Find your leadership soul
Values and ethics are the soul of your company. Today, having values is not enough.
Companies are their people. What are leaders responsible for? Leaders are responsible for delivering results and the spirit of their team members.
Some of your team members embrace your shared goals and vision. They foster a healthy culture. They inspire.
Some team members may feel aggrieved, under-valued and disaffected. Some of them sit next to you at work. Their attitudes and behaviors also live within your organizational culture. They add their own energy and influence to the character of your company. What you accept, you and your team reflect - to each other, customers, partners, and your community.
Values and operating principles on posters hung in the corridors of businesses only mean something if they come down off the wall and are in the hearts, minds, and actions of each and every team member.
The way we treat one another is a big factor in team performance and it starts and is sustained with each one of us.
Let’s get out of our heads and find our leadership soul, where vulnerability and honor live.
Let’s model kindness in our conversations and decision-making for the greater good -- even when hard calls have to be made.
This week we celebrate World Kindness Day. We pause for a moment in our hectic, wired world to look up, smile at one another and acknowledge the power of the simplest acts of kindness.
Let’s embody and act on the values we want for ourselves and for our children. Let's create humane, caring cultures where we all want to come to work, deliver real value for our companies, and leave energized for our families, friends, and communities.
We have to do this ourselves – it’s the only way forward.
With gratitude this Thanksgiving for kindness and caring, from our home to yours,
Peace.
Sherri McArdle is a wife and mother to adult children and has been a business leader/owner for over 25 years. She is also a Master Certified Coach (MCC) to leaders and executives across the country and a trained mediator.
