Do You Care to Lead?

A 5-Part Formula for Creating Loyal and Results-Focused Teams and Organizations

Michael G. Rogers

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119628446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Create loyal, engaged and results focused teams and organizations using a practical five-part servant leadership formula.

Think of a world where people go to work completely engaged, are inspired to do more than they ever thought possible, remain 100% loyal to the teams and organizations they belong to, are achieving mind-blowing results, and gladly and even passionately follow their leader's direction. Is that a world you want to be a part of? The reality is you really can! However, it's not the world most people and leaders currently live in.

When employees were asked in a Gallup poll whether their supervisor or anyone else at work cared about them, only 4 out of 10 strongly agreed with that statement. That is a startling number. We have a lot of work to do. Old leadership practices don't work anymore.

In his work with hundreds of leaders and teams, Michael Rogers has created a practical approach to leadership that works. It is the Care to Lead Leader™. Care to Lead Leaders are different than most leaders. Most leaders talk of caring with their lips but are far from actually leading with their hearts.

Care to Lead Leaders lead from their heart. They understand that leading from the heart wins the hearts of those they lead, which makes leading more purposeful and a lot easier.

Through Michael's five-part SONIC leadership formula, you will become a Care to Lead Leader. You will discover:

• One simple Care to Lead Leader practice that can literally revolutionize the culture of your teams and/or organizations.
• How to build real trust on your teams and/or organizations and explode creativity and the volume of ideas.
• How to have more courage and second guess yourself less.
• Practical tips on skyrocketing individual performance.
• The secret to creating the most loyal followers on the planet!
• How to take your teams and/or organizations to unprecedent levels of achievement and results.

In this book, Michael illustrates his ideas and concepts through introspective questions and inspiring stories that keep you engaged and have you regularly looking at your own leadership and asking; Am I the kind of leader people really want to follow?

After reading this book, you'll have the tools to apply practical servant leadership approaches that create buy-in into bigger visions, improve loyalty and engagement and move your teams and organizations to unprecedented levels of action.

Chapter 1
Serve

If serving is below you, leadership is beyond you.

—Anonymous

The first part of the Caring to Lead Leader Formula is to serve. You won't get those you lead to even think about following you unless you serve. Pouring a big portion of this selfless action into your leadership is the magic sauce of Care to Lead Leaders. It's the first ingredient of connection between you and your team and organization. And it is the fastest way, hands down, leaders can connect and start building trust with their people. Service starts with your personal commitment to selflessness.

Selflessness

An anthropologist was studying the culture of a remote African tribe. On the final days of his studies he had prepared to leave and was waiting for transportation to take him to the airport. While waiting, the children of this tribe had gathered around him as they had done many times before.

The anthropologist decided to gather the candy he had collected from a town he had visited on his way to the remote tribe days before. He filled a basket with the sweets and then placed it underneath a fairly large tree. He then walked about 100 or so yards from the tree and drew a line in the dirt. The children were told that when he said go, they were to run as fast as they could and that the first one to the basket would win all of the candy for themselves.

The anthropologist gave the signal and then something surprisingly happened. The children held hands and ran to the tree together. Once there, they excitedly sat in a circle and shared the candy. The anthropologist was a bit shocked. He asked them why they all went together when one of them could have had all of the candy for him‐ or herself.

A younger girl in the group looked up at him and said, “How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?”

Africans use a term called Ubuntu. It means “I am, because we are.” Desmond Tutu, the well‐known South African human rights activist, said of Ubuntu, “It speaks of the very essence of being human. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, Yu, u nobuntu; hey, so‐and‐so has Ubuntu. Then you are generous, you are hospitable, and you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, my humanity is caught up, inextricably bound up, in yours. We belong in a bundle of life.”¹ Ubuntu is at the very core of Care to Lead Leaders and what they do as they work on building team and organizational cultures focused on selflessness and service.

Ubuntu is everything that a leader should commit to and aspire to practice, to be, and to create. Like the little girl who so sweetly answered the anthropologist, it's about your personal selflessness: caring about and putting others first. It is realizing that you are not a leader without those you lead. You are a leader because others have chosen to follow you, not because you were simply appointed to be such. Because of that you have an important and even sacred responsibility to selflessly serve those you lead with all of your heart, might, mind, soul, and strength. You aren't superior to others; you are dependent on them as much as they are dependent on you. Leadership is not about you; it is about each of you. That's the essence of Ubuntu and it is the way of life for Care to Lead Leaders.

As you commit to and practice selflessness as a Care to Lead Leader, your leadership naturally instills and creates Ubuntu types of cultures on your teams and in your organizations. Service becomes a priority, and team and organizational concerns about each other's needs is foundational to who you become together. Everyone is more focused on what they can do together than what they can do alone. Egos, money, and career aspirations take a back seat to the success of the entire team. There is no such thing as a solitary individual. When one succeeds, it is the success of everyone, because everyone had a role in it. Can you imagine the power of teams, organizations, and even entire nations practicing Ubuntu, with such a large focus on selflessly serving one another? It is a complete and powerful game changer for sure.

Creating such cultures of selflessness and service starts with you, and it always starts with you, as I will highlight now and several times throughout this chapter. Personally focusing on selfless service is the key to unlocking Care to Lead Leadership.

Service Unlocks Leadership

Not too long ago, I was speaking at Southwest Airlines. The airline, as you might know, has a strong culture and reputation of caring and service that many other companies have tried to replicate over the years. Although historically the airline industry has lost money, Southwest Airlines has amazingly turned a profit year after year. As I spoke to many of the employees there, I quickly learned that much of that success has had to do with their deep connection to their history, culture, and a focus on serving each other, which started with their cofounder and past CEO, Herb Kelleher. He was a model of what he hoped the culture at Southwest would create.

Author Ekaterina Walter shares an interesting story on Inc.com of a friend, Gregg Gregory, who was once on the same Southwest flight that Kelleher was on. With a giant Mickey Mouse baseball hat on, Gregory had noticed the CEO way up front in the boarding line. Although he thought it kind of cool, he didn't really think much more about it, until Kelleher walked by him on the plane taking a seat all the way at the back and then plopping himself in a middle seat. As you may or may not know, the back of the plane and a middle seat for most passengers are the least coveted spots and seats on the entire plane.

As the aircraft reached a safe altitude, Gregory watched Kelleher walk to the front of the plane where he began chatting with airline attendants for a little while. The CEO then made his way down the aisle and started assisting flight attendants by serving peanuts and beverages to passengers. Walter writes, “Eventually he came up to Gregory's seat and said, ‘Hi. My name is Herb Kelleher. Thank you for flying my airline. Can I get you something to drink?’”²

Herb Kelleher's actions on that flight was what Care to Lead Leaders do. Service is a way of life for Care to Lead Leaders, and as mentioned previously, it spreads throughout their teams and organizations. It's something they do without thinking about because it is something they always do. They are regularly asking themselves, what can I do to help someone, what can I do to cheer someone else up, what can I do to make something easier for others, what can I do to inspire those I lead? They deeply understand that they need and depend on those they lead as much as their people need them, and those they lead know this. Ubuntu!

Selfless service signals a number of things in your leadership to others. It conveys that you care, that you can be trusted, that you are approachable, that you have wisdom and direction others can benefit from, and that you are someone to be followed. In other words, your service to your teams and organizations is your key to unlocking your leadership. In fact, as mentioned previously, it's the quickest way there is to establishing trust in others and yourself as a leader.

Service is fundamental to the rest of the Care to Lead Leader Formula. As with all formulas, you can't miss this part; it is the key ingredient to everything else. It is a staple. The other parts of the formula in this book are deeply connected to the principle of selfless service, as I highlight in the following chapters.

Service Changes Hearts, and Changed Hearts Change People, Teams, and Organizations

I have always found it amazing how service changes people and as a result people change the world around them. It's why we have a Global Youth Service Day, International Volunteer Day, National Volunteer Week, and Random Acts of Kindness Week, to name a few. It's also the reason we have wonderful organizations dedicated to service, such as the Lion's Clubs International, Kiwanis, and the Rotary Club. It's because we as a world understand that service changes hearts, and changed hearts together change all of us. It can even change the heart of an enemy.

The Civil War was one of the most ugly and vicious wars in American history. At least 620,000 men lost their lives in battle, which was approximately 2.5% of the entire population of the country at the time. Total casualties exceeded those of all other American wars, from the Revolution through Vietnam.

In winte...