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola. Along the way, I watched and learned from some of the best (and worst) managers, peers, direct reports and leaders in business. There were plenty of successes, a few bloody noses and countless lessons learned. I’ll share true tales from the trenches—some funny, some sad, each with a takeaway that applies in business today.

How long does this take?

This book is intentionally short because it was written for busy people. Cracking the High Road Code and developing your plan for career and personal success, however, will take considerable time and commitment. The results will be worth every minute of the time you invest. Are you interested in improving your quality of life, job performance and the performance of your organization? If so, this book is for you!

Will this process make me a CEO?

Maybe, maybe not. That’s up to you, based on your goals and how you choose to manage your life and career. The High Road Code will help you assess yourself and develop your goals (both personal and business-related). Once armed with this knowledge and data, you’ll be able to balance your life in a way that will help you achieve these goals. I can promise you that following these principles and developing the habits and approaches outlined in the book will increase your effectiveness, market value, career potential and life satisfaction. It’s all in your hands.

The process of cracking the High Road Code detailed in this book includes:

Understanding your personal integrity and ethical code (and how those factors interact with any formal codes that may be used in your job).

Creating your list of personal values.

Developing your personal mission statement.

Creating a vision of your leadership style.

Understanding and leveraging the customer matrix for your business and social roles.

Creating a plan for assessing a new work group that you are or will be leading.

Creating a master plan for insuring that your group attracts, and eventually promotes, the very best talent available.

A list of guidelines for the High Road traveler that will promote, market and sell your Brand and help you achieve your goals.

Using the High Road Code will create a sense of stability that allows you to make predictable, principle-based decisions and increase your success rate—without wasting time overthinking a decision or worrying about it after the fact.

After you have created your personal High Road Code, you can grow as a fierce-but-honorable competitor and the type of leader you want to be in both your career and personal life. Don’t kid yourself. Success in all aspects of life takes hard-work, and getting to the High Road is an uphill trip! This process will prepare you for the worthwhile challenge.

This High Road Code process works at any point in your life and career. It can help you navigate the most challenging and complex part of your career—starting a new brand assignment or job. It will also work if you want to boost your results in a current assignment or are just getting started after school or military service.

Once your values, mission and desired leadership style are developed, they likely won’t change significantly over the course of your career. But, as you gain experience, you can always revisit the process described in this book to make sure no additions, deletions or alterations are needed. There may be small course corrections that will make you better at achieving your goals. Highly successful individual performers generally grow and develop into the leaders of an organization. Your leadership skills must constantly evolve whether you’re leading peers, leading an organization or tackling the more challenging task of leading your leaders. This book is designed to help you maximize your effectiveness as a leader and develop a winning culture in every organization you touch.

Throughout the book you will find lists of questions. These questions don’t usually have right and wrong answers that fit everyone. I encourage you to think through the questions and develop the right answers for you and your Brand.

The best part about taking the High Road is that that’s where the winners are traveling. With that in mind, let’s get you started on your journey to success.

One

Start with Integrity

The hard thing to do is often the right thing to do.

Travis McGee in John D. MacDonald’s

Lonely Silver Rain

Integrity is an unwavering commitment to doing the right thing. It’s not something we are born with; it develops throughout our lives with most of the building blocks established in the early years. None of us are perfect! We’ve all used poor judgment in our words or actions and lived to regret it. These (sometimes painful) experiences are key in shaping our integrity. Much like mistakes, we can learn from these events and develop plans and systems in order to not make similar errors again. We can always work to elevate our level of integrity.

The High Road Code is based on your personal integrity. Without integrity and trust, a person will not be an effective leader. Your integrity, however, does not grant you immunity from the actions and deeds of people you deal with every day who don’t share your ethical position on the High Road. There are bad guys in business and our society who can and will lie to you, use you, blame you and try to cheat you. Fortunately, there are also smart, ethical ways to protect yourself from these villains. Developing your personal High Road Code will provide you with principle-based ways to deal with integrity issues and maintain your standards. There may be times in your life and career when your personal ethics system will require you to call out unethical behavior. There may be other times when you’ll opt to leverage the legal or business ethics system that’s also in place.

Occasionally, people with questionable integrity move up the ladder in honorable organizations. Karma often catches up with them sooner or later—and everyone high-fives when they move on. Most of the time, you’ll find that integrity and solid business ethics win and succeed. There may be times in your career when you can’t wait for karma to protect your personal Brand and you decide to make a career change. These choices will be yours to make based on the principles you develop on your journey to The High Road.

One of the job expectations at both P&G and Coca-Cola is a commitment to personal and corporate integrity. Like all great organizations, they know that anything casting doubt on their reputation is damaging to their brands and long-term success. Once these doubts surface, they’re extremely difficult to manage and erase (especially in this era of social media sharing). Both companies have had some well publicized situations that required prompt, decisive action to protect their brands.

On April 25, 1985, Coca-Cola announced that it