{"id":12956,"date":"2020-01-13T03:15:47","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T03:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/948294437a.nxcli.io\/?p=12956"},"modified":"2024-01-24T19:59:32","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T00:59:32","slug":"how-to-move-a-mountain-a-leaders-guide-to-accomplishing-what-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/13\/how-to-move-a-mountain-a-leaders-guide-to-accomplishing-what-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving Mountains"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exceptional leadership moves mountains. It is not the leaders themselves who actually move the mountains. It is the competent organizations they lead that make things move. Have you ever attempted to move a mountain?<\/p>\n

Leadership provides what it takes to cause people to accomplish things that matter by making it both possible and necessary for people to perform exceptionally. You can manage things, like moving mountains, but you cannot manage people to accomplish things that would otherwise prove impossible. Competent leaders make things happen by causing people to contribute at the level needed to manage the things that matter \u2014 especially in the face of adversity\u2014so the organization will accomplish what matters most.<\/p>\n

Exceptional leaders understand that you cannot simply extract high performance from anyone. You must cultivate that performance. People perform to their potential when they understand what they can do and what they must accomplish. The role of leadership in cultivating performance is to ensure that people have the inspiration and resources needed to prepare themselves to realize and continuously develop their own potential. Leaders either inspire or intimate. You can intimidate people and get them to to take action – but no amount of external force will get a person to perform at their best. Competent leaders choose to be a source of inspiration. How do you get people to perform?<\/p>\n

Human potential is a function of our internal drive.<\/span><\/h3>\n

Ultimately it is self-satisfaction that drives individual performance in any organization. Daniel Pink writes about this in great depth in his book “Drive,” He notes that you can offer all sorts of incentives, but unless people are inspired to demonstrate their personal potential through their personal contributions – there is little you can do to positively impact their performance. No amount of compensation or praise will replace the internal drive that motivates people to push their limits and expand the boundaries that define their capacity to perform.<\/p>\n

Highly competent leaders are good “people makers.” They excel at the competencies that help transform average people into exceptional performers. Researcher and author Liz Wiseman makes the case that leaders tend to either be multipliers of performance or diminishers. She argues that multipliers actually make people smarter.<\/p>\n

Developing people into high performers requires hard work. But diminishing people’s drive (and hence, their performance) is simple. Developing top performers requires that you first develop yourself into someone who can. And even then, it is always uncertain as to whether you might succeed in helping to draw out the potential of anyone you lead.<\/p>\n

But it is easy to debilitate most people’s potential either through deliberate action – or by being an incompetent leader. A simple and obvious way to directly impact the potential of any given individual within your organization is to stop it in its tracks. Deliberately getting rid of poor performers may be a desirable way to limit the harm that incompetent people afflict on organizations.<\/p>\n

What happens when you eliminate people with unrecognized or undeveloped potential? Organizations also tend to expel people with enormous untapped potential either because they fail to recognize it or because the organization has no means to effectively guide and develop people. Decisiveness can be a powerful tool in the hands of a competent leader – and a dangerous weapon otherwise.<\/p>\n

It is even easier to unintentionally diminish the performance of the people you lead and, by extension, the performance of the organization as a whole. By simply failing to be an effective leader, you increase the odds that both competent people and those with the potential for competence will leave in search of an organization that can help them thrive. Leaders who lack the competencies needed for cultivating competence in others tend to find that mediocrity flourishes like a pernicious weed that takes over the organization’s habits of thinking.<\/p>\n

Incompetent leaders don’t just provide a good example of mediocrity for others to observe and emulate\u2014they multiply and expand its influence until it consumes everything good and tragically establishes itself as the status quo.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mediocrity and incompetence are not just toxic – they are highly contagious.<\/span><\/h3>\n

Mediocrity is a disease caused by neglect and poor mental hygiene. It is a state of mind, the result of your habits of thinking.<\/p>\n

Mediocrity is what fills the void created by a lack of creativity and the absence of conscientiousness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mediocrity in any organization always flows from top to bottom. Even if it is not apparent in the performance at the top of an organization, if at very least, it is tolerated by leadership – the organization will understand it to be sanctioned as a standard for suitable, even expected behavior. It will be deemed to be appreciated when poor performance is rewarded by dysfunctional (incompetent) organizations by way of payroll checks and job promotions that keep flowing.<\/p>\n

Dysfunction is like a weed that flourishes when you are not actively cultivating competence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you are not effectively confronting mediocrity, you are causing it to thrive.<\/p>\n

Dysfunction within an organization chokes out all meaningful accomplishments, eventually causing your organization to stop growing and eventually die.<\/span><\/h3>\n

Tolerance of mediocrity isn’t something you bake into your strategic vision or game plan. Most leaders do not explicitly encourage people to perform poorly. Mediocrity may exist because you cannot figure out how to change the course, improve the culture, leverage the needed resources or solve whatever problems are institutionalizing dysfunction in your organization.<\/p>\n

The simple fact that mediocrity and the resulting dysfunction exist is evidence that it is allowed to exist. It is the responsibility of leadership to obviate the causes of dysfunction and combat mediocrity at any cost. The failure of leadership to do so, regardless of the reason, is, in itself, a function of incompetence and a leading reason that organizations fail to accomplish what matters most.<\/i><\/p>\n

Incompetent leadership is the pinnacle of mediocrity. Competence is not the opposite of incompetence – it is the cure for the dysfunction it causes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fortunately, tolerance of mediocrity is a choice.<\/span><\/h3>\n

You can choose to no longer accept the status quo, and you can choose to do something about it. You can choose to be competent.<\/p>\n

Competence doesn’t happen by accident. You are not born competent; you become competent. At birth, you are entirely helpless and vulnerable, unable to move, feed, or protect yourself. You were incapable of surviving without being nurtured. You grew to become competent by learning to communicate your needs and then how to serve them independently. You learned to become a competent human.<\/p>\n

The pathway to human competence is learning and growth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Competence requires developing the competencies<\/em> that enable you to accomplish the things that matter. You develop the knowledge and skills required for the tasks you must undertake. If you are lucky, you may exhibit natural talents that can perhaps bias your likelihood of succeeding. And finally, your experience provides the insight and instructions needed to advance on your journey forward.<\/p>\n

While competencies are necessary, they are not sufficient for accomplishing your aims. You can know what to do and still be entirely incompetent. Competence does not exist in the absence of meaningful accomplishment. You cannot attain competence through learning and practice alone. You must actually demonstrate competence through what you accomplish.<\/p>\n

Competence is not what you do\u2014it is who you are\u2014or more to the point, what you make of yourself. You cannot “do” competence. You have to “be” competent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Competence is a result of having prepared yourself to accomplish things that truly matter. You might be great a wasting time – but this hardly makes you a competent person. It is when you apply what you have learned and mastered and then achieve something that is meaningful and significant that you demonstrate your competence.<\/p>\n

Competence is evident by what you accomplish or not. Determination is important to be prepared for what you want, but circumstances also play a role in our pursuit of competence. You might be fully prepared to accomplish your aims – and still fail. You might be bested by someone faster or stronger than you are, or you might be thwarted by conditions that were impossible to predict or even imagine.<\/p>\n

It is not necessarily your failure to achieve your objectives that will define you: You can fail to realize your goal and still accomplish something extraordinary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The old clich\u00e9 that it isn’t whether you win or lose that count has some merit here. How you fail makes a difference. What you gain through your failure might exceed what you may have achieved in success.<\/p>\n

It is also true that you can achieve what you set out to do and fail to accomplish anything meaningful, significant or positive. Competence is measured by significance, and significance is a function of meaning derived from your sense of your purpose. Purpose is an inextricable component of competence.<\/p>\n

Knowing what to do and how to do it is not nearly as important as knowing why.<\/span><\/h3>\n

Knowing what to do is a matter of developing the rudiments of achievement. To do so, you must acquire the requisite competencies for whatever it is you aim to accomplish. You must then also understand how to apply your competencies in order to have some meaningful impact. What you accomplish must contribute value to others. That value is determined by your understanding of the purpose driving what you do.<\/p>\n

Having enormous talent, vast knowledge, incredible skills and impressive credentials – does not make you competent. It may make you arrogant or give you a sense of entitlement, but it will not enable you to contribute anything of value – unless you are conscientious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conscientious literally means operating in accord with your conscience. It amounts to an understanding that what you do serves something greater or beyond your own personal needs and interests. It is doing something with a sense of a greater or noble purpose. It is “knowing your why.”<\/p>\n

Conscientiousness is critical to accomplishing things that are significant and truly meaningful. It is what informs your grit. Grit is the willingness that creates your ability to stretch beyond what you might be comfortable doing.<\/p>\n

When you get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable you not only challenge your self-imposed limitations, you will actually develop your mental and physical strength and enhance your capacity to perform.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conscientiousness feeds competence – and decimates mediocrity.<\/span><\/h3>\n

Conscientiousness is what sparks the curiosity that ignites the flames of learning and growth that consume active minds. It feeds the determination that fuels discovery and innovation – and elevates human performance to extraordinary levels.<\/p>\n

Conscientiousness is what causes you to be competent by connecting what you can do<\/em> to what you actually accomplish<\/em> through the guidance of an indomitable and indelible sense of purpose. A noble purpose, one that will not only inspire you. It emanates and expands in waves on ripples of accomplishment and provides inspiration that others can ride on.<\/p>\n

Exceptional Leaders Demonstrate Competence by Developing Competence in Others.<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

Leadership is the art of getting others to perform together towards a common purpose. You cannot be effective as a leader unless you can demonstrate the conscientiousness that others must see as necessary and possible. People will not follow you because they like you. They follow leaders whom they trust. People look to their leaders for proof. As John C. Maxwell writes, “People follow leaders they respect, people who are competent.”<\/p>\n

Your responsibility as a leader must be to instill in others the sense of purpose that will equip them to perform to their potential – and to strive to expand their potential so they are more capable tomorrow than they were yesterday. To be competent as a leader, you must have this purpose indelible in your mind. If not, your organization might be overwhelmed by mediocrity.<\/p>\n

I am not suggesting that any of this is easy. It is not.<\/p>\n

Getting people to change their behaviors may feel like moving mountains, but this is what competent organizations do, because they can and because they know they have to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As noted earlier, organizations move things, and leaders move people to make those things happen. A competent leader makes certain that the organization accomplishes what matters most. Moving mountains requires exceptional leadership. Mountains don’t move on their own.<\/p>\n

Albert Einstein suggested that nothing happens until something moves.<\/span><\/h3>\n

Moving mountains is an intriguing concept. It is not merely a metaphor suggesting that you do what is seemingly impossible. It is instructive as to how your habits of thinking can inform the actions you take and how the choices you make determine what it is you can accomplish or not.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

To illustrate this very point, a few years back, I actually set out to move a mountain. Not just any mountain, but an iconic one: the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps, which happens to be the adopted mascot for our company, ALPS Leadership.<\/p>\n

The Matterhorn is significant to me because, while it is not the tallest peak in the Alps (Mont Blanc in France owns that distinction) – it is one of the most recognizable mountains in the world.<\/p>\n

For me, the Matterhorn represents the idea that you don’t need to be the largest, tallest or strongest to have great influence.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I had admired the majesty of this great mountain from afar. I had never actually traveled to see it with my own eyes. A friend and colleague of mine pointed out that fact to me – and challenged me to make that trip happen, which I did when I was booked for a speaking tour in Europe the following year.<\/p>\n

I added a few days to the itinerary and flew from London, England, to Geneva, Switzerland. From the airport, I immediately boarded a train to Zermatt – a ski resort town at the b<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ase of the Matterhorn. It was one of the most remarkable and breathtaking railways I had ever traveled.<\/p>\n

\"\"Zermatt is inaccessible to personal motor vehicles. The streets are restricted to foot traffic and some light public transportation. Movement is slow and feels more deliberate under the seemingly watchful eye of the Matterhorn, whose magnificent glacial peak rises into view from almost anywhere in Zermatt. Her presence is inescapable.<\/p>\n

On the first day, I walked to the base of the ski area and stepped onto the<\/p>\n

snow. I was finally close enough to the mountain to literally touch it. The next day, I took a cog rail up to Gornergat, a former observatory that has been made into a hotel, which, at an elevation of 10 285 feet, is the closest point to the peak you can get to without the need for climbing gear. Surrounded by breathtaking snow-covered peaks – it felt like I was standing eye-to-eye with the mountain. I spent several hours there and took the last train back to Zermatt. The next day, I reversed course and traveled back to London to go about my business.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The Gornergrat bahn – Matterhorn railway \u00a9 2018 Phil Liebman<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

View to the East from Gorergrat \u00a9 2018 Phil Liebman<\/p><\/div>\n

The point is that the Matterhorn had captured my imagination for years.<\/p>\n

In my mind’s eye – I had spent a great deal of time admiring her majestic beauty and finding meaning that inspired me to be my best in what I do.<\/p>\n

It was a decision combined with planning and then action that finally moved the mountain – from inside my head – to under my feet and in
\nfront of my eyes.<\/p>\n

Moving a mountain is really about choosing to move yourself from where you are to where you want to be.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Do you know what matters most to you? Or to your organization? Does your sense of purpose wax and wane – or drift with the changing tides of trends that are popular at the moment?<\/p>\n

Or is your sense of duty connected to a noble and indelible purpose? If your commitment to what you must accomplish is unshakable and significantly meaningful, there can be nothing holding you back. You must do what it takes to make yourself competent. You must make the people that form the organization around you competent as well by giving them the meaning that fuels their sense of purpose and drives them to act in concert with each other and a common cause.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The Hotel at Gornergrat – an old observatory \u00a92018 Phil Liebman<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

General George Patton noted that “a good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A good plan requires preparation. W. Edward Deming warns us that “it is not sufficient to do your best; you must first know what to do and then do your best.” Endeavor to be curious and insatiable in your quest to learn. Be courageous in the decisions you make. And be exceptional by striving to always be competent and accomplish what matters most.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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