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We live in a world of fast-paced competition, which means we cannot afford to reward the routine repetition embedded in the all-too rigid of our past. We must prize sensible action and appropriate adaptability. While important, written plans are out of date the day they are delivered with their untested or generalized assumptions to be workable in practice. Long delays in the planning cycle allow our competitors to have a competitive advantage.

Our business success is now intimately related to how we think, act, and interact daily. To win and receive rewards, we must now do the right thing, not merely the written idea. It is not enough to take a problem to other executives and wait for a response. The competition will not stand back and wait. To be successful, we do not “need the meetings,” instead we must ”meet the needs.”

Our responsibility is to make our world a better place.

It is remarkable how many smart, highly motivated, and responsible leaders rarely pause to contemplate their behavior. In our world of leaner, faster-moving organizations, there is a need for a subtler set of competencies: the communication and relationship skills required to influence and energize employees, adaptability to rapid change, and respect for people of diverse backgrounds.

Emotional intelligence is a given expectation. Objective assessments and candid feedback are essential to employee development, yet leaders of all ranks generally don’t provide such feedback to subordinates. Why don’t they? Candor generates emotion, and emotion can be scary.

I have been a coach and hired coaches for my leaders. At the most basic level, coaches serve as suppliers of candor, providing leaders with the objective feedback they need to nourish their growth. Coaching gets leaders to slow down, gain awareness, and notice the effects of their words and actions. On a larger scale, the best coaching fosters cultural change for the benefit of the entire organization. It provides a disciplined way to deepen relationships with employees while also increasing their effectiveness.

Have you noticed that being a good leader is difficult? It takes work.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is to engage your employees in a dialogue of emerging purpose. Leadership is potentially both high-impact and high-risk, and dialogue is at the heart of leadership. Rapport is vital to conversation. The chemistry must be trust and credibility; your employees must have confidence that you are not wasting their time. Excellent listening skills and a sense of curiosity on the part of the leader, together with the ability to deliver honest feedback, are crucial to keeping the dialogue grounding in reality—not fabricated suppositions or unsupported beliefs. In the heat of conversations separating transient, situational factors from those innate and require attention is needed. This sifting can often require delicate judgment. Carefully validated information is a vital determinant of the quality of the outcome of the dialogue venture.

While good leadership is difficult, good leadership is also rewarding.

As a CEO, an activity that I found enlightening and rewarding was rounding on executives, their leaders, and employees. Rounding is the act of spending one-on-one time with individual employees. For the employee rounded upon, the experience is invariably strategic. Rounding offers you the leader, a golden opportunity to step back and reflect on your employee’s personal development. By expressly allocating precious work time, rounding suspends the immediate pressures of the day and encourages the employee to think about “just me” momentarily. To the extent that rounding sensitizes people to reflect and act more purposefully, it is strategic by nature, helping to align the organization with the people in it. It can also be the impetus for building and motivating individuals and teams.

As a leader, do you focus primarily on changing behaviors or delivering results, and do you focus more on self or the organization?

Personally focused on behaviors, then self-awareness, changing or learning new practices, creating a leadership presence, and defining personal purpose is where you could start. If, as a leader, you are focused on the organizational behaviors, then creating a better team and empower others is where you could begin.

If personal outcomes are a priority, learn to engage employees in the plan to reach desired results. If focusing on organizational issues, then financials and shaping strategies are critical for success.

Max De Pree says, “leadership is serious meddling in other people’s lives” (Leadership Jazz, p. 7). He’s right. As leaders, we hold power to hurt, to move, to wait, to heal, to embarrass, to encourage, to disrupt individuals, families, whole communities. Playing god is unavoidable but should always make us tremble. May we always strive for kindness, for generosity, for strength.

We also have the same power as a community. As a community, we hold power to hurt, to move, to wait, to heal, to embarrass, to encourage, to disrupt individuals, families, whole communities. Playing god is unavoidable but should always make us tremble. May we always strive for kindness, for generosity, for strength.

Thought partners share ideas and experience to navigate complex challenges. Perhaps, this sounds a lot like advice or mentorship, but the key difference; thought partners are always mutually beneficial. When you choose someone who thinks as you do, you feel smarter, after all, the person thinks like you. When you pair with someone who thinks differently than you do, you stretch each other’s view of a situation to find and sort useful new approaches to a complex problem.

The right thought partner should challenge your way of thinking and provoke a different action from you. A thought partner should add value to your business or life.