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 Connecto

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 bu

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 mu

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 tr

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 i

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 betwee

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 (Entit