Lee Ellis's Blog, page 171
July 30, 2019
How Humor Can Keep Employees Engaged
Why does humor in the workplace make financial sense? Because it works. And in a world where 83 percent of Americans feel stressed at work, 55 percent of Americans are unsatisfied with their jobs, and 47 percent of Americans struggle to stay happy, something has to change.
What’s at stake? Close to a trillion dollars in lost productivity and increased costs. This SHRM article tells how to humor helps the workplace…please read on the SHRM website and post your comments and suggestions, too – thank you
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July 29, 2019
New Training Guide! Get Your Copy
NEW RESOURCE! We’ve just released the new Engage with Honor Group Training Guide as a self-study leadership development course for your team.
Used with the award-winning book, Engage with Honor, this training guide provides everything you need to build a culture of courageous accountability.
Purchase your copy in the Online Store
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July 28, 2019
On This Day in Leadership History, July 28th
On this day in leadership history in 2006, researchers announced that two ancient reptiles had been found off Australia. The Umoonasaurus and Opallionectes were the first of their kind to be found in the period soon after the Jurassic era.
What’s the leadership lesson? Honorable leaders are open to new ideas and discoveries in their work, and they strive to remain teachable (because they don’t know everything).
Umoonasaurus – Wikipedia
Opallionectes – Wikipedia
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July 26, 2019
Leading with Honor Wisdom for Today, July 26, 2019
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picasso
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July 25, 2019
Three facts about #leadership #resilience
Explore the in-depth infographic on this topic, and spend some time evaluating and building your resilience.
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July 23, 2019
Free Assessment Report Offer – See Inside
Free Assessment Report Offer – self-awareness is the foundational first step in personal and professional growth, and it’s the basis for all training and consulting that Leading with Honor does.
As a free offer to our friends and colleagues, take the online ‘Leading with Honor Report’ to get a snapshot of your leadership strengths and struggles –
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July 22, 2019
Refine Your Leadership Balance – SPECIAL OFFER
Refine Your Leadership Balance – SPECIAL OFFER – The unique, psycho-metrically validated Leadership Behavior DNA® (LBDNA) assessment process can pinpoint your exact leadership style including how you perceive boundaries in work and team dynamics.
Thousands of people every year rely on LBDNA to help them and their teams grow both personally and professionally. Buy both the Leading with Honor book and the Leadership Behavior DNA Assessment together.
Visit the Leading with Honor Store to learn more
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Authentic Leadership Behaviors in 4 Steps
by Guest Author, Phil Eastman
I was once told that the secret to any book’s success is its title. Unfortunately a book title does not always properly portray what is inside. The title can be clever and catchy while the text inside is dull and disappointing. To illustrate, several years ago Mahan Khalsa wrote a solid book on solution selling with one of the best titles I have ever heard, Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play. What a great title with great potential for sales. That title is also a great opening line for a discussion of authentic leadership.
The pursuit of leadership authenticity is like a book with a provocative title. Too many leaders have been ingrained with the myths that results are all that matter. In fact, results do matter, but what matters more is the means by which a leader achieves those results.
“Results are better when leaders are authentic in their approach. The challenge is to make sure your road to authenticity winds through your character.” [Tweet This]
There are three major barriers to leadership authenticity –
1. First, we live in an image saturated world with few opportunities to see, recognize and celebrate authentic leadership. Successful leadership portrayed in most media outlets are usually centered on the deal and winning above being true to oneself and others. The television show, The Apprentice, is a great example. On the show, teams work together toward a common goal while competing against another group doing the same. When the losing team finds itself in the boardroom making a desperate plea for remaining on the show, the people seem willing to resort to any behavior to keep from being fired. Very few have taken responsibility for their own actions and often times those who do are the ones who get fired. We don’t have a productive manner or model for a discussion of character.
2. Therein lies the second challenge. When character discussions arise, they are almost always directed negatively rather than focused on the positive. In other words, character is more visible when things are fractured rather than intact. We need a model for the positive proactive discussion of character and its connection to leadership.
3. The third and possibly most challenging element in the pursuit of leadership authenticity is solid and realistic self-awareness. Introspection about your character and leadership style is very difficult and yet is the master key to your development. Many leaders or teams use an online assessment like Leadership Behavior DNA to objectively learn more about their unique strengths and struggles.
All that said, self-awareness is the key to authentic leadership, and authentic leadership is critical to your organization’s success. But what is authentic leadership, and what does it look like?
“An authentic leader is one that courageously and wisely moves a group of people, by doing what is right, to an end that is in the long-term best interest of everyone.” [Tweet This]
Character then becomes the pivotal aspect of authentic leadership. In other words, a leader’s character defines and drives their actions, and as such, if you want certain leadership behaviors, we must tackle the shaping of your character. That must however be done consciously rather than by letting your character be formed by the unconscious flow of media driven images.
To develop authentic leadership, one must –
1. Find and use a character model that appeals to you.
2. Determine what behaviors you will adopt and build into your leadership based on that character model.
3. Practice your new leadership behaviors in the work you currently do.
4. Share with your team what you are working toward (they will appreciate the authenticity).
Think of authentic leadership as matching the book’s content with its title. The compelling, clever, descriptive exterior representation must match the text inside so that neither the title nor the text disappoint. Remember, let’s get real or let’s not play. PE
Get an Objective Review of Your Leadership Strengths and Struggles
[image error]The unique, psycho-metrically validated Leadership Behavior DNA® (LBDNA) assessment process can pinpoint your exact level of your “go-to behaviors” during fearful situations. Thousands of people every year rely on LBDNA to help them and their teams grow both personally and professionally.
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About the Author: Phil Eastman is the author of The Character of Leadership: An Ancient Model for a Quantum Age and Dimensional Strategy: A Leader’s Guide to Building a Strategic Plan. He is also creator of the Authentic Leadership Checklist.
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July 21, 2019
On This Day in Leadership History, July 21st
On this day in leadership history in 2011 in Florida, Space Shuttle Atlantis landed successfully at Kennedy Space Center after completing STS-135. It was the final flight of NASA’s space shuttle program.
What’s the leadership lesson? Even though a season may come to an end on something important in your work, it could be transformed into something new in the future. Keep good ideas alive in new ways.
Space Shuttle STS-135 – Wikipedia
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July 19, 2019
The Moon Landing Perspective from the POW Camps
By Lee Ellis
Where were you fifty years ago when American astronauts landed on the moon? Do you remember what you were doing that day? Most Gen X, no Millennials, nor more recent generations can answer that question, as you weren’t born. But there are still many around who do remember what happened on July 20, 1969. Much of the world watched Neil Armstrong take that “one small step for (a) man, one giant Leap for mankind”.
Unfortunately, I missed it. As one of some 400 POWs (at that time) who were incarcerated in small cells in North Vietnam, we had no idea this was happening. We were being crushed by the weight of an ideology that was not kind to mankind.
POW Realities in Retrospect
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The summer of 1969 was a battle in all the camps. Of course, there was no air conditioning, but to make matters worse, our windows were bricked up and only a few air vents here and there allowed any fresh air in those medieval style dungeons. After several previous summers there, we could handle the inconvenience of heat rash and boils. Our challenge was an intense surge in torture; a purge was blistering across the camps in Hanoi and surrounding areas.
There were two very different but critical scenarios playing out simultaneously across the camps.
Fear and Hope
First, there was an escape at the Zoo camp, and that triggered fear in the prison hierarchy. The impact on us was brutal retaliation, not only in the Zoo Annex where it happened but all the other camps, including Son Tay, the camp where I lived from 1968-1970. The two men who escaped were captured within 36 hours and brutally tortured—one of them to death.
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Members of the League of POW MIA Families meet with President Nixon about the conditions of their loved ones in Vietnam.
But secondly at the same time back in the states, a remarkable and historic movement was taking place in the spring and summer of 1969. The National League of POW/MIA Families gathered momentum and gained massive popular support for our cause. They first abandoned the Defense Department’s “Keep Quiet” policy for POW/MIA families and went public about our situation. The League leaders met with President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger and insisted that our government speak up and put pressure on the Communist about our treatment. It worked.
President Nixon and his administration did not want to be on the wrong side of this issue. By the spring of that year, SECDEF Melvin Laird was in front of the cameras demanding that the communists keep their signed commitment to the Geneva Accords, specifying rules for treatment of POWs.
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Ross Perot Sr testifying before Congress on the treatment of POW MIAs and their families.
Then with the help of our dear friend, the great Ross Perot Sr. (1930-2019) and many other great Americans, the League expanded their PR campaign worldwide to pressure the communists for better treatment and a full accounting of all POWs and those Missing in Action.
The communists thrived on anti-US propaganda, but when the tables turned on them it got their attention. In the summer of 1969, they needed something to counteract the bad PR. And of course, in good communist style they needed propaganda. Bending the truth and using facts out of context in their normal fashion was not sufficient. They needed “fake news” to make their case and prove it to the world. This precipitated the other purge of the summer of 1969.
What kind of fake news did they want, you might ask? The answer is beyond the logic of a normal person and likely exceeds your worst imagination. They began to torture men to sign a statement saying they had received “lenient and humane treatment.” Soak on that for a moment. Yes, that’s what happened. It was the most blatant example of “the ends justify the means” one could ever imagine.
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The Vietnamese forcing Navy Commander Jeremiah Denton to create propaganda to support the Communist cause.
Our team battled tooth and nail. Ultimately though, our captors could make you do something, and they wouldn’t let you die. Eventually more than a third of our camp had experienced these “means” in an attempt to get the desired ends of a “good treatment” statement. When we challenged them because it was not true, they assured us that “truth is that which most benefits the party.”
Celebration Amidst the Battle
So, while most of the world was celebrating the lunar landing, in the reality of the POWs camps we were suffering in the worst way. But our day of celebration was much closer than we realized. On Sept 2, 1969 Ho Chi Minh died and six weeks later the proletariat had chosen new leaders. Within a week, as with a flip of a switch. all torture stopped. They quit calling us “creeminals”; they quit threatening us with war crimes trials; they tore out the bricks in the windows and opened the shutters for hours each day, and the food got better. There were still battles regularly, but compared to the previous years, life became more of a live and let live existence. Our hearts were lifted, and our hopes strengthened.
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To us, the victory of the wives and families was monumental and perhaps more life-changing than the moon landing. These volunteers, mostly women, changed the policy of two governments and enabled us to live a much better life (that’s an entire lesson on great leadership). These new conditions allowed us to process our anger, shame, and bitterness, and ultimately return with honor—ready to take on the life of freedom with our families and fellow countrymen.
Hearing the Moon Landing News
One morning seven months after the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the speaker in our cell at Son Tay blared with the usual propaganda from Hanoi Hannah. Though we usually ignored most of it, our filters picked up the clues of events happening outside. Suddenly our ears perked with the mention of Astronaut Neal Armstrong. She said that if he were to go to the DMZ, the craters there would look very familiar to what he had seen last summer. She did not use the word moon, but the context could only mean that he had been to the moon.
Immediately we went to the wall to reach out to our neighbors in Cat House room 4. “Get Brudno on”, we said. Capt. Al Brudno was a brilliant teammate with a degree in Astrophysics from MIT and plans to become an astronaut, and we wanted his confirmation. He came back with “Yes, and they are ahead of schedule.”
Though it was February 1970 before we learned about the lunar landing, we were thrilled and very proud of our country. Jim Warner, our resident Marine and brilliant philosopher, scientist, poet, and true renaissance man (not an oxymoron—Marines can be tough and brilliant) made some interesting comments and then remarked, “That means our flag is now on the moon. We should come to attention and salute it the next time we see it from the prison yard.”
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Later that day when we went outside to pick up our meal, we looked up and there was a crescent of the moon. We stopped, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, and at the command of our senior officer, Capt. Ken Fisher, proudly saluted our flag. We pictured it in our mind and from then on whenever we saw the moon, our spirits were lifted to know that Old Glory was not far away
Looking Back
And now you know the rest of the story of the moon and 1969. Not only about the dark side of the earth, but how a sequence of events highlighted by the courage and commitment of our families, friends and citizens shined light and hope into the world of the POWs. The course of our lives was changed forever, and we are eternally grateful for all you did for us.
LE
The Crucible of POW Existence
[image error] In this powerful and practical award-winning book, Lee Ellis, a former Air Force pilot, candidly talks about his five and a half years of captivity and the 14 key leadership principles behind this amazing story.
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Then is well documented in Heath Lee’s inspiring new book League of Wives, 2019, St Martin’s Press
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