LEADERSHIP Series: Managing Yourself First

Having good intentions is admirable. It is your behavior that will have impact. If you want to maximize your impact, first manage your behavior while purifying your intentions.

Proverbs 31:4-5 (MSG) Leaders can't afford to make fools of themselves, gulping wine and swilling beer, lest, hung over, they don't know right from wrong, and the people who depend on them are hurt.

Behavior always speaks more loudly than words. Just as golf is the game of commerce and is often used to judge the character of potential clients and people with whom one does business, so the “19th” hole also is a visual book of behavior. Words spoken, without the normal constraints of the business setting, cannot be recaptured in the air once their sound is out. Leaders know their drinking limits and stick within them

Leaders who know their limits can be trusted. It was Peter Drucker, in his 1999 HBR article on Managing Oneself, who pointed out that "history's great achievers - Napoleon, da Vinci, Mozart - have always managed themselves....[and later in the same article]…Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values and how they best perform."

And remember, as Polonius admonished Laertes, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Are you managing well the most important person you must lead - yourself?


Copyright ©2009 by P. Griffith Lindell