Leadership: How much are you bogged down in your daily operations?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Leadership: A city comes to life...

Dear Readers,

The first weeks of the year are now past and scientific studies show that over 80 percent of all people have broken their New Year‘s resolutions at least once and have often even already given up trying to implement them. Particularly if as an executive you devote yourself more intensively with the management of your subordinates, the question in the title is decisive for your success as a leader.

A City Comes to Life… The city is in the process of coming to life. I‘m sitting in a café and observing all the people passing by outside and on the go. People with a coffee-to-go in their hands hurrying to work. People totally sunk in their thoughts on their way to their daily labor. People with their bags on their shoulders on the way to the gym. People who haven‘t slept well with the last night inscribed on their faces.

The city is in the process of coming to life. I‘m sitting in a café and observing all the people passing by outside and on the go. People with a coffee-to-go in their hands hurrying to work. People totally sunk in their thoughts on their way to their daily labor. People with their bags on their shoulders on the way to the gym. People who haven‘t slept well with the last night inscribed on their faces. Trucks stop, the drivers jump out of the cabins, open the tailboards and start to unload goods for all the stores. Like huge monsters opening their maws. Package by package, load by load the goods are distributed to the surrounding shops. Slowly the city is coming to life. The traffic increases noticeably. In the stores the lights go on and slowly the doors start to open. In the café the last chairs are now being taken and the waiters are placing menus, salt and pepper pots, sugar bowls and ashtrays on the tables. A city is coming to life.

And when you think that this ritual is repeated every day in innumerable cities all over the world, then you notice how much daily routine really does determine our lives. And at the same time you see how small our own world really is in our thoughts. Why is this? How often do we consider how the morning really starts in another city, in another country or on another continent? How often do you walk through your town in the early morning past people without really taking notice of them? How often do you stand in line at the airport or at a roadhouse on the highway without really noticing the people around you? How often do you follow you daily routines without considering whether this is really what you want for your future?

If you observe how a city comes to life and how everything starts to follow the normal daily grind, you will again and again notice how small our reality often really is. And I realize that we often take ourselves far too importantly. The world will continue to revolve every day. With us or without us. And precisely in this insight lies a great opportunity for ourselves, and also for our future. Because every day we have chance anew to do our bit. In order to make this world we live in a nicer and better place for ourselves and also for our fellow human beings. If we observe how a city comes to life and how quickly life can change, then we have the chance to realize that every day offers us new options once more. Are you aware that – no matter how good or how bad you feel at the moment – two thirds of the world population would immediately swap places with your if they could? Yes, you are reading right. And this is also the case when things are going badly for you!

Of course, I‘m aware that things aren‘t going well for some of you. Many of you are earning more or less the same as you did a few years ago or sometimes less. And you have to struggle with higher costs in all areas of your lives. Some of you may have financial worries. Again others may have worries about their health. And yet others have problems in their families or relationships or with friends. And when we have problems in our lives, then it‘s as if we hit our left hand with a hammer. The pain is so intense that it draws our full attention and it helps us very little to hear that our right hand still doesn‘t hurt. Nevertheless – no matter how many worries and hardships you have: Have you ever asked yourself what it must be like when you wake up in the morning and don‘t know whether you will still experience the evening? Or what it might be like to wake up in the morning and not know how you will be able to eat today and what you can use to feed your children on this day? Or what it is really like when you have to search for food on a garbage dump?

You are, of course, correct if you now say: But I don‘t live in such a country where I have to deal with these problems… Right!

A city comes to life…

We live in our Western world and for many of us the misery of this world is so far away that we don‘t even see it when we walk through our own city. How often do you walk past a homeless person or a beggar without even deigning to look at them? Is he a worse person than you just because in his life he took diffenentr decisions from those you too or because life has hit him so hard and knocked him down so much that he decided he couldn‘t get up again anymore? Life is much more than the sum of our own worries. It‘s much more than the sum of our mistakes. It‘s much more than all the trifles we get worked up about every day. Most of us are free. Although many of us have created our own prison in our lives. A prison whose doors stand wide open. Doors that aren‘t recognized and aren‘t used to break out of our own prison because we‘re standing with our backs to the door. And because many of us are busy making our “life cell” comfortable instead of daring to look at our own lives with detachment for once.

For years I felt very good in my own “life prison” and I made myself very comfortable there. I also had a multitude of good reasons to feel good in my own cell. And I had a vast number of explanations and excuses to justify my behavior. I always thought I had to do that for others, but in the final analysis I was always justifying it to myself. I also didn‘t understand that the door to my life‘s prison cell was standing wide open and that I can make a decision at any time and change my life. My habits and my own routines molded me and at the same time they locked me in. A prison without warders and without locks on the doors – and yet so hard to break out of. If we look at it precisely, then we‘ll notice: On the one hand our lives aren‘t at all as important as we sometimes believe – and on the other hand they are much too important to spend them in a prison. Once you look at the management situations you‘ve experienced with your subordinates in recent years, many of you will notice how much on occasions you have yourself been the “best guest” in your own prison.

Leadership: The rock of aspirations

The rock of the aspirations

In my hometown there‘s a beautiful old park with magnificent woods and a multitude of plants and flowers. Here nature unfolds in all its glory year after year. This park lies near a university and for many decades it has been a tradition for the newly enamored student couples to meet in the park. They write their declarations of love to their partners and also to their lives on the many rock faces. If you walk through this park you can read how people from the various decades announce their love. There you can read the beauty of the emotions and the beauty of the language. You read how the language has changed in the course of the decades. And there you can read all the aspirations that these people associate with their lives and with their futures. There you read the goals that all these people had in their youth. The aspirations for the beauty of life. But something that is almost more interesting in this park is the fact that many of these young people have in the course of their lives returned to the spot of their aspirations and beside their declarations of yesteryear they have carved their current views. Partly on beautiful marble plaques. And if you read all these things carefully you will notice that most of them buried their aspirations and imprisoned themselves willingly in a prison of their own creation. All the dreams of yesteryear are supplemented and explained with an undertone of regret and between the lines you still read the aspirations of yesteryear. Also with the current inscriptions. The aspiration for the beauty of life can be felt everywhere in this park. That is why the park is also called “The Rock of the Aspirations.”

A city comes to life… Now what can we learn from all of these thoughts for our own lives?

One of my mentors once said to me when I got into a fuss about an unimportant trifle yet again: “Ultimately we are nothing more that a fart in the universe. Therefore we shouldn‘t take everything so seriously.” But as managers we should never underestimate the effect we have on our subordinates and what traces we leave in their lives – even with the supposedly unimportant reactions. And at the same time he gave me the film “It‘s a Wonderful Life” with James Stewart and Donna Reed in the main roles and I was supposed to look at it to consider what he had said. It‘s an old black and white film, which has been one of my absolute all-time favorite films since that day and it‘s helped me again and again to see my life in proper perspective. If you don‘t know this movie, then you should definitely watch it. It‘s a masterpiece about management and what effect even apparently small acts have in the lives of our subordinates. For our own development it‘s important to leave our prison cell and understand that we‘re free. Free in our thoughts. Free in our actions. Free in our lives.

Please allow me to pose a question and a little exercise connected with it in order to make clear what I mean. Okay? First I‘d like to invite you to familiarize yourself with the following ideas. They aren‘t comfortable ideas but it‘ll help you to leave you normal thinking habits for a moment. Agreed? Good.

Imagine that your doctor has examined you and revealed to you that you only have 6 to 12 months left to live. I know that isn‘t a comfortable thought – but let yourself sink deep into this for a moment so that you can do the ensuing exercise. So once more: Imagine your doctor has examined you and explained to you that you only have 6 to 12 months to live. And now the exercise: What would you do in the time left to you? Now write down everything that comes into your mind.

• What would you do?

• Who would you meet?

• Where would you go to?

• Who would you have a heart-to-heart with or who would you make up with?

• Who would you forgive?

• Who would you thank?

• What else would you do in the time remaining?

Write down everything you think of. A song that reflects all the aspirations for life and at the same time shows the prison of life is the song by Udo Jürgens called “Ich war noch niemals in New York” (“I‘ve never been to New York”). Perhaps you‘re listening to the lines as you write what you would do in the time remaining…

Have you written down everything? Then take a look at your notes.

What sort of things are there? Are they things that are impossible for you to do? Now allow me to close this “Question of the Week” with the resolution of the exercise in the form of a question. And the resolution is: When you look at your notes – why do you want to wait until you only have 6 to 12 months left to live? How can you now start doing them straight away? Look at each individual point and ask yourself how you can implement each of them in the next 6 to 12 months. Break out of your life prison now!

A city is coming to life… broaden your field of view, take off your blinkers in order to see the beauty of life…

a city is coming to life… and this is your personal alarm call!

Most cordially,

Your Coach Nuno F. Assis