Gold Nugget Coaching

I was browsing the blogosphere tonight and came across a post on CareerHub that got me thinking about some things. I’d like to share some valuable coaching with you that can make an enormous difference in your career and in your life.

By the way, if you aren’t already aware of it, there are some very helpful blogs out there, offering all sorts of valuable free information. You can use the blog search engine that Google provides to do a keyword search on just blogs. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com.

Getting back to the post I mentioned, its title is “Personal Branding: A Leader’s Tool for Career Change,” written by Susan Guarneri, a career coach. Susan had just returned from the annual Association of Job Search Trainiers Conference [link is here], and she was sharing some key career leadership ideas from keynote speaker Greg Giesen. For example, she wrote in her post:

“Taking a leader’s ownership of our career, as well as all other areas of our life (personal, family, spiritual, social, emotional, intellectual, and physical), demonstrates to everyone our leader-like orientation to life.”

Then, quoting Greg Giesen directly:

“There is only one way to live our lives and that is as authentic leaders.”

While I fully endorse this advice, it begs the key question, “What is a leader?” If it’s assumed that everyone knows the answer to that question, then it’s a moot question. But in my coaching I have found that most people don’t have clear distinctions of what makes for a leader. Indeed, I’ve found that a good many leaders themselves aren’t clear about what empowers their leadership.

In the corporate world, leaders often have a lot of authority and thus are called “leaders.” But is leadership merely a matter of organizational authority? If it is, then many people you and I might consider to be leaders may have a problem because their organizational authority may be quite limited or even non-existent. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King, recognized the world over as a great leader, yet with no real authority in the corporate sense.

What I’d like to do here is offer you some practical distinctions for leadership in terms of the actions that leaders take and, therefore, actions that you can take to take a leader’s ownership of your career and the other areas of your life, as noted by Susan Guarneri above. Since this is a BIG subject (with 16,573 results on amazon.com books for a search on “leadership”) I’m not going to presume to cover the entire topic in a few sentences. Nonetheless, there are three universal actions of leadership that you can start practicing right now:

• Leaders declare a vision. Bold leaders declare bold visions and, interestingly, oftentimes with little evidence of it being feasible. One of my favorite examples is when John Kennedy declared shortly after the start of his presidency (on May 25, 1961) that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Specifically, what he said was:

   “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. . . . We have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.” [Link is here.]

  And, of course, another amazing example of a leader declaring a vision is when Dr. King quite simply said,

  “I have a dream.” 

  What vision have you declared?

• Leaders declare a purpose. Sure, you could go around making all sorts of declarations of vision. But marry that to a purpose, and now you have provided fuel for your vision. Again, Kennedy concerning purpose: 

  “. . . [to] win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny. . . .”

  If you have declared a vision, what is its purpose? Said another way, for the sake of what are you declaring your vision?

• Leaders set priorities for action. A vision and a purpose are great, but without priorities for action, a vision can become just so many empty words. President Kennedy set the nation’s priorities for his vision when he made his funding request to Congress in his speech.

  If you have declared a vision, once you set priorities and start taking action, you will then actually be on the path to fulfilling your vision.

There are, of course, many other dimensions to leadership. However, you can focus immediately on the three actions described above to take a leader’s approach to your career and other domains of your life:

1. Declare a vision.
2. Declare a purpose connected to your vision.
3. Set priorities to fulfill your vision.

Not a trivial task maybe. But if you’re going to play the game of life, why not make it a big game!