I thought this was kind of interesting. The Globe & Mail’s Report on Business recently ran a column by Thomas Nelson chief executive officer Michael Hyatt that looked at leadership issues from the bible.  Here is an interesting one:

Admit that working non-stop is unsustainable: In Exodus 18 Jethro put it bluntly: “The thing that you do is not good. Both you and these people who are with you will surely wear yourselves out. For this thing is too much for you; you are not able to perform it by yourself.” The same will happen to you, Mr. Hyatt says, if you try to work around the clock. You’ll wear yourself – and your people – out.

Sounds just about right to me.

In this video podcast, Patrick Awuah makes the case that a liberal arts education is critical to forming true leaders.

After working at Microsoft for almost a decade, Patrick Awuah returned home to Ghana and cofounded Ashesi University, a small liberal arts college that aims to educate Africa’s next generation of leaders. Its first class of students graduated in 2006.

New York Times columnist David Brooks has a very interesting column this morning on leadership.  Brooks contrasts the bombastic, uber self-confident leader with the Jim Collins (Good to Great) version of a ‘humble hound’.   Brooks says:

Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall,” celebrates a different sort of leader. He’s found that many of the reliably successful leaders combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.”

Alongside the boardroom lion model of leadership, you can imagine a humble hound model. The humble hound leader thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses. She knows her performance slips when she has to handle more than one problem at a time, so she turns off her phone and e-mail while making decisions. She knows she has a bias for caution, so she writes a memo advocating the more daring option before writing another advocating the most safe. She knows she is bad at prediction, so she follows Peter Drucker’s old advice: After each decision, she writes a memo about what she expects to happen. Nine months later, she’ll read it to discover how far off she was.

In short, she spends a lot of time on metacognition — thinking about her thinking — and then building external scaffolding devices to compensate for her weaknesses.

She believes we only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure, to be corrected by the next one. Even walking involves shifting your weight off-balance and then compensating with the next step.

I think this version of leadership is one worth thinking about.

Julia Middleton’s Thoughts on Leadership blog is a go to source for thought provoking ideas on leadership – particularly in the context of today’s crazy environment.    I read her blog on a regular basis and found this one on crisis management particularly interesting.   Middleton states:

I was always taught to keep my eyes on the hills and my feet on the ground. In a crisis, too many leaders do neither, and some only keep their feet on the ground…but they take their eyes off the hills. Right now I appreciate that keeping your feet on the ground is essential, and it’s hard work. I’m just urging you to look up once in a while.

For my goal, I committed to interviewing some of the North’s leaders, and during my search for some of Northern New Brunswick’s leaders, I had the pleasure of working with one of Restiouche County’s leaders, Mr. David Allen, co-owner of Allen, Paquet and Arseneau, Professional Accounting Services located in Campbellton, NB, with offices throughout Northern NB.  I was thoroughly impressed by the level of professional service, courtesy and friendly attitude of Mr. Allen.  I met with Mr. Allen last week and the interview went like this, and by the way, he always speaks with a smile:

May: How do you identify Leadership in your workplace, amongst your employees?

David:   Somebody who is showing up to work with a smile on their face, if you ask them to do a task at anytime of the day, they say yes, even if it’s a few minutes before lunch hour and the task will take 15 mins to complete.  True leaders are hard workers and are always happy to take on tasks, new and old.  I can tell if a new employee has leadership quality if they are able to manage themselves and exceed expectations.  They also have to treat clients as #1 regardless of the situation.

May:  What is it that you do to help develop leadership skills?

David:  I think the best method to help develop leadership skills is to lead by example.  The best leaders are the ones who follow this example without being asked to.  I myself feel accountable to lead my team by example.  I work hard, put in long hours, I reach out to my employees and try to involve them in the problem-solving and strategizing process and respect their feedback.  I also show up to work every morning at 6am, and I tell you, I’d be some impressed when I walk into the office and there’s someone else already here!!  It is important that leaders take their work seriously and do whatever is in their power to deliver the service with the highest quality. 

May:  How do you reward leadership initiatives taken on by your staff?

David:  You tell them!  Let them know that you are pleased with the job they’re doing.  This way your staff knows you’re paying attention and giving compliments where they are deserved.  They feel respected and their work is validated by their boss and encourages them to continue to do better and better.

May:  Do you have any leaders within your organization?

David:  There are about 5 that stand out with their leadership qualities, namely:

           -  Hard working

           - understand that respect needs to be earned and not handed to them

           -  understand that perks and promotions have to be earned with time

           – Have a clear understanding of their timelines and deadlines, and are able to prioritize well under pressure

May:  How do you deal with failure?

David:  That really depends on the situation.  For example: if a client makes a request for services and they were given a specific timeline, and the employee failed to deliver, if an honest effort was made, and/or the request for the timeline was unreasonable, then we back up the employee and we share the accountability.  It is important for us that our employees feel supported and do not carry the burden of failure on their own, specifically when they are hard working and make every effort to meet deadlines.  We understand that there are certain circumstances which may prevent the delivery of the service on time and that sort of flexibility allevens the pressures of failure.  We all fail at some point, it’s important that we learn from it and learn a new way to do things better the next time.

May:  Thank you David for taking the time to meet with me today

David:  You’re welcome

So there you have it folks, shared accountability and leading by example is one way some of our leaders in the North are helping promote and develop leadership among their employees.

May Khatib

My first professional experience after university placed me in a foreign country alongside a group of Canada’s most ambitious, challenging, motivated young people. They were hard working and committed to creating change for little money, constantly questionning their approaches.  Our organization developed a culture that glorified a certain type of leader. This leader was an extroverted, opinionated, tireless individual who promoted their ideas widely, took risks, and motivated people around them.  To me, this was the quintessential leader, someone who led a group toward a vision, someone who had developed firm opinions around issues and wasn’t afraid to share them. But, that wasn’t exactly me. For some time (months and months!), I tried to fit myself to that mold. It wasn’t completely natural and the ‘here’s my opinion, follow me if you’re on board’ style wasn’t one I was comfortable with. After some soul searching and observation, I finally realized that leaders come in a variety of packages and use various approaches.  There were things that I learned from being around this one type of leader, but I also learned to appreciate my own style, one that seems to emphasize building trust and making decisions calmly and thoughtfully. All leaders have some fundamental traits that are similar, but I believe that they can be manifested as different approaches.

- Jenn Dysart

A new young leaders program has been launched  for Acadian and Francophone youth in Atlantic Canada.   The Faut que ça bouge (Let’s Get Moving) project is meant to get young people more engaged in the future of their communities.  The program will support 39 high school aged young people from around the Atlantic provinces and help them develop projects to advance their communities.    The program is being funding by ACOA and Herigage Canada.  You can read the full press release here (in French).

In this interview with the Globe & Mail, the Business Development Bank of Canada’s Jean-René Halde makes a point that is very interesting, particularly in the context of small and medium sized businesses in New Brunswick:

“The other leadership issue is to get our entrepreneurs to achieve as much as they can achieve. One thing that concerns me is they slow down too early. They get happy. We’re happy quite often when we are in the middle of the pack, when we should be striving to be the best, the biggest, the most innovative.”

How many times have I heard that?  Too many to remember.  Really interesting companies with owners/leaders really only interested in getting big enough to generate a good lifestyle for themselves rather than the drive to build something really great with national and international ambition.

Harvard Business Review contributor Marshall Goldsmith has an interesting commentary this week on leadership and self-awareness.  He says:

A leader who is self-aware enough to know that he or she is not adept at everything is one who has taken the first step toward being a great leader.

Interesting thought for today.

My column in the Telegraph-Journal this week discusses the issue of leadership in New Brunswick and the role of the Wallace McCain Institute and the New Brunswick Roundtable on Leadership.  My conclusion?

Moses coming down from the mountain with the tablets of stone and issuing edicts won’t work. We need to take everyone in the organization up the mountain and convince them of the need for change. That, it seems to me, is where we start the conversation on leadership.

Read the full column here.

David Campbell, Roundtable participant