Michael Hume

Demonstrate True Personal Commitment To Inspire

by Michael D. Hume, M.S.

How do you inspire people in your business, or in your organization?  What does it take to be a truly inspirational leader?  You have to start by being an inspired person, and then you have to have a superior awareness and sense of purpose.  Beyond those prerequisites, though, there are probably as many ways to be a successful inspirational leader as there are leaders.

Your personal brand of inspiration has to be genuine.  That’s why I generally advise my leadership clients to start with a style of inspirational leadership that would work on themselves.  What have leaders done to inspire you?  Start with those things.  It’s likely to be easier to inspire from a place of authenticity when you do.

You can appreciate that there are other ways of inspiring people, other “brands” of inspirational leadership which are effective.  Some inspire through bold, decisive action – people are inspired by the leadership they show when they “charge the hill.”  Others have more of a “quiet sensation” brand – people admire their steadfast persistence and humble behind-the-scenes efforts.  Still others might just behave like a spark-plug of positive energy, leading and inspiring with upbeat optimism and a can-do attitude.  It’s great if you can develop more than one style of inspirational leadership so that you can readily adapt to the needs of your troops, but it’s critical never to stray from your authentic center.

One very powerful brand of inspirational leadership is embodied in the leader who demonstrates unwavering personal commitment to her people.  She might own a business, or have a leadership mission within an organization, but either way she inspires everyone around her by being a reliable and transparent ally.  I’ve known such leaders, and one thing their brand brings is a certain harmony to the team.  Everyone’s inspired, individually, but since the leader is on everyone’s side, the little squabbles that sometimes impede team performance are kept to a minimum – often, they don’t occur at all.

It takes a caring, empathetic individual to pull off that brand of inspirational leadership – don’t try to develop that style unless it’s the natural event for you to do so.  If you are a hard-charging leader suffering from what I call “EDS” (“Empathy Deficiency Syndrome”), it’s probably best that you hold off on the personal-commitment style and perhaps develop it as a secondary brand.  Empathy is always good, and you can always find a sincere way to express it (especially with expert coaching – feel free to drop me a line).  But making insincere efforts at being empathetic can not only fail to hit the mark, it can back-fire and damage a key relationship.

If you’ve been inspired by empathetic, caring, personally-committed leaders, this might be the natural style for you as you journey toward being a more inspirational leader.  Think about it.  How can you show your personal commitment to the folks on your team?  What decisions, actions, and words might you have left out in the hustle and bustle of getting the job done – and how might you refocus on those relationship-critical efforts?

Do your people know you’re committed to their success (not just your own)?  Are you sure?

When it comes to true commitment, here’s my favorite analogy: consider a bacon-and-eggs breakfast.  The chicken was involved.  The pig was committed.

You don’t have to give your life, like the pig did for your breakfast, but you do have to have “skin in the game” in terms of commitment to the success of your people.  And they have to know it.

Be inspired, and then inspire others with what’s natural for you.  If personal commitment is a style that comes naturally and authentically from your center, develop it – it’s a great way to build your inspirational leadership.

An Entrepreneur Is His Own BEST Critic

By Michael D. Hume, M.S.

Anyone who’s played golf knows two things for certain: first, you’re going to hit some bad shots every time you play, and second, there’s a severe limit on how much the “coaching” from your playing partners can help you. When you’re playing badly, you have to take personal responsibility to snap out of it yourself. You have to tell your well-meaning cartmate “Thanks, but let me work through this myself.” Most golfers will respect such a request.

That’s not to say coaching isn’t valuable – it is. After you’ve “worked through it,” you might want to take another lesson or two before the next time you hit the links. But the lessons are most valuable when you’ve done everything you can on your own to check yourself and improve your own performance.

The same is true in business, and you’re in business - whether or not you own a company. Remember, there are two kinds of person out there, and in each of us; one is the Victim, who will blame his bad game on anything but his own efforts to swing the club, and the Entrepreneur, of whom it’s often said “He’s his own worst critic.” People with an entrepreneurial spirit, at least mentally, are always in business for themselves, and they are always coaching themselves to be their best (the Victim, of course, is not interested in being his best, but only in making sure life is “fair” and no one gets something he didn’t get).

In your business mission, there will be times when you are off your game – just like an ordinarily-competent golfer who has a round in which he can’t seem to hit the green to save his life. Before you reach for help from a pro (which you might want to do – feel free to drop me a line), make sure you’ll get the most out of your coaching by first coaching yourself. And don’t be your own worst critic – be your own BEST critic with Brutal honesty, renewal of your personal standard of Excellence, a Sense of humor, and enough guts and adventure to keep Trying.

Start with Brutal honesty. A Victim-type can’t do this, but your inner Entrepreneur knows when you’re off your game and has the courage to proclaim it. If you find yourself “blaming” bad outcomes on circumstances or on other people (even if those other factors could be part of the equation), stop and be brutally honest with yourself. What could you have done better? It rarely hurts to be brutally honest with yourself – but one word of caution. People say they’re “brutally honest” with others when they’re really only giving themselves license to be brutal. Keep the brutality to yourself!

Another thing your inner Victim can’t abide is a sense of personal excellence… again, it’s not about excellence to the Victim, it’s about everyone being equally miserable. But your inner Entrepreneur always strives to hold you (and your performance) to the highest possible standards of Excellence. While you’re being honest with yourself, ask yourself what the most excellent performance would’ve looked like, and if there’s any reason you can’t perform at that level.

Keep your Sense of humor. Entrepreneurs are brutally honest with themselves and hold themselves to the highest standards, but they don’t take themselves too seriously. Return to the golf analogy – the best thing to do when you’re stinking up the course is to laugh. You know you’re not laughing because you’ve stopped caring or trying, only because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry! And seriously, life is to be played and enjoyed, not struggled-through. Remember these lyrics to a song by me: “Life is a joke, and the joke’s on you, and you’re never gonna get it ’til the joke is through.” Catchy, huh?

Finally, keep Trying. This connotes both a spirit of persistence (remember, you haven’t failed until you’ve stopped trying) and of experimentation (if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again… if you keep missing, try something else).

Let others believe you to be your own worst critic… but internally, to feed your inner Entrepreneur and starve your inner Victim, remember to be your own BEST critic. You’re in business for yourself, whatever your job title… and taking personal responsibility for self-coaching is part of how you take care of your business.

Inspiring Leaders Have Superior Awareness And Purpose

by Michael D. Hume, M.S.

Get to know an inspirational leader, and you’ll find she has two key attributes that less-inspiring people don’t enjoy; she has great interpersonal awareness (meaning, she knows herself well and can accurately “read” other people), and she’s driven by a deep sense of purpose.

Many of my clients own a business, and many are leaders in various kinds of organizations (from small businesses to government agencies)… almost all of them want to be known for an inspiring brand of leadership.  After working with scores of aspiring inspirational leaders. I’ve found these two key attributes are nearly universal among those who are successful.  They take the time to get to know themselves and others, and each is a person on a mission.

Here’s good news: if you don’t think you’re top-drawer on one or both of these measures, you can develop better awareness and better purpose.  Any good executive coach can help; a coach who’s experienced enough to have helped hundreds of leaders on these topics can make a huge difference in a leader’s mindset and performance.

How do you ramp-up your awareness?  One of the best ways is to get your coach to administer some sort of personal inventory that helps you understand yourself better (your hopes and fears, your tendencies, your aspirations… what makes you tick).  There are a lot of assessments on the market these days, but I like to work with the most widely-used and deeply-researched personal evaluation instruments – that way, my clients can learn a “language” of awareness that’s spoken by many others.  When a leader gets a guided tour of himself through such an instrument, he not only gains much deeper self-awareness, he can develop a pretty decent shorthand for reading other people (an invaluable leadership skill).  Behaviors start to make more sense when you realize what underlies those behaviors – the values, attitudes, beliefs, and general mindset that rests below the surface for each of us and which drive our decisions and actions.

If you’re a young or emerging leader, you’d be well served to start your journey toward inspirational leadership with such a push toward heightened awareness.  Sometimes, greater awareness helps lead to a more clearly-defined sense of purpose (and in any case, it can’t hurt).  But if you’re still unclear about your mission, even after you better understand your own motivations, there’s more you can do to hone your purpose.  Again, coaching can help, and great coaching can help a lot… but the general idea is to dig more deeply into what your passions are, and to try to cobble those passions together into a mission that will maximize utilization of your strengths and minimize the need for your less-developed skills.

Too many “leaders” in our society seem to work more out of habit than from a deep sense of purpose.  Here’s how you can tell how well-developed your mission is: ask yourself at least ten times, “What am I trying to accomplish?”  Give a different answer every time.  The first few answers you come up with (“I’m paying the bills,” “I’m getting out of debt,” “I’m working toward a promotion”) will be valid, but not insightful.  Keep asking until you come up with something meaningful, like “I’m trying to create thus-and-such an outcome in the world” or “I’m building a business that people really need and is like no other.”  If someone (like your coach, or a new employee) asks you what you’re trying to accomplish, you should have at least one insightful answer to the question.

Of course, you will never be an inspirational leader unless you are first an inspired person.  Increasing your interpersonal awareness, and clarifying the mission of your life and career, should be at least somewhat inspiring to you; and that should be the sort of inspiration you won’t be able to avoid sharing with others.

Not All Entrepreneurs Are Commercial Geniuses

by Michael D. Hume, M.S.

I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again. There are two kinds of person out there, and inside each of us. There’s the Victim, living his life as if he’s entitled to whatever he wants or needs. The Victim is critical, and cynical. He needs to be taken care of (usually by a big government), but is always quick to point out how much better a job he’d do if he were the one in charge. He’s political. He’s competitive. And he’s often passive-aggressive in his behavior, smiling in your face while stabbing you in the back.

Thankfully, there’s also the Victim’s opposite: the Entrepreneur. “Entrepreneur” is a better way to label the Victim’s opposite than the semantic opposite (“Victor”), because people who have an attitude opposite that of the Victim don’t think of life as win-lose, and therefore aren’t out to win at the Victim’s (or anyone’s) expense. No, the Entrepreneur lives life as though she feels obliged to create things in this life, and spends a lot of her energy creating opportunities for herself and others. She works hard, takes risks, bets on herself, and takes care of herself and of other people. The Entrepreneur doesn’t want dominion over others, and cherishes freedom above all other societal values. She’s creative. She’s collaborative. And when you need help, she’ll offer it before you ask.

We each will be dominated, to a greater or lesser extent, by the inner image we nourish. So a great way to feed your inner Entrepreneur (and starve your inner Victim) is to think of yourself as being in business for yourself, even if (and especially if), in a commercial sense, you are not. The Victim in your workplace acts as though it’s the “company’s” job to make sure he survives… the Entrepreneur next to him operates as though the company’s survival depends upon her, and her performance. The two mindsets are completely opposed to one another.

A smart person asked me recently if the term “Victim” takes things too far… not all people who don’t own a business, she said, are “victims.” Particularly, she disagreed with the notion she thought I was putting forth that someone who works for the government is automatically a victim. She pointed out that not all of us are cut out to run businesses – some lack the intelligence, the talent, or any of a number of ingredients (particularly luck) that make a successful business owner.

It’s the mindset I’m labelling, though, not the job description. I stand by this: each of us has the potential to be an Entrepreneur or a Victim, to be dominated by one attitude or the other, and our behaviors will tell you which inner image we’re nourishing most.

She was right – not everyone is equipped to run a business (and it isn’t for the faint of heart). Some people need to be “worker bees,” and our society depends critically upon them. But two worker bees with the same job description can have completely different attitudes toward their work, and you’ll tell them apart by the way they do the job.

Two waiters may work the same shift. One takes initiative, is always positive, and always seems to hope more customers will walk through the door (however “slammed” he is). The other seems to see customers as an interruption of the social aspects of the job, gripes when he’s “seated” with too many customers, and is always quick with a criticism of the management.

Two government managers may have the same daily duties. One tries to keep costs low for her bosses (the taxpayers), works hard to be the best leader she can be and to continually improve herself, acts like her unit is a business and she’s a stockholder, and even works long hours to make sure the citizens get the best possible service. The other shakes her head often in bewilderment, wondering why her colleague works for the government if she’s going to “overfunction” like she does… she is more about “having” a job than “doing” a job, and less about being her best than about making sure no one else gets something she doesn’t get.

In other words, in any walk of life, in any job, you’ll find Entrepreneurs and Victims. Not every Entrepreneur owns and runs a commercial enterprise, and not every one is a creative genius. Most Entrepreneurs, in the attitudinal sense, are solid, self-reliant worker bees who don’t own the business they work for. They only act like owners, in the sense that they feel a strong obligation to help their organizations succeed, whatever it takes.

Maximize your potential by exercising your initiative. Be in business, whether you’re in business or not. And take care of your business, every hour of every day. Life is better when you do.