Mantra Leadership: Don’T Become the Emperor with No Clothes!

By Xlibris US

Leadership is inclusive of many things, but in its narrowest definition it is
about influencing others. Learning and education are most effective through
repetition and practice. Mantra Leadership is the convergence of continuing
leadership education through the utilization of essential leadership mantras.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493175994

Book preview

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Introduction To Mantra Leadership And Background

Chapter 2 Mantra # 1—Culture Is A By-Product Of Leadership

Chapter 3 Mantra # 2—Meet Your Commitments, But If It’s Not Right, It Doesn’t Go!

Chapter 4 Mantra # 3—Spend 15 Percent Of Your Time On Innovation

Chapter 5 Mantra # 4—The Twenty-Four-Hour Rule

Chapter 6 Mantra # 5—Honest Performance Reviews

Chapter 7 Mantra # 6—The No-Surprise Rule And The Rule Of Ten8

Chapter 8 Mantra # 7—Open-Door Listening

Chapter 9 Mantra # 8—The Right People On The Bus4 And The No-Maintenance Rule

Chapter 10 Mantra # 9—Say Good Morning

Chapter 11 Mantra # 10—Interviewing And Courtship Are The Times Of Greatest Deception!

Chapter 12 Mantra # 11—If Everything Is Important, Then Nothing Is13 / Bucket Your Resources And Dry A Line

Chapter 13 Mantra # 12—Market Share Is Your Company’s Gps, And Dance With The Girl You Came With!

Chapter 14 Mantra # 13—The Happy Hum!

Chapter 15 Mantra # 14—The Emperor Has No Clothes!20

Chapter 16 Leadership Nuggets

Chapter 17 Continued Reading / Recommended Books

Chapter 18 Leadership Mantras

References/Notes

Leadership is inclusive of many things, but in its narrowest definition it is about influencing others. Learning and education are most effective through repetition and practice. Mantra Leadership is the convergence of continuing leadership education through the utilization of essential leadership mantras.

Dana A. Oliver

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO MY WIFE, Linda, thank you for remaining by my side, keeping me grounded through my career, supporting my job changes, relocations, and several places we called home. Your love, sacrifice for the family, thoughtfulness, and dedication have helped me reach my potential and acted as my support structure during my most challenging times. I endear you with my deepest respect, love, and gratitude.

To my daughter, Lexi (Doodle-Bugs), thank you for remaining true and holding your head high on your path to becoming a mature, beautiful young woman and future professional. I am very proud of you and could not have dreamed of another child providing me with more enrichment. Always remember when times get difficult or confusing, it’s about trust and respect, and any notable accomplishment takes time and hard work.

I love you and when in doubt and you’re looking for personal inspiration, be courageous, be strong.

To the Surgical Technologies Leadership, it’s been an honor and privilege to be part of a team whom I have learned so much from during a journey that has exceeded double-digit growth for over twelve consecutive years and during one of the worst economic downturns of a generation. I deeply respect all the opportunities that have been presented to me, and I place my trust in these same leaders that the business has been well positioned for the next decade.

To Craig, my immediate boss for over a decade, I have personally learned more from you than any other leader in my career, and I can truly credit you for showing me what it meant to be an executive as part of a superbly collected leadership team. I can honestly say that looking back, you helped me appreciate what it meant to be a responsible leader, and I want to thank you for the many opportunities that you entrusted to me.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Mantra Leadership and Background

I BEGIN THIS book with the end in mind, which is to share why I chose to write it. The primary reason was to introduce aspiring leaders to essential leadership skills by means of a unique management philosophy I call mantra leadership. Mantra leadership has evolved and is the culmination of my over thirty years of experience in business and research and development. During this time I’ve had the firsthand experiences to work in a variety of business environments and for a number of leadership styles and, all along the way, refining this philosophy through coaching, mentoring, education, training, reading, and perhaps most importantly, through quiet observation. Experience and time bring wisdom, and I’ve tried to harness the positive and essential leadership skills I’ve experienced throughout my career while at the same time abandoning the less desirable ones.

It’s likely that everyone has heard the expression You don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone. Let me assure you that this reality has deeply resonated with me attributable to my many direct working experiences from some very good leaders and, sad to say, some equally poor leaders; more typical though was a mixed bag of leadership skills. Working for and observing the effects of these leaders are the central theme that was the genesis of mantra leadership. What I mean to say and what I want to be very clear regarding this point is that I’ve learned a great deal from all of them while I’ve tried to adopt the essential, positive leadership attributes of these many leaders while abandoning the less-than-desirable behavioral traits. Sadly true in my career is the unfortunate reality that I’ve learned more from poor leadership by observing what not to do than I have from good leaders teaching me what to do. It’s this ultimate truth that I’ve tried to make right in my leadership style and share with you in the writing of Mantra Leadership.

I do want to be clear that my intention is not to throw anyone under the bus, per se, but, more importantly, to point out that my passion for educational leadership would be left void if I didn’t share my personal thoughts regarding such a powerful subject. To further my intentions, I do feel strongly about passing along over thirty years of hard-learned knowledge and a management philosophy that I’ve developed through tried and true experience. Good management is something that I have personally aspired to provide to my teams, and I want to emphasize good because during these many years throughout my career, I have, without question, observed many poor leadership behaviors. Fundamentally, in my bones I have a passion for managing people from an ethical—and moral-based leadership perspective. The world we live in today is fast-paced with continual competition, a demand for increased earnings, information overload and filled with personal agendas, leaving in my perspective a much needed void for resonate management and stand-up leadership.

So how did we get here? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but it’s safe to say that the rapid ascension of leaders due to the likes of mergers and acquisitions, start-up IPOs, the dot-com bubble, and others have introduced many ill-prepared leaders. This is not to say they are not successful in their own right; I’m simply challenging how prepared and groomed our many leaders are today. It can’t be denied that few companies retain employees for decades and have purposeful succession plans designed to train their next level of managers on how to grow and handle their personnel with professionalism, candor, and preparedness. Yes, it does exist at some of the highest levels in mature companies, but the truth is that the average manager today is marginally prepared. My experiences suggest that the typical manager performed well at their job and was promoted as the company grew, leaving them underprepared for the many personnel challenges they were about to experience for the first time. Another contributing reality is that both companies and employees have limited dedication to each other, resulting in employees jumping from job to job with increasing responsibility but without the learned management skills needed to move to their next position. As these leaders ascend into increasing positions of responsibility, it’s uniquely difficult to qualify a candidate’s leadership capabilities and, equally important, their soft skills.

More often than not, leaders are evaluated on their professional results and not on the wake of instability they left behind for their backfill. This reality and the rapid pollination of unpolished management ascending into their next position at another expanding business are breeding a work environment of suspect managers, coaches, and mentors when what is essentially needed is to teach the fundamentals and basics of hiring, retaining, growing, and challenging teams to effectively meet the new demands of today’s fast-paced and expanding world. All around each one of us are growing and aspiring managers that take entry-level training classes on what’s right and wrong and how to deal with situations in their daily jobs, often to see the realization of their own ill-prepared upper management, which makes their new learnings devalued. It’s difficult at best to reinforce the right behavior when all around you the next level of management is exhibiting what not to do. A sad but true testimonial is that I have learned more from poor leadership behaviors by observing how not to behave than I ever learned from good leaders! An employee’s number 1 reason to leave their job is their boss, not the company, and these same employees are four times more likely to leave a bad boss than a leader they appreciate.¹ Business is challenging enough when trying to compete and grow with a trained and stable team, yet many leaders are unwittingly burdening themselves with additional disadvantages due to poor leadership skills. This scenario can be reversed by employing sound leadership skills that can provide a strategic advantage by leveraging a motivated and ambitious team.

I have a genuine passion for good leadership, and I truly believe that management is essentially responsible for 95 percent of everything that goes on within a business. If there is a lack of professionalism, then management hasn’t practiced it and taught their employees. If there is a dysfunctional team, then management hasn’t intervened to address the problem. If there are conflicting priorities, then management hasn’t made the difficult choices of what not to do. If inequities exist, then management hasn’t properly positioned their employees’ salary structures. If a poor employee exists and correction has not been taken, then management is avoiding its responsibility. When leaders no longer ask for their employees’ opinion and have grown arrogant with their responsibility, management has not provided for an honest feedback process. If a blind SurveyMonkey of your team was performed, do you think any of these scenarios would make the inquiry? All these realities likely exist in the business you work at today, plus countless more, yet these same employee demotivators can be effectively resolved with sound and purposeful leadership skills that can allow for your team to focus on what’s truly important: your company’s mission to succeed.

Every leader learns, grows, and evolves over time, and the resulting culmination is due to a variety of factors experienced through their careers and, in no small part, includes the values they learned growing up and as part of their formal education. These early experiences clearly shaped the fabric of who I am today and played a major factor in the leadership style I’ve crafted over time. For this important reason, I thought I would briefly share an overview of this journey before introducing you to how mantra leadership works.

My journey begins with a strong family upbringing without a great deal of money or material wealth. My dad was largely a career navy man, and my mother worked part-time in addition to having the daunting task of managing the household and its four children. My parents provided a loving and stable household for which I love them dearly and I espouse nothing but respect. I grew up in a household with structure, basics, and a consistent environment of understanding the difference between right and wrong. Part of my parents’ upbringing was the consistency in their messaging including such well-known expressions such as leave it as you found it, treat others as you would like to be treated, don’t swear, don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house, shut the door—you don’t live in a barn, turn off the lights, eat what Mother puts on the table—this is not a restaurant, wait until you have kids, save a penny—earn a penny, and the list goes on and on. However, having this strong moral base rooted me with the understanding of earning your keep and treating others with respect. I am not perfect and I have learned difficult life skills along the way, which are now what define me and have clearly influenced the management style I employ.

As a teenager, most of my disposable income came from two places: from asking my parents for a few dollars to working odd jobs in order to go the movies and sometimes frequent McDonald’s. It was clear that my parents raised me to enter the world as a good person and make my own way in life. In other words, my folks were not planning for my college, nor were they creating the expectations for me to go, but I was expected to provide for myself as I got older. This simple life lesson resulted in me finding ways to earn money honestly through humble employment, such as cutting lawns and shoveling snow before I was old enough to legally work. When I was sixteen, I took part-time jobs while going to school as a restaurant dishwasher, shed builder, weekend caterer, shoe salesman, and gas attendant. These honorable part-time jobs helped me learn the value of a dollar and humility. Funny how people treat others, depending on their status in life! Those early jobs were some of my first indelible experiences on understanding how to treat people at all levels within society and business. Let me emphasize, it’s never too difficult to smile and treat someone with respect regardless of your social position.

After graduating high school, I went directly to work in the printing industry as a tradesman with the help of a strong reference from my sister’s husband. I spent several years in this industry, and I was rewarded with early promotions due to my hardworking nature. However, I knew deep down that this was not the career path for me. Looking back, part of this decision was in no small part because I didn’t care for my boss—one of many early experiences that shaped my philosophy on leadership. At this early time in my life, I still lived at home and was paying a modest room and board to my parents. I can still recall sitting down with my parents and informing them of the decision I made to leave my job to begin school and my father’s disappointment. My dad recognized I was learning a trade, earning respectable money as a twenty-year-old, and he didn’t hesitate to point out that I had been promoted three times. This early and momentary disappointment many years later was turned into