stopping...not stopping

It has been twelve weeks since I last penned a blog.  Over the past ten years, the longest I believe I ever went without writing a Friday Morning Blog was 4 or 5 weeks (more than likely vacation time).  As I began thinking to myself about why I have not been writing my blog (and why I have not missed writing my blog) I realized that the time has come to put this blog to rest...at least for now.  For ten years I have paused on most Friday mornings and put my thoughts about leadership into words for the world to read; for ten years I have taken the time to organize my random thinking about leadership into a paragraph or two (and hundreds of bullet points) that hopefully make sense to others; and for ten years I have relished in the process of trying to unpack a leadership conundrum that would help others navigate the process of leading.  I have enjoyed every minute of it, and am glad that I had the opportunity to think about leadership in a deeper manner because of this blog.

While I am stopping the process of blogging about leadership, I am not stopping the process of thinking about leadership.  So on this final Friday Morning Blog, here are a few things I am thinking about right now in terms of leadership and leaders:

• leaders are most vulnerable when they stop worrying about their leadership...and what do they have to do to ensure they remain confident in their leadership while wondering about it at the same time?
• having a leadership role is different from leading when one has no title...and how does that difference look and feel to both the leader and those who follow them?
• those in leadership roles have definite blind spots that keep them and their organizations from achieving their full potential...and how are those blind spots discovered and then acted upon over time?
• leaders need empathy in order to successfully lead people...and how can empathy be developed when potential leaders spend most of their time managing processes and solving problems?
• as the world changes and becomes more complex, the nature of leadership has to change...and how will future leaders lead differently when their models of leadership are current leaders (who were trained by past leaders)?
• successful leadership is often determined by what others see being accomplished...and how can leaders best spend time on the internal work that is necessary for enduring leadership to occur?

I leave this blog with the words of John O'Donohue's blessing for a leader:

May you have the grace and wisdom to act kindly, learning to distinguish between what is personal and what is not.

May you be hospitable to criticism.

May you never put yourself at the center of things.

May you act not from arrogance but from service.

May you work on yourself, building up and refining the ways of your mind.

May those who work for you know you see and respect them.

May you learn to cultivate the art of presence in order to engage with those who meet you.

When someone fails or disappoints you, may the graciousness in which you engage be their stairway to renewal and refinement.

May you treasure the gifts of the mind through reading and creative thinking so that you continue as a servant of the frontier where the new will draw its enrichment from the old, and you never become a functionary.

May you know the wisdom of deep listening, the healing of wholesome words, the encouragement of the appreciative gaze, the decorum of held dignity, and the springtime edge of the bleak question.

May you have a mind that loves frontiers so that you can evoke the bright fields that lie beyond the view of the regular eye.

May you have good friends to mirror your blind spots.

May leadership be for you a true adventure of growth.

(taken from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings written by John O'Donohue and published by Doubleday in 2008)