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in a leader-follower structure, the performance of the organization is closely linked to the ability of the leader. As a result, there is a natural tendency to develop personality-driven leadership. Followers gravitate toward the personality. Short-term performance is rewarded. When leaders who tend to do it all themselves and rely on personality depart, they are missed and performance can change significantly. Psychologically for the leader, this is tremendously rewarding. It is seductive. Psychologically for most followers, this is debilitating. The follower learns to rely on the leader to
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Our greatest struggle is within ourselves.
You are destined to fail. No matter how good you get at avoiding mistakes, you will always have errors
In the same vein, success is a negative, an absence of failure, avoidance of a critique or an incident.
Focusing on avoiding mistakes takes our focus away from becoming truly exceptional.
Reducing mistakes would be an important side benefit to attaining our primary goal, achieving excellence.
people were coming to work simply with the hope of not screwing up.
The sense on board was that we were not proactive movers but only passive reactors to external events.
There was an emphasis on blaming what was happening on outside influences and factors, and the crew evidenced a collective lack of responsibility.
“Inspection mentality” is a morale killer.
doing well on inspections was going to be the natural outcome of being excellent, not the goal.
We called this idea of being open and inviting outside criticism “Embrace the inspectors.”
This mechanism sends the signal that we are in charge of our destiny, not controlled by some force.
Concerning areas where we were doing something exceptionally innovative or expertly, we viewed the inspectors as advocates to share our good practices with. Concerning areas where we were doing things poorly and needed help, we viewed them as sources of information and solutions. This created an atmosphere of learning and curiosity among the crew, as opposed to an attitude of defensiveness.
Control without competence is chaos.
“we learn,”
One of my new mottos
Learning is active;
how you look at things makes a difference. Instead of looking at a task as just a chore, look at it as an opportunity to learn more about the associated piece of equipment, the procedure, or if nothing else, about how to delegate or accomplish tasks.
Training is a subset of learning, which in turn is a subset of personal growth. We strive to grow each day.
We Learn (Everywhere, All the Time)
