Sustainable leadership requires making the common good your highest priority. “Common good” doesn’t mean consensus—in fact it’s often discovered through intense and candid debate. Develop your own methods of assessing what’s best for your people, organization, clients, and your community, and where those interests intersect. You can “succeed” without doing this, but over time you risk undermining what you intend to achieve. Look more deliberately for common interests and you will lead with the unity necessary for sustainably strong performance.
Self-coaching:
- Looking at how your leadership impacts your organization, your people, clients, and community, in what ways could their common interests be better served?
- In what ways do you foster or encourage candid and rich debate / disagreement that lead to greater insights about your positive impact on these constituencies?
- Given the above, what changes can you make that would have the greatest impact toward a common good in 2010?
David Peck
Executive Coach and President
Leadership Unleashed
Twitter: recoveringleadr
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Based on client experiences / lessons learned, our weekly LeaderTips have been offering self-coaching themes and topics of interest to leaders since 2004. They are often published in BusinessWeek Online, sent weekly to our clients, and hundreds of other corporate leaders worldwide. I invite you to forward them to others, who are also welcome to subscribe using the link below. Note that over 100 of these tips appear in my book, Beyond Effective: Practices in Self-aware Leadership. Click here to subscribe to LeaderTips via email.
