Leading with Wisdom and Humility: More Transformative Truths from Hal Donaldson
I had the great pleasure to sit down with my dear friend, Hal Donaldson, and interview him at the headquarters of Convoy of Hope in Springfield, Missouri. If you are unfamiliar with this non-profit organization, it provides humanitarian relief across the United States and around the world not only when disasters strike, but to care for individuals and families on an ongoing basis. Convoy has served over 200 million people worldwide, distributed $2.5B in relief funds, while feeding 600,000 children daily, empowering women, resourcing farmers, and equipping churches to reach their communities.
The Heart of a Leader: Hal Donaldson’s Life-Changing Truths on Vision and Service
I had the great pleasure to sit down with my dear friend, Hal Donaldson, and interview him at the headquarters of Convoy of Hope in Springfield, Missouri. If you are unfamiliar with this non-profit organization, it provides humanitarian relief across the United States and around the world not only when disasters strike, but to care for individuals and families on an ongoing basis. Convoy has served over 200 million people worldwide, distributed $2.5B in relief funds, while feeding 600,000 children daily, empowering women, resourcing farmers, and equipping churches to reach their communities.
Cultivating Trust: Creating a Culture of Honesty and Openness
Leadership literature universally agrees that trust is critical to success—both individually and corporately. Trust holds relationships together and encourages people to work cohesively and to willingly follow a leader. Effective leaders are genuine, credible, dependable, predictable, and benevolent.
Empowering Teams: Fostering Creativity, Diversity, and Participation
Visionary leaders create a sense of ownership. They communicate to people within the enterprise that this is their work, their opportunity, and that they are critical to the success of the whole organization. Leaders realize that all their power is in their people. They seek to enable each team member to contribute to his or her fullest.
Building Teams that Endure: Empowerment, Relationship, and Communication
A plethora of research reveals that when leaders effectively communicate their vision, constituents report significantly higher levels of job satisfaction, motivation, commitment, and productivity. Using honed communication skills, leaders listen, articulate vision, and express the heart of constituents, painting a picture of the future, outlining strategic goals, and openly sharing the current state of affairs.
Innovative Leadership: Embracing Change and Persevering Through Challenges
A strong leader has significant drive, energy, and determination, making decisions, getting things done, and acting with energy. Not content with momentary surges, effective leaders have a hardy and persevering energy—the ability to endure—that is critical for leadership.
Transformative Leadership: Accepting Responsibility and Forging Vision
Leaders have some sense of knowing not only where the organization must go but also how to strategically steer it. Even though the responsibility of oversight may be visionary and inspirational, leaders must also ensure that their teams remain on task operationally. To do so, leaders must be strategic thinkers and equippers.
From Good to Great: Enhancing Team Effectiveness Through Active Engagement
Teammates can be counted on to meet deadlines and to reach goals. They are trustworthy and predictable, helping to relieve some pains encountered in a struggle. No organization can operate for very long if people do not do what they say they will do. In reality, all management systems are based on promise keeping.
Building a Gold-Medal Team: Essential Qualities for Success
Though one person may serve as the designated leader, often the leadership role rotates among its members according to the current project. The leader willingly relinquishes his or her role, and team members do not greedily grab for it. The team entity is too valuable to permit a power struggle, so effective teams recognize that the success of a team supersedes individual success; individuals win or lose as a team.
Achieving Superior Results: Recognizing the Immense Value of a Team
Teams rivet themselves to the vision more easily than individuals working alone. With regular accountability and collaboration, teams can more clearly assess potential hindrances and trajectories of decisions, observing how an action done on the front lines of the organization either reinforces or sabotages the company vision.
Building a Powerful Team: Foundational Characteristics
Perhaps one of the best examples of true teamwork is conveyed by Thomas Quick as he describes a surgical team, headed by a surgeon. The team includes surgical assistants, nurses, anesthetist, and technician. Each function is specialized and highly skilled, and each person knows that his or her success is dependent on the other members of the team. All are committed to one objective—the well being of the patient.
Strategically Choosing Your Inner Circle: Why This Matters
The inner circle of the leader (the team within the team) and other chosen team members should possess a heart of integrity. An effective leader must not overlook character shortfalls despite impressive credentials of experience, personality, or education.
First Class Skills: Enhancing One’s Own Leadership
While supervision and management are of great importance, the actual building of a team is the paramount task of executive leaders. Kouzes and Posner emphasize building a team to accomplish the work at hand: “A one-word test for differentiating between leaders and managers that came through loud and clear in case studies was the use of we instead of I.
The Leader’s Priorities: The Building Blocks of Compounding Power
Effective leaders look ahead and provoke change. The very factors that produced today’s success can lead to tomorrow’s failure. Therefore, a leader must be able to embrace change and move with the currents of advancements and culture. As an agent of change, the leader sets a fire so that staff members see the flames with their own eyes and smell the smoke with their own nostrils. They personalize it.
Exponential Leadership: It Starts on the Inside
With solid character emitting from the heart of a leader, other virtues naturally emanate, exemplifying the standards for the team. Effective leaders and their staff members can be compared to a ship’s captain and the crew: even though it is essential that the ship’s captain have some vision of what lies beyond the horizon, it is also important that the crew understand the standards by which their performance will be assessed as they sail toward it.
Compounding Impact: The Divine Origins of Teamwork
While often overlooked and undervalued, God’s social nature reveals key components of successful team-mindedness and activity. Executive leaders who consider and explore these observations can better display these insights within their own teams through collaboration, partnerships, and team-mindedness. This trickles throughout the whole organizational population, leaving positive effects inside and outside the company.
Independence Day: Leaders Declare Their Values Through Action
Have you as a leader been forced to make a critical decision that would not only impact your life, but the lives of those you serve? If not, the time will surely come for you. Your mental fortitude will be tested. The team that you’ve surrounded yourself with will face pressure to deviate. Pressures will surround you from all sides. Yet will you hold to your conviction?
Infusing Team-Mindedness to Compound Cohesion
The quality of relationships among the executive leadership team is a primary factor in developing effective teams throughout the whole organization. Researchers Hersey and Blanchard indicate that the most significant factors in the productivity of an organization pertain to the interpersonal relationships therein. These relationships are foundational to the success of effective teams. This is a linchpin for all leaders.
Overcoming the Leadership Vacuum: Harnessing the Compounding Power of Teamwork
The success of organizations depends on strong, visionary leadership. Companies can compensate for the absence of certain skills and resources but cannot overcome the absence of effective leadership. This leads to a high level of frustration among leaders and team members. What causes this dilemma? The leaders’ skill sets are weighted toward other areas. Consequently, a massive leadership vacuum develops.
Building a Culture of Remebrance
What does remembrance accomplish in an organization? For one, it helps us to appreciate the present. We remember the struggles, the sacrifices, the humble origins, the story that led us to this moment. Does your team know the stories or the people who preceded them?