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Families Also Need Leaders

 FamilyMeeting1

 

“My family comes first” – almost every father I know.
There is a ton of content out there for business leadership, for church leadership, for every type of leadership. There are books, consultants, coaches, blogs, podcast’s and even mastermind groups.  I consume some of this content and I have learned some good stuff.

 

Business and church leaders often work on leadership skills so that they can lead their business or churches more effectively.

 

Most would say that “family comes first”or “my family is the most important thing in my life”, we have careers to support our families. But think about it, how much planning, how much strategy, how many goals and how many meetings do we have about our family lives? I think most of us just allow our family lives to happen as they will.  What if we applied our leadership wisdom, skills and talents to our families? starting now!

 

Families need leadership as much or more than do businesses.  We can shape our children’s lives with our parenting skills. This can effect our children for a lifetime, for good or for bad. The concept of family leadership goes beyond parenting only.  Parenting is just one of subset of family leadership, because not all families raise children.  Family leadership embraces what is unique and special about a family. It doesn’t try to change or manipulate and make a family into something it is not.  It accepts the family for what it is, it helps and guides family decisions and focus for decades and for generations.  Families are the foundation of a civilized society and provide stability, so of course we should strive to lead our families well.

 

There are three things that the leaders of families can do to lead well.
Assumptions: there is a roof over the family’s head, adequate clothing on everyone, enough food to eat and plenty of love in the home.

 

  1. Define the family’s mission.
  2. Create a sense of unity and oneness in your family.
  3. Set specific goals for the family.
A family mission is that one most important thing that your family focuses on in the near-term. Perhaps it is improving relationships with one another, perhaps it is teaching our faith, perhaps it is doing something together like a big vacation, perhaps it is working on a financial struggle.  Don’t spend too much time on this, just pick something you can agree with and go for it, there are no rules and you can change things on the fly.  Is your family just existing, or does it have a unique mission? whatever you think that mission is or should be, start to talk about it, write it down, discuss it with your spouse, tell it to your children until they know it by heart.  I am just beginning this process with my kids and they seem to enjoy the guidance.
Does your family have a sense of unity and oneness, is your family united? do family members suffer alone with problems? Does everyone tend to dump things on mom? or dad? everyone should share the burden of life together, help one another, defend one another and forgive one another.

 

As part of that mission and unity it is a good idea to set yearly goals for your family. Set less than 10 goals and write them out, make them achievable but ambitious and make sure everyone in the family knows them.

 

These all sound great right? But how to begin?  We can start by coming up with a family mission then simply say it out loud often, talk about the goals for the year, start creating that UNITY that ONENESS in your family by teaching unity and expecting it from everyone. This wont happen overnight but with consistency over time we get there.

 

Family life is important, more so than is our careers, our businesses, even more than our churches, so lets strive to lead our families well.  Children are counting on us, our spouse is counting us. When death comes many years from now our family is what will matter to us, not our nest egg.
Don’t continue another day in an unhealthy or toxic family life, make effort to restore and to lead our family well. If necessary get marriage counseling or parenting counseling, there is no shame in that, determine to fix what is broken.

 

The only thing more painful than confronting and uncomfortable topic is pretending it doesn’t exist.

 

 

Most family members will respond to leadership and will freely follow…or will at least tolerate it.

What are some other ways we can lead our families well?

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A Social Network at Work – Why We Should Bother

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Foursquare, Google+, Pinterest, Youtube, Yammer, …and the list grows, social is everywhere and is growing, it has been largely spontaneous, and not forced, the demand for social tools pulls these new products into existence.

social media software

However, within many corporate organizations social tools are looked down upon or considered a marketing tool at best, we cling to email and archaic productivity tools that were great for the 80’s and 90’s but in comparison they are slow and overused. 

Social software tools absolutely can and should be used to collaborate within organizations.  Particularly within organizations where innovation is used for growth. All things being equal, an organization that collaborates and educates itself spontaneously using social media tools will innovate faster than one that looks down upon the same tools.

It is time that social software tools work their way into corporations and into organizations on a large-scale. 

Acceptance by corporate leadership and the corporate masses will not be as easy as has been with the general public.

Some of the reasons:

  • Corporate concern about proprietary issues, there is hesitancy to push these more open social tools.
  • Social media is a tool to enhance social interactions and few want to be “social” at work on a large-scale so other reasons for use must be placed at the forefront of people’s minds before adoption will be widespread.
  • There is not yet a dominant leader for social enterprise software as there is in the public (facebook, twitter, linkedin).

Here are three absolute musts for widespread adoption of social enterprise networks and software into the corporate environment.

  1. An absolute assurance of privacy and protection of proprietary information.
  2. A spontaneous motivation for the masses other than “leadership says we should be using social tools.” (‘keep up with the Joneses’ attitude can be a motivation even for those in the C-suite.)
  3. A clear and obvious advantage for the masses using social tools at work, they must want to use these tools to make their job’s easier.  They must realize its value or they are responding to leadership’s generous incentives.
  4. Credit and rewards given for use of social tools, ie… it could be part of the required collaboration and education of peers objectives that most corporations reward employees for.

So what exactly am I talking about here, facebook at work? Not exactly, but I am talking using social software to enable daily instruction and education of peers, I’m talking about having the ability to intentionally share what we are working on, intentional and incentivized collaboration enhanced with social enterprise tools.

taken from wikipedia…Enterprise social networking focuses on the use of online social networks or social relations among people who share business interests and/or activities. Enterprise social networking is often a facility of enterprise social software, which is essentially social software used in “enterprise” (business/ commercial) contexts. It encompasses modifications to corporate intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication, collaboration and other aspects of their intranets. Enterprise social networking is also generally thought to include the use of a standard external social networking service to generate visibility for an enterprise.

Leadership should realize that social tools will not likely explode as they have in the public domain because reasons for use are different.

So lets discuss exactly why we should set up a social media network within our enterprise:

  • Social networking can speed up collaboration like nothing else, self collaborating teams that educate themselves can solve problems, innovate and accomplish MUCH more at a FASTER RATE than teams that are separate and siloed and are not collaborating.
  • The competition is increasinly using social enterprise tools and to compete we should use.

Leadership must realize that most employees don’t want to be social to the same level they do with friends and family on facebook so they must incentivized! They must constantly communicate the whys, the business advantages to social collaboration tools. 

Enterprise social networking has not yet exploded like public social networking has (ie. facebook) but it can if we are mindful about why it should and careful to consider how it differs from public social media.

What are some social media networking tools that are good for use within enterprises?

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“Corporate America” Bashing

I listen to the motivations entrepreneurs often and have noticed that one of the top reasons they give for starting their own companies is to escape from “Corporate America”.  The “Corporate America” term has come to mean bureaucracy, dysfunction and frustration for many many people. This bothers me because…it does not have to be this way!

Fist-in-air

What if leader’s in “Corporate America” began a personal mission to heal the bureaucracy, dysfunction and frustration within their organizations?  What if organizational health became one of our top objectives?

Think of impact that this would have on productivity, think of the impact this would have on turnover rate.  Think of the impact this would have on financial performance over time.  Think of the impact this would make in employee’s lives and in job satisfaction.

I believe that the impact from this would be amazing!

Get healthy corporate America! care about the impact of your team and project leadership, don’t be lazy in your people management, understand the impact of your leadership …or lack of leadership in people’s lives, in people’s careers, on people’s salaries and most importantly on your company’s performance in the market.

Here are three things that we can do in the short-term to improve the health of our organizations:

  1. Communicate the purpose of the organization and your commitment to health constantly, even if it seems redundant, say it out loud repeatedly.
  2. Care about the growth of our people, challenge them to grow and expand their skills and tangibly reward them when they do.
  3. Ask our people for help in making healthier teams, because they have a major role to play in team health.

 What other things can we do today to make our organizations more healthy?

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