Leadership Sounding Board

Personal Effectiveness Starts with GRACE

I started to think about the elements of Personal Effectiveness and wanted to put them in an easy to remember acronym.  The acronym started as R.A.C.E. but I didn’t think that was appropriate because as you experience greater degrees of  personal effectiveness, you tend to experience a greater sense of peace and graciousness in your life and that spills over onto others as well.  And then I realized I had almost forgotten that very important element which really sets the tone for everything you do – GRATITUDE.  And so the acronym is G.R.A.C.E.:
Gratitude, Relationships, Action, Commitments and Environment.

Inspired by the notion of GRACE, I checked out Wikipedia and found this description: “Grace is enabling power sufficient for progression. Grace divine is an indispensable gift from God for development, improvement, and character expansion.” [God is the name some give this power, and it could also be  divine spirit, the cosmos, the giver of life, mother earth, or whatever you call that which is bigger than you.]

Today being Memorial Day, I would like to express my gratitude to the men and women who have gone before us that have championed ideas and beliefs which were not popular with other countries and other nations. Ideas like democracy, freedom of speech, women’s rights, human rights and self-determination.  The men and women who put their lives on the line for all of these ideas, who built relationships with those they fought beside, who were in action, and committed and contributed to creating a new environment in which these ideas could live – they have expanded their character.  Those that are still with us and engaged in fighting for our rights and the rights of others in war-torn countries, I salute you! You have inspired me and moved me to tears with your stories of helping each other, your courage in helping others restore some sense of order to their lives and your empathy and support for the victims of conflict. 

Personal effectiveness is about this sense of GRACE, not about being more organized or efficient, isn’t it?  Isn’t it really about character expansion?

How are you expanding your character today?  How do people see your GRACE in the workplace and in your personal life?

Enjoy the lovely voice of Hayley Westenra singing this moving song about GRACE: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pK4PtJiOPE.

Leadership and Sustainability

"In the long run I know that it isn’t possible to keeping doing all the jobs I have to do in this organization but until we get past this financial crisis, I have no choice but to juggle the legislative activities and the trade show and the bill paying and the chapter meetings, and the newsletter…(exhausted yet?)  And we can’t really afford to hire additional staff or contract out any of our services and we can’t cut back any programs or the members will not feel compelled to renew their membership dues.  Our tradeshow funds haven’t begin to flow in yet and we don’t have enough to cover the payroll.  We just finished paying off a lot of debt and it really drained the reserves!"

 
This experience of a talented and driven association executive with a staff of two raises several questions:

1.  If you are totally committed to the organization and can’t take time for yourself, how do you regenerate your energy supply so that you don’t burn yourself out?

2.  If the executive burns him or herself out in wearing all these hats in the association, does that really serve the organization?  What impact does it have on volunteer leadership and what impact does it have on member program delivery?

3.  What is the role of the executive in dealing with the concept of sustainability of the organization?  Does the sustainability of financial resources have more importance than the sustainability of the human resources in the eyes of the board? 

4.  And lastly, if you are so busy dealing with things of great immediacy, how can you balance the longer term concerns, such as sustainability, with the shorter term concerns?

Tell me what you think and share your ideas about how to manage this situation!