Leadership: useful framework and suggestions to improve

My time spent as an active duty Marine Corps Officer started a lifelong journey to better understand leadership. Over the years, I’ve observed many great leaders. Unfortunately, I also experienced the negative impact on employee morale and customer satisfaction of some very poor leaders.

My conclusion is that great leaders are not born. They incrementally move from good-to-great through a conscience effort. Leadership starts at the top. It’s impossible to build a corporate culture that fosters great leaders without the top level executives also being great leaders. Here are four ways to improve your individual and company wide leadership skills.?

Suggestion #1 - Create a Leadership Framework

Identify Three Core Values

There should only be three Core Values. They form a foundation upon which everything else is built. Everyone must know and demonstrate these core values every day. For example, Marine Leadership?starts with the Core Values of Honor, Courage, and Commitment.?

List the leadership traits and qualities that are most important to your company

Every company will emphasize different traits and qualities. Here’s a list to get you started.

Identify leadership principles that everyone should follow.

What leadership principles are most important to your company? These principles should be discussed, prodded, poked at, and fully internalized with examples.

Suggestion #2 - Document your progress

One of my heroes is Benjamin Franklin. Many consider him the first American and founder of ‘Self Help’. Franklin kept a diary that listed one virtue on each page that he would like to convert into a habit. Every day he wrote an entry into his diary of one specific thing he performed that demonstrated a virtue he would like to master.

You can do the same thing. Take three of the leadership qualities and traits most important to you and document every day what you did to demonstrate that quality.

Find your most promising future leaders, develop them, systematically replicate them, and put them on your biggest opportunities – not on your biggest problems. - Jim Collins, Good to Great

Suggestion #3 - Tell Stories to Learn from each Other

We are defined by the stories that we tell. When I first worked for EDS, Ross Perot was still leading the company. I was highly impressed with Ross’ commitment to leadership. How many companies would go to the extent that Ross did to rescue his employees caught in the Iranian revolution. (Intrigued? read ‘On Wings of Eagles’ by Ken Follett).

Everyone at EDS was considered a leader. Many attended a formal Leader Application Workshop that helped instill a common view of leadership. We often told stories about how we implemented leadership principles in formal and informal settings. The core of this leadership became know as grass root wisdoms. You would hear these statements constantly in everyday conversations.

Suggestion #4 - Read a Book

At the end of the day it’s everyone’s individual responsibility to become a great leader. One of the best books I recently read on leadership is ‘Extreme Ownership How US Navy Sales Lead and Win’ by Jocko Willing and Leif Babin. This book does a great job identifying leadership lessons learned through US Navy SEAL combat or training experience, explaining that leadership principle and demonstrating how the principle can be applied to the business world.

Never let go of your character – “When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.” - Maxwell, Developing the Leader Within You

What are your ideas to improve your individual leadership?

I'm making arrangements with Amazon to provide a FREE Kindle version of my new book, Comedy: The Avatar and the Brain-Computer Interface, this coming Labor Day between 2-6 Sept 2021. Please consider reading the book and posting an honest review on Amazon Kindle. My author's page on Amazon

The book uses the framework of a science fiction novel that is a combination of thriller and mystery. The narrative follows the adventures of two young adults as they journey through life—one born in 2020 and the other 2170.

This provides the reader with the opportunity to compare how key trends in AI, robots, avatars, brain-computer interfaces, and quantum computing change in the near and long term. The reader also explores how the Toyota Production System and DevOps culture can be tailored to support new colonies on Mars and Venus.

How do these two childhoods, separated by almost 150 years, compare? How about later phases of life? How do society, technology, and philosophy change between the two time periods? Read and find out! I hope you enjoy!