Musings on Leadership

This post  is inspired by " Above The Line: Lessons in leadership and life from a Championship program " ( here ). The author is former Ohio State University head football coach Urban Meyer. This book chronicles Ohio State's 2014 championship year when they won the very first College Football Playoff championship. But it also gives a lot of information about what goes into creating an elite program like Ohio State's. The Power of Belief My slogan during my campaign for Division Director was "Believe and Achieve". I truly believe that you can't achieve ANYTHING without first believing that you can achieve it. Belief is EXTREMELY important to a leader. They have to believe in themselves. They have to convince others to believe in them. They have to convince others to buy into their vision of where the organization can go. But it all starts with belief in yourself. When you believe in yourself, you find a strength of will within you. Strength of will isn...

I've written on the subject of defeats before but I came across a quote by Maya Angelou that I love: "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it." We've all suffered defeats. You didn't get the promotion or raise you felt like you had earned. You didn't get the job for which you were SO right. You asked someone out and they turned you down. Failure is a fact of life. I don't know of ANYONE who hasn't had at least one or two failures along the way. A study by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, researchers at Columbia University, found that it's MUCH better to praise a child for his or her EFFORT instead of their RESULTS. They studied 412 fifth graders, ages 10 - 12, and found that when you praised children for being smart, they began to focus solely on results and began to resist trying anythin...

  This week's tip comes from the classic book by Dr. Spencer Johnson,   "Yes" or "No": The Guide to Better Decisions . In earlier tips I've said that, as a leader, most of the decisions you'll make will be difficult ones. Sometimes these decisions have no "right" answer. So what's a leader to do? In Dr. Johnson's book, he puts forth a 4-step system that you can use to make the best possible decisions. Make a tentative decision. Ask 3 practical questions: Am I pursuing the real need? Am I informed about my options? Have I thought this through to a better result? Ask 3 private questions: Am I telling myself the REAL truth? Does this decision feel right to me? Do my actions show I believe I deserve better? If all 6 answers are "Yes", proceed. If ANY answer is "No", rethink the decision. The first 3 in step #2 questions are "head" questions and they help you gather and analyze information. The second 3 question...

This post is inspired by a YouTube speech I saw by Simon Sinek. (You can watch it here .)  Go after the things you want. Simon tells a story about a long line for some free bagels. The friend that he was with didn't want to stand in the long line. But Simon wanted a free bagel! So Simon walked up, reached between two people and grabbed a couple of bagels. The moral of the story is that some people focus on the thing they want while others can only see the thing that's preventing them from getting the thing they want. There is a caveat however. You're allowed to go after anything you want. You're just not allowed to deny anyone else the right to go after what they want. Sometimes the problem is you. In the 18th and 19th centuries there was a problem where women would die within 72 hours of giving birth. They called it the Black Death of Childbed (also known as Puerperal Fever). Doctors (surgeons) who performed autopsies during the mornings would call on women in the afte...