THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP - G
One of the greatest books of its time (2001) - my copy proudly sits in my office library.
Thank you for reading my blog. Thank you for spending one minute of your precious time to contemplate the G words in your ‘Language of Leadership’.
At the conclusion of the workshops which I facilitate, I ask everyone to individually offer words of gratitude (and sometimes a gift of chocolate) to one person who also participated. This is done publicly and sometimes there is a pregnant pause as people grapple with the courage to kick off the exercise. However, once the group feel the warmth and sincerity of the gratitude, I can’t stop them!
We are void of gratitude and we need to take the lead to stop and say thank you, with context, to acknowledge the people who show up in your life.
The phrase, Good to Great, is a book title. It’s notoriety is synonymous with its internal terms, ‘Hedgehog Concept’ and ‘The Flywheel and the Doom Loop’. We used this language through the ‘noughties’ in the corporate world in our bid to have: a one big thing which we did globally well and an attempt to build momentum to achieve a transformation (on numerous occasions).
What has me sharing Good to Great, ever so regularly, is the statistic of the Good to Great CEO’s (13 of them) – as their uniqueness was their humility. Most of them were introverts and all but one was appointed from within the company. The key message is, leadership isn’t about bravado and ego, it’s about the company, the customer and the employee.
Our use of good to great is applying and experimenting with the practices that we know work. They are tried and tested and it’s about the will to make it work for you.
Gut. Yep, Gut. That’s my third G word!
Do you ever hear yourself say, I can feel it in my gut or others say, “trust your gut feeling”.
In my readings of neuroscience, I learnt that almost 100 years ago, neurons from the brain were discovered in the stomach – and we are still grappling with this aspect of intuition. When you can’t observe behaviour, it is difficult to believe that this can be proven. However, so many of us can honestly say that intuition guides us in our decision making!
The importance of the gut is that it links to other brains in our body (yet, there’s more than one) which we can train to help us communicate more effectively. I continue to work with, explore and learn about the power we have at our disposal and challenge you to consider your gut and how it helps you make decisions. This research is worth investigating - Conversational Intelligence helps us communicate as leaderships should - to move from good communicators to great communicators!
What are your G words?