How to Lead by The Book: Proverbs, Parables, and Principles to Tackle Your Toughest Business Challenges
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Concise, to-the-point, and highly useable, How to Lead by THE BOOK presents a series of personal and business challenges recognizable to leaders, then deals with each through insight, personal experience, and a discussion of why conventional approaches often fail. Each section then concludes with winning proverbs, parables, or principles that offers applicable strategies to solve the issue.
In this practical and inspiring guide, you'll discover proven methods and advice to shape young leaders, stretch veteran leaders, become a better communicator, maintain your work-life balance, deal with dishonesty among competitors, and much more.
- Shows why typical approaches to leadership problems often fail, while biblical wisdom succeeds
- Covers both day-to-day dilemmas and larger questions of management, accountability, and vision
- From the bestselling author of How to Run Your Business by THE BOOK, Up Your Business, and If You Don't Make Waves You'll Drown
What is the number one downfall for leaders? When is the best time to make a decision? How do you hold others accountable? How do you survive success with your principles intact? What does the Bible say about time management? Get the answers to these and many more practical business questions when you discover the winning wisdom of How to Lead by THE BOOK.
Dave Anderson
Dave Anderson joined the New York Times in 1966 after working at the New York Journal-American and the Brooklyn Eagle. He became a Sports of The Times columnist in 1971 and won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1981. Among many other honors, he was inducted into the National Sports Writers and Sportscasters Hall of Fame in 1990 and in 1991 received the Red Smith Award for contributions to sports journalism from the Associated Press Sports Editors.
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How to Lead by The Book - Dave Anderson
CHALLENGE 1
How Do I Hold People Accountable?
Man’s Wisdom and Way
Get in their face with tough talk. Intimidate, threaten, and bully. If they don’t like it, they should either step up or opt out!
In the 1,000 leadership presentations I give each decade, I have discovered that this old-school palaver is still the strategy of choice for many misguided leaders. While trying to find the right word to describe this tendency herein, I could not decide whether to use hopeless, futile, or stupid. Thus, I have decided to define this method for accountability as hopelessly futile stupidity.
THE BOOK’s Wisdom and Way
Keys to holding others accountable include clear feedback on performance and consequences for failing to perform. These topics are covered in future chapters. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s important to remember the first nonnegotiable for accountability: You can’t first hold others accountable until you’re resolutely clear about what you expect from them!
While visiting the Mount of Beatitudes in Israel, I was struck by its prominence in height and stature compared to its surroundings. Thus, it is fitting that Jesus chose this spot to teach on the topic of elevated values and expectations. In Matthew 5–7, Jesus outlined the revolutionary values of the Christian faith with His Sermon on the Mount. He presented clear behavioral standards, along with appropriate rewards or penalties, contingent upon one’s obedience. Whereas the Old Testament ended in Malachi 4:6 with a curse, Jesus began His ministry teaching on the Mount with a blessing: Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
You are able to bless your employees in a similar manner when you clearly define what you expect from them. You simultaneously strengthen your organization, as doing so provides an essential benchmark for accountability.
Why did Jesus set forth expectations and values so early in His ministry? For the same reason you must do so within your organization: You cannot possibly hold anyone accountable until you define what you expect in the first place! But even more important, it gave Him a chance to model what He expected with His own life. Even when Jesus’s mouth was closed, He taught by His life. You must do likewise. After all, you cannot credibly hold others accountable for the behaviors you have defined as nonnegotiable unless you personally live them.
There is no record in Matthew of Jesus offering feedback to anyone, much less holding them accountable, until He had clearly defined what He expected from his followers. Using THE BOOK as a guide, consider the seven thoughts and rules in this chapter to help you create a higher-accountability culture in your organization.
Some leaders believe that establishing clear, high, written expectations is harsh and is a form of micromanagement; therefore, they present their expectations punctuated with an apology. On the contrary, what is truly harsh is not letting people know what you expect and allowing them to fail. Thus, if you want to apologize for something, apologize for letting others flounder and drift, but never for being clear about what you expect from them.
1. Ambiguity is the enemy of accountability.
Until you define or redefine expectations for technical and behavioral performance on the job, holding others accountable is unfair and impossible, because the question becomes, Accountable for what?
2. Failing to communicate the truth of expectations and accountability to your associates puts blood on your hands
when you terminate them and they don’t see it coming.
If you catch employees by surprise when you fire them, you have failed as a leader. You either failed to set clear expectations, failed to give honest feedback on their performance, or failed to hold them accountable throughout their tenure with your organization. The Bible relates a parallel situation when God instructs Ezekiel to act as a watchman for his contemporaries. In a similar manner, you serve as the watchman for any entity in which you wish to exhibit leadership.
Son of Man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; therefore hear a word from My mouth, and give them warning from Me: When I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life, that same wicked man shall die in his inquiry, but his blood I will require at your hand. Yet, if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, nor from his wicked ways, he shall die in his iniquity; but you have delivered your soul. [Ezek. 3:17–19]
3. Giving honest feedback, as fast after a behavior as possible, is a key to eliminating gray areas and holding others accountable.
No one working with you should ever have to guess where they, or you, stand concerning your expectations or their performance. Give fast, honest, specific feedback to reinforce productive actions and confront errant behaviors.
4. Consequences for failing to perform must be established and imposed.
In Matthew 25, you read about the Parable of the Talents. A talent was the largest measure of money in the Greek system. The unprofitable servant had his one talent taken from him—the one he refused to use—and given to the top performer, who had increased his five talents to ten! His penalty for not using the opportunity he had been given was to lose it. Even though this one talent
servant was trusted with less than the others, he was still accountable for what little he was given. As is typical of those failing to deliver results, this underachiever casually attempted to excuse burying his talent, almost as though he were expecting praise for his prudence in preserving rather than increasing it. To exacerbate matters, he made light of his sloth by uttering an excuse and blaming the master who had entrusted him with the talent: Sir, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed. And I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground
(Matt. 25:24–25).
Like the master in this story you must coach with consequences,
enriching those who deliver results and punishing the sluggards falling short. Without consequences for failing to reach established performance standards, those standards are reduced to suggestions, and your personal credibility is rendered ridiculous.
In the first book of Corinthians, chapter 5, Paul is writing about sexual immorality and its consequences. It seems as though a church member was sleeping with his father’s wife. Note that Paul gives no apology for the consequence. The fellow who was living in sexual sin was to be put out of the church, and suffer for lack of its fellowship, until he had repented and was spiritually restored. Paul rightly reasoned that condoning someone who publicly persisted in such scandalous sin could corrupt the entire body of believers in Corinth. Then, as now, professing Christians are on public display. Those who confess Christ with their lips, but deny Him with their lifestyle, do incalculable damage to Christ’s cause. Read these words from the apostle Paul concerning this accountability issue:
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles—that a man has his father’s wife! And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. [1 Cor.