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Personal development: Evaluating non-traditional leadership criteria March 8, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Leadership.
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If developing the attribute or character trait of leadership capability or potential is part of your personal growth program, you may be pursuing that goal from an overly traditional viewpoint.

Particularly in a business setting, the requirement for demonstrating leadership capability may often be limited to a number of perhaps stereotyped and oversimplified traditional criteria.

Criteria that may be out of sync with the qualities of leadership required in today’s fast-evolving (even revolutionary) world of interpersonal relations.

In an article by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times International Weekly edition, titled: “How to Get a Job at Google”, the author discusses Google’s hiring criteria. One of the criteria is leadership.

Friedman interviewed Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google. Bock emphasized that Google is particularly interested in emergent leadership as opposed to “traditional” leadership:

“Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power,” Bock says.

Something to think about.

Personal growth: The need for self-tolerance March 6, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Goal Setting and Realization.
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One of the important aspects of moving towards the achievement of our personal development potential is in focusing on the vector of developing mature interpersonal relationships.

This is a multi-faceted area for improvement, and we recognize that one of the important aspects of this component is the need for personal work on the subset of developing the character attribute of tolerance.

In our ongoing self-improvement work we have learned some important value lessons.

We recognize that one aspect of intolerance is the pejorative naming, labelling, and categorizing of people, groups of people, institutions, religions, nationalities, races, sexual orientation, and political views.

We know, for example, that naming, labelling, and categorizing often allows us to over-simplify the complex.

We know that it is both morally wrong, and ultimately unproductive, to be intolerant, bigoted, or judgemental, and we work to correct these tendencies in our own personal makeup.

But how often do we see that there is also need for us, if we are to realize our individual human potential, to be more tolerant towards ourselves in our personal development work?

Personal growth is just that – growth.   By implication, growth is not achieved overnight, it is an evolutionary process. We should not be beating ourselves up constantly for not achieving sufficiently rapid improvement in areas such as attitudinal change. Attitude modification is one of the most challenging components of self-improvement.

We should be more accepting and tolerant of what we consider to be our own, personal attitudinal shortcomings, even as we recognize the need for improving these deficiencies in our intellectual and emotional makeup.

Carried too far, intolerance towards our perceived lack of fast change in our personal behaviours and attitudes can have demoralizing, damaging, and ultimately destructive effects on our efforts to improve.