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The Fourth Step to Real Leadership: Excellence
The Leadership Enrichment LIFE-cycle (LEL-c) culminates in its fourth and final stage: EXCELLENCE . This is where your renewed and strengthened Leadership Platform is fully leveraged. It's the point where your personal growth translates into organizational achievement and prepares you to begin the cycle anew. A crucial theme in this stage is the focus on others . As the book emphasizes, your leadership becomes most powerful when it is for and with others. The Emotional Connec
Richard Dillard
Jan 12 min read


The Third Step to Real Leadership: Fulfillment
After building a case for change, the next step is to bring that change to life. Welcome to the third stage of the Leadership Enrichment LIFE-cycle (LEL-c): FULFILLMENT . This stage is about translating your well-laid plans into tangible progress by taking the right action for the right reasons. It's about turning purposeful action into real leadership growth. This stage addresses the critical "how" of leadership enrichment. It ensures that the changes you make are not just
Richard Dillard
Jan 12 min read


The Second Step to Real Leadership: Internal Locus of Control
You’ve elevated your awareness and committed to learning. Now comes the hard part: taking ownership. The second stage of the Leadership Enrichment LIFE-cycle (LEL-c) is INTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL . This is where the "knowing-doing gap" is bridged. "Locus of control" refers to your belief about what causes the results in your life. An external locus of control attributes outcomes to powerful others, fate, or chance. It’s a mindset where individual efforts don't seem to matter
Richard Dillard
Jan 12 min read


The First Step to Real Leadership: Life-long Learning
The journey through the Leadership Enrichment LIFE-cycle (LEL-c) begins with a single, crucial stage: LIFELONG LEARNING . This is the starting point for building and refining your Leadership Platform. It’s a recursive process that conditions us to think rightly and effectively so we can act rightly and effectively as real leaders... not just managers. As leadership expert W. Edwards Deming noted, to manage one must lead and that transformation begins with the individual. To t
Richard Dillard
Jan 12 min read


The LEL-c: Introducing a LIFE-cycle for Leadership Enrichment
Having a well-designed Leadership Platform is the first step. But like any living document, it must be continually renewed to avoid stagnation. In Take Your Lead , this process of continual renewal and improvement is called the Leadership Enrichment LIFE-cycle (LEL-c) . The LEL-c is a solution to the "knowing-doing gap"—the common failure to take new leadership information and use it to improve performance. It provides a roadmap for transforming thinking into knowing, knowing
Richard Dillard
Nov 1, 20252 min read


Building to Last: A Leadership Platform
We've already distinguished "Real Leadership" from "Imaginary Leadership" (see Are You Leading? Uncovering Real Leadership! ). But how do you intentionally build the personal power required to be a real leader? The solution proposed in Take Your Lead is to move beyond abstract ideas and construct a tangible Leadership Platform . A Leadership Platform is a framework that codifies what you understand, believe, and intend to do about leadership. It determines the difference bet
Richard Dillard
Oct 4, 20252 min read


Are You Leading? Uncovering "Real Leadership!"
In our last post, we established the critical link between leadership, culture, and performance. But what kind of leadership truly drives a healthy culture? In Take Your Lead, we contend that our encounters with genuine leaders are rare, despite the abundance of leadership literature available and the growth of the "leaders are readers" movement in the last century. This scarcity stems from a common confusion between two distinct classes of leaders: Leaders-in-Position (Enti
Richard Dillard
Sep 27, 20252 min read


The Leadership-Culture-Performance Connection: Your Untapped Competitive Advantage
Inside every competitive landscape hides hidden potential. It's clearer than ever that Managers are armed with hundreds of business improvement methods, all aimed at achieving better organizational outcomes. Yet, many of these well-laid plans fall short. Why? Because even the most robust management concepts cannot compensate for a defensive or non-adaptive organizational culture. Our new book, Take Your Lead , establishes a critical cause-and-effect relationship that every le
Richard Dillard
Sep 14, 20252 min read


Performance with Purpose—The New Leadership Imperative
In today’s fast-paced world, performance is often reduced to metrics and KPIs. But what if performance could be more than numbers? What if it could be meaningful? Take Your Lead introduces a new paradigm: performance rooted in purpose. When leaders connect their goals to a deeper “why,” they inspire teams to go beyond compliance and into commitment. Our coaching and consulting work focuses on aligning leadership behaviors with cultural values to drive sustainable, purposedriv
Richard Dillard
Jul 3, 20251 min read


Culture Isn’t a Perk—It’s a Performance Strategy
Ping-pong tables and free snacks don’t build culture—people do. And in highperforming organizations, culture isn’t just a feel-good...
Richard S. Dillard
Jul 3, 20251 min read


Rethinking Leadership—From Position to Platform
For decades, leadership has been defined by titles, authority, and hierarchy. But in a world of constant change, that model is no longer...
Richard S. Dillard
Jul 3, 20251 min read
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