ACTS OF KINDNESS: There is something remarkably humble about any great act of leadership. Great acts of leadership are fundamentally great acts of kindness. They can be small or large. The foremost measurement of any act of kindness is whether or not it is one for public purpose.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What does the phrase "leadership for public purpose" mean to you, and what does this phrase say about leadership specifically?
ALT TEXT: The above picture is a sketchnote. The depictions are of platforms that professionals commonly use for writing and presentation. One platform, for instance, is PowerPoint. Argued is that leaders should lead by giving presentations.
LEADING IS PRESENTING: Warren Bennis offers that a leader’s greatest actions start with an instinct that he or she has learned to trust. Bennis explains that the best leaders have intuition that, “in a flash,” shows them the “absolutely right thing to do” (98). The argument is that one’s mind can be trained to trust an internal compass, a compass that makes decision-making much easier. A clue to finding actions people can take to lead in today’s world is “Tactical Thinking,” a pragmatic approach that relies on better planning; this process of slow, careful, thoughtful, thorough planning is often a step people skip (Puccio et al. 187). As explained in Chapter 11, “Tactical Thinking” means “devising a plan in specific and measurable steps for attaining a desired end and monitoring its effectiveness” (Puccio et al. 187). Puccio, Murdock, and Mance recommend this practice as part of a larger discussion on the need for leaders to think creatively; they compare “Tactical Thinking” to the process of creating “to-do” lists—not for daily tasks, but for exhaustive lists of all the possible actions a leader could take to solve a specific problem (190). General wisdom is something the best leaders have in abundance; the best leaders have learned to cultivate wisdom through regular “reflection and inquiry” (Wei et al. 9). Leadership wisdom has four features: (1) an intellectual component, (2) an action component, (3) a value component, and (4) an adaptive component (Wei et al. 9-10). The “value” component means decision-making that serves everyone’s best interests; it is a matter of considering how one’s actions will impact others before the leader acts (Wei et al. 9-10). Every meaningful action a leader could take begins with feelings, “psychological forces that drive each of us beneath the surface” (Sugerman et al. 17). These feelings are, to paraphrase, explained as eightfold: (1) a humble feeling, (2) a sense of pioneering, (3) a charge of energy, (4) a desire for affirmation, (5) a wish of inclusivity, (6) an urge to be deliberate, (7) a will to be resolute, and (8) a call to be commanding (Sugerman et al. 17). Provided in Sugerman et al. is a way of problem-solving that matches appropriate feelings with effective actions; appropriate feelings can inspire original ideas. Success is not enough to measure leadership; not enough is written about how to respond to failure, such as to “Communicate constantly” (Tracy 47). “Uncertainty compounds the crisis,” Tracy explains (47). The underlying message of “Learn from Adversity” is that every failure is a two-step process that involves not being afraid to fail, then not being afraid to identify the thousand or more ways that are available to a leader to improve (Tracy 46). Refusing to be broken is a noble action a leader can take, as it was in the case of Theodore Roosevelt when he lost his wife and mother on the same day—his wife shortly after giving birth to Roosevelt’s first child, and his mother to typhoid fever (Goodwin 124-125). As Goodwin records, Roosevelt soon moved West to start a new chapter in his life (127). A lesson on action that Roosevelt learned from this difficult time is that leaders must respect the “fragility” of positions of power; leaders must maximize every minute they have to accomplish their work, and accomplish them well (Goodwin 132).