I’ve challenged all leaders I have worked with during the past two decades to achieve “more results faster continually.”They can get on track to start achieving such results not by working harder and longer but by slowing down and using Leadership Talks on a daily basis.
However, I also tell them that getting on the more-results-faster-continually track is not an end but a beginning. They must then begin focusing not just on the quantity and speed of results but the kind of results they aim to achieve.
There are roughly two kinds of results, standard results and deep results. Most leaders understand standard results but fail to come to grips with deep results. In fact,these leaders go through their entire careers getting the former, but they don’t have a clue about the latter. Of course, standard results are necessary. But in the long run, they are far less important than deep results.
We know what standard results are. They are the results we must get in our jobs, such as: speed, productivity, operations efficiencies, sales closes, sales leads, sales to new customers, failure prevention, health and safety advancements, quality, training, quality control, logistics efficiencies, marketing targets, new revenue streams, sales erosion, price calibrations, cost reductions, demand flow activities and technologies, inventory turns, cycle time reductions, materials and parts management, etc.
Whereas achieving standard results enables us to do a better job and have a better career, deep results are different. Deep results are about being better leaders and human beings.
Of course, being a better leader will have a positive impact on your job and your career. But there is something else involved: Being a better leader means being a better person. Who we are as a leader and who we are as a person should be the same thing. If they’re not, we diminish both our leadership and the person we are.
Look at it this way: Standard results are about “doing”; deep results are about “being”. Our most important achievements as leaders are not just what we achieve but who we become in that achieving.
For instance, if we don’t get standard results in our job, we fail in that job or at least in that particular aspect of the job.
But in the realm of deep results, such failure might lead to success if in that failure, we find a better way to lead, a way to be better.
Here are some ways deep results differ from standard results.
–Deep results emerge over longer periods of time.
–Deep results encompass wider circles outside your job, usually impacting your family, friends, and relatives.
–Deep results are often not conventionally successful results. They can come in the guise of failure.
–Deep results can’t be quantified. They’re usually a quality of living or being.
–Deep results are often not immediately apparent. Usually, you become aware of them after they appear and sometimes long after they appear.
–Deep results are formed in your inner life and the choices you make over the things you control, your opinions, aspirations, and desires.
–Deep results shape, and are shaped by, character.
How does one go about getting deep results? There are many paths up this mountain. But one path is straight and steep and clear. That is the path of the Leadership Imperative.
I WILL LEAD PEOPLE IN SUCH A WAY THAT WE TOGETHER NOT ONLY ACHIEVE THE RESULTS WE NEED BUT THEY ALSO BECOME BETTER AS LEADERS AND AS PEOPLE.
The Imperative has two parts: one is results-accomplishments and the other is self betterment.
You are never more powerful as a leader as when, in getting results, you are helping others be better than they are — even better than thought they could be. Guided by the Leadership Imperative, you’ll find yourself realizing deep results.
Deep results are not a measurement or a direction. They are not a central purpose. They are a process of being. They are not something achieved. They are an achieving
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