Leading with Character

10 Minutes a Day to a Brilliant Legacy Set

Jim Loehr,Caren Kenney

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119781660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

From leadership expert Dr. Jim Loehr, strengthen your moral and ethical character for outstanding leadership results with this must-have set.

Leading with Character: 10 Minutes a Day to a Brilliant Legacy

At the end of your life, how are you likely to be remembered? Chances are that people won't be praising your money, power, and status. Instead, the people you've impacted will remember you for your compassion and personal strength—in short, your character. Unfortunately, many leaders are unaware of their character shortcomings and blind spots that hold so many of us back from building the lasting legacy we are capable of.

With the right motivation, you can begin to strengthen your character and become a moral and ethical leader capable of creating lasting change. In Leading with Character: 10 Minutes a Day to a Brilliant Legacy, Dr. Jim Loehr, cofounder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, reveals 50 character competencies that you can practice daily to transform your life and work.

This book will also guide you through the process of developing a Personal Credo that will serve as your decision-making mission statement. Most leaders never take the time to identify their own core values, instead defaulting to a reflexive form of decision making. Gain an awareness of the conscious and unconscious processes that guide what you do and why you do it, and take charge of your leadership legacy.

Even good leaders are vulnerable to corruption. Read Leading with Character to learn how human evolution and contemporary culture can lead us astray without our even knowing it. As we work hard to get to the top, who are we becoming along the way? If we want to become heroes whose memories will long outlast us, we need to channel our energy into creating habits that will add up to a strong and meaningful character.

The Personal Credo Journal: A Companion to Leading with Character

We all want to become high impact leaders with a robust ethical and moral character, but getting there is a challenge. Dr. Jim Loehr's Leading with Character offers a succinct plan for developing your character as a leader and building a meaningful legacy through your life's work. The Personal Credo Journal is a day-by-day workbook that will guide you through the process of identifying your core values and crafting your Personal Credo—a statement of beliefs and values that will help you align every action and decision with your deepest held ideals.

With these activities and exercises, you'll spend just a few minutes each day reflecting on meaningful and thought-provoking prompts about your life story, your personal strengths and weaknesses, and your life goals. By the end of this life-altering, 150-day challenge, you will have gained a deep self-knowledge and a clear vision of your path forward as a leader. Take charge of the legacy you'll leave behind, build character, and learn to use your Personal Credo to transform your life.

LEADING WITH CHARACTER

10 MINUTES A DAY TO A BRILLIANT LEGACY

DR. JIM LOEHR

WITH CAREN KENNEY

FOREWORD

Leadership has never been more important than it is right now. As I write this, the world is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout. Unemployment in the United States is reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, and economies around the globe are reporting negative GDP growth. Businesses up and down Main Street are closed, many forever. On top of this, the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has fueled pent-up social and racial unrest across the country and around the world. Twenty cities in the United States are under curfew, and the military has been deployed. Trust in institutions and “the system” is falling, as uncertainty and fear grow.

Leadership in moments like this really matters. I'm talking about leaders everywhere, at all levels of society: heads of state and CEOs, leaders in our communities and in our schools, leaders in the arts, in academia, in the world of sports. Even in our own family. We all have a role to play in making the world better, and the crises we are experiencing today underscore that point.

These overlapping crises we are facing will, I believe, be the ultimate test of leadership in our lifetime. What leaders do now, and just as importantly, how they lead, will likely shape their legacy.

That means finding ways to be the leader you want to be and that our neighbors, our employees, our people, and our planet need you to be. As Jim Loehr points out in this urgent, eye-opening, and actionable book, that means leading with purpose.

Jim's is a voice that we need to hear right now, especially, as he puts it, “those of us who are fortunate enough to be in a position of leadership.” His perspective on leadership – what it entails, what it requires day after day – could not be more timely.

I've been fortunate to know Jim for nearly 20 years, so I've become very familiar with the specific kind of leadership that he has been talking about over the course of his career: purpose-driven, moral, compassionate leadership born of character and nurtured by intentionality and hard work. And in this book, he gives you a clear guide to developing a personal credo that captures what you hope to accomplish through your leadership, which you then need to apply, or try to apply, at every encounter you have and every decision you make. That's how we display our true character, Jim writes, and how we “chisel our true essence from the bedrock of life, one moral decision at a time.”

The book is called Leading with Character, and one's purpose in life is the through line, the fuel, and the catalyst for it all. In the pages that follow, you'll get what I've gotten out of my experience working with Jim over the years. It is a necessary examination of the relationship between character and leadership and what leading with character means. It is an eminently practical guide to defining one's own personal credo and to training the leadership muscles that will help you live up to it. And it is a stirring meditation on the elements of one's legacy – how it's much more about how we treat others than what we do for ourselves, and why we must work at it every single day with intent and discipline.

What you walk away with is both a framework and a toolkit for becoming a better, more thoughtful leader. It's a guide to training and strengthening your leadership muscles, much as you would train a muscle group in the gym: with focus, commitment, and determination. And it is a roadmap that, when followed with intent, will better prepare leaders to treat people as they should and to confront the challenges they will inevitably face – and that we are all facing now.

I've been in training, so to speak, and developing my “leadership muscles” for more than 40 years, while working at three “institutions.” I started my career in the U.S. Army (founded 1775), which I joined out of college and where I spent four years as an officer in West Germany at the height of the Cold War. Next came Procter & Gamble (founded 1837) where I spent 28 years in Brand Management and General Management, including leading the company's business in Southeast Asia and eventually rising to Group President of the $7 billion Global Male Grooming business, when P&G made the largest acquisition ever in packaged goods, buying Gillette for $57 billion in 2005 and then running that iconic business for six years. Those experiences helped shaped me as...