024: Leading with a Limp, Part 4: Leadership Qualities That Encourage Recovery

The Bill Perry Show

In this “Leading with a Limp" podcast series, we talk about how leaders can effectively manage themselves and their teams during times of conflict and move toward organizational health.

If you’ve been a leader for any time, you know that strife, betrayal, and even personal wounds will come. The secret to leading well isn’t to avoid these painful times but to embrace them and heal. Creating an exceptionally healthy work environment requires intentional hard work. But do it, and your team will flourish.

In this episode, we focus on the qualities of leadership that enable leaders to create cultures that facilitate restoration.

The Winning Combination: Humility and Professional Resolve

Jim Collins and his research team identified these two qualities as marking leaders who succeeded in creating enduring success for the companies they led. Humility without professional resolve fails to deliver exceptional results. Professional resolve without humility produces inflated egos at the expense of the contributions of those who serve your vision.

Humility

C.S. Lewis offered a brilliant definition of humility: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less.” Healthy leaders are not driven to inflate their own egos. They don’t suffer the common neuroses of being gracious publicly and assholes in private.

The Resolve

Leaders who possess a resolve to create an enduring business and whose successes are shared by all who make that possible will intentionally create a level of trust that enables teams to navigate seasons of conflict and emotional injury.

Responsibility and Generosity

The creation of exceptional trust is the reward for leaders who are quick to take responsibility for failures and generous with credit for their team’s successes.

We’re Creating a Challenging Future

Unfortunately, with the growing popularity of an every-player-gets-a-trophy mentality we are not setting future generations up for success where these two characteristics are concerned. I believe that every child should be valued, but we have to allow them to fail and then teach them to take responsibility for their failures if we are going to foster their future success. In a world where ego is rewarded with little consequence for failure, extreme personal humility and intense professional resolve cannot flourish. We owe our kids a better future.

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If you recognize conflict in your team or a limp in your leadership but don’t know where to begin, let’s talk. We offer a great diagnostic tool to determine the strengths and liabilities of your organization. It’s a relatively pain-free process by which we obtain feedback from your team members to identify the roadblocks and blind spots in your pursuit of a healthy team.

Connect with me for a free, complimentary conversation about our organizational-health process. It won’t cost you more than 30 minutes of your time to find out if some feedback would be valuable for you and your team.

Connect with me on social media! Hit me up on Instagram or Twitter. I’d love to know how these podcasts are provoking your thought processes.

Until next time, lead well!

Bill