jeanmoran-blog
LMI Packaging Solutions CEO Blog
CEO Jean Moran blog posts.
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LEADERSHIP
I was recently asked to share some of my philosophies and stories about leadership.
I do not pretend to be a great leader, but like most of us, I have known many who were.
A business colleague and I have had an ongoing debate about leadership. He says that everyone does not have what it takes to be a leader and I say that anyone can be trained to be a leader. As is the case with most debates in life, the answer is somewhere in the middle, like Malcolm. I heard a distinction this week that addressed that middle.
TO BE A LEADER YOU MUST WANT TO BE A LEADER.
So let me begin this next series of blogs giving you the Jean Moran view of leadership. Again, I am not Ghandi, and am not Martin Luther King. I am just a CEO that has tried to do the best I can to lead for the past 45 years and I have had the privilege of knowing some extraordinary leaders.
Here is what I have seen, and believe.
A leader will go first into the fire and stay last on the sinking ship. Your people will follow you but only if you are willing to do what you have asked them to do. This may seem unfair and not very exciting at times but if you are a leader you will want to do this. It will come as second nature to you.
You will smile more often because one of your team has won then you will when you have won. Again this is not unusual because when your team wins so do you.
You will learn humility in a new way. You will learn that your ego no longer can rule the day. When it does you will confuse reality with the stories you make up in your head about your greatness and everyone will suffer from your being out of touch with reality.
You will be courageous when you are scared, and you will work when others are sleeping. You will believe in yourself when others don’t and still question when others say you are a hero. Your leadership will never sleep, even when you are shopping for groceries.
LEADERSHIP is not easy, but when it’s happening there’s nothing quite like it. Everyone wins.
Finally, leadership is about handing off; allowing others to step forward and take the lead. Maybe the greatest test of leadership is its sustainability once the baton has been passed.
Recently I listened to a talk show in which Billie Jean King was featured. She talked about how she played that tennis match against Bobby Riggs, not to win, but to change the way women athletes were viewed in the world. She has been directly linked to the passing of Title Nine and the post graduate opportunities now available to women in the United States. I’d say she did a good job of passing the leadership baton for her values.
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YOU CAN FIND YOUR LIFE ON THE YOGA MAT
This is something my yoga instructor says to me weekly. My ‘monkey mind’ usually responds quietly ‘yeh, yeh, yeh, yeh!’
Until the other day, when suddenly, what she was saying had a direct link to something I was experiencing in my life. I was doing a new pose that was playing havoc with my hamstrings and I wanted to do it quickly and get it over with.
My yoga instructor gently reprimanded me, saying, “No, no, no, stay in the discomfort of the pose. That is the only way it can help what it is designed to help in your body. People come out of poses much too quickly and lose all the benefit. Breathe into the discomfort and stay with it.”
In an instant I knew what there was to do with that issue I was facing in my life. As usual I wanted the easy answer. I did not want to live in the questions. I wanted to move out of the discomfort quickly and once again not learn what there was to learn for a long term solution.
There are things we can resolve in our lives very quickly by throwing poorly thought out solutions after them and for a short time it will look like we have resolved the issue. I am learning that if I stay with the challenge a little longer and really allow it to show me what I need to see, then and only then do I fully get the benefit of the opportunity the universe has put before me.
This is the road less taken in our quick fix world but I think it is one that must be considered. I urge you next time to try living in the questions of what is challenging you rather than rushing to the easy, quick fix answers.
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