Leadership, Accountability & Winning
Posted by Jim Bearden on Sun, Jul 26, 2009 @ 10:56 AM
The never-ending media focus on everything wrong—or potentially wrong—with everything, seems to lead us to only one plausible conclusion: The sky is falling! OK, I hope you’ll forgive that tongue-in-cheek reference to conditions that are, indeed, troubling.
Who among us can quarrel with the fact that the economic/financial landscape has changed dramatically over the past year? I’m hard pressed to think of one industry, association, practice or institution that hasn’t been impacted by the current recession. If we take the rational first step of acknowledging the existing financial circumstances (they are what they are), and stop obsessing and hand-wringing, we’ll be in position to make some better decisions going forward.
The decisions we make for dealing with the outside factors that impact us and our efforts to achieve and sustain success are based in part on our perspective. The way we look at those factors, the meanings we assign to them, will ultimately determine just how much impact they have on us. With that in mind, here’s something I offer for your consideration:
The potential for success does not disappear,
just because the requirements for success change.
One of the most popular presentations I’m doing for audiences this year is one titled: “Looking for Ways to Win, Regardless of the Hands You’re Dealt”. In that presentation, and in this blog, I’ll share what I see as some of the requirements for winning, especially in “troubling times”.
When the circumstances that impact our efforts to achieve success change, so do the requirements for doing so. The things we’ve done to get us to where we are (under different circumstances) may prove ineffective—even irrelevant—under the circumstances we’re encountering now.
Three requirements for success transcend changing outside circumstances, but their relative importance does change. They become more important in the face of adversity or difficult circumstances. Those three requirements will be my focus in this series of blog entries; they are:
- More accountability and less victimhood
- People who are able and willing to lead
- The Relentless Search for Better Ways