I'm not sure how many of you caught the article by Robert Rosen. It was an interview with Priyanka Sangani in the Economic Times of March 14, entitled 'Healthy, Wealthy and Wise'. Robert Rosen says, "Who you are as a human being is what drives you in the work place and that is what determines how well you perform. Robert Rosen is founder of Healthy Companies International and author of Grounded: How Leaders Stay Rooted in an Uncertain World. He has spent twenty years studying and advising CEOs on how to build better companies that balance results as well as the human side of the business.
As I was reading this article, I realized that he had brought out some very interesting points. I thought that I would throw out some of the things he had given and then use that to piggy back on to some of the things I would like to speak to you about.
He says, "Basically as you look at healthy leaders, they are disciplined, self-aware and committed to personal growth for themselves and for those around them. They are attuned to four agendas.
· The financial agenda which helps them ensure that they have the capital and results required for continuity, success and growth.
· The operations agenda, which focuses on efficiency and processes.
· The market agenda which keeps them tuned to their customers and competition.
· The human agenda – most important – they are always concerned about the people who work with them and for them.
Then he says that there are six dimensions to a healthy leader. This I thought was very interesting because this is something that I have been talking about at Corporate Capsules for some time, that leadership is not just myopic, not just delivering a set of requirements to a company, but being able to look holistically at who you are so that you are in there for the long haul. Rosen talks about this as he looks at a healthy leader and says, "For longevity, leaders have to have six dimensions that they take of:
· Physical Health: Being strong enough to cope with the pace of growth.
· Emotional Health: Being self-aware and having the hope and resilience to bounce back.
· Intellectual Health: Asking hard questions, curious, constantly assessing yourself and adapting to change and innovating
· Social Health: Being authentic and building mutually nourishing relationships
· Vocational Health: Having a passion for success and a meaningful calling in life
· Spiritual Health: Not whether you are religious, but whether you have a higher purpose and a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself.
These six elements have always been around but have somehow taken a back seat to high performance and have been detrimental to the health of a leader. He comes back to the point where he says, "Healthy leaders have a purpose; they unleash energy. They have passion." Looking at Indian corporate leaders, he points out Kumarmangalam Birla as a healthy leader. "He's a master at intellectual health, curious and always learning and unleashing human energy and growing business and seizing opportunities."
The thing that caught my attention was the last three points that he made:
· Who you are as a person is what drives your performance at work
· The world is changing faster than the ability of leaders to re-invent themselves
· Spiritual health is essential in today's business environment.
Who you are is grounded in your roots. That's a good question for us to ask ourselves today. Do we know who we are? Are we secure in who we are? Are we getting caught up in being the kind of person that people around us want us to be.
I was watching an interview that Sidney Poitier had given. He was the first African American who got an Academy award in 1964 for his movie 'Lilies of the Field.' One of the things that he says, "I am the me I choose to be." I have to make sure that I am who I am. But Sidney Poitier says, "I had to be the me I chose to be because when I came to the US, I had no idea of the positions of blacks or whites. I got a job in a grocery story delivering groceries. I went to the front door of a white person and they asked me what I was doing? I said that I had come to deliver groceries. They said, "Go to the back door. That's where you belong." He said, "I didn't understand it. I just left the groceries on the front porch and I walked away. I know largely who I was and that I was not different from my roots. When people in Florida said to me, "You're not who you think you are!" I said to the people in Florida, "I'm not who you think I am."
Reflecting on that, I thought how important it is for us to know who we are, especially for us to know our personalities and sometimes, the dark side of our personalities. I might be an animated, playful, sociable person, but my dark side is to be forgetful, to interrupt people, to be haphazard and unpredictable. Or I could be persuasive and strong-willed, competitive and resourceful and yet be bossy, unsympathetic and resistant to change and impatient with people. Or I could be analytical, persistent, self-sacrificing, considerate, but be unforgiving, resentful, fussy. Or an adaptable person, a peaceful person, a controlled person and then be blank, unenthusiastic, reticent. All this made me think how important it is for each one of us to be able to find out who we really are and then to be able to make sure that that's the kind of person that we portray ourselves.
Coming back to what Robert Rosen was saying, "It's who you are as a human being that drives you in the workplace. My prayer for us is that we will take the trouble to find out who we are. It's interesting that Rosen talks about the spiritual dimension because I believe that it is the spiritual dimension that helps us understand who we are. In our Scripture it says: "God made us while we were still in the womb. He was the one who formed us. And if he did, he knows exactly who we are." Connecting with Him helps us to know who we are and then we can begin to be who we are in our market spaces and our spheres of influence. That's my prayer for you this morning.
Let me pray for you. Almighty God. Show us, Master, who we are. Show us where we have become what other people want us to be. Show us the places where we have compromised who we are. But tune us back to you as Creator, as to who you made us so that we can be all that you want us to be and in so doing, be healthy leaders in our work place. In Jesus name, I pray. Amen.
• Priyanka Sangani, "Robert Rosen--Healthy, Wealthy, Wise," http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-03-14/news/48222047_1_leaders-agenda-emotional-health
• Quotes by Sidney Poitier taken from dinner meeting with Oprah, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPnmxB9mLDg
• Florence Littauer, "Personality Plus" http://www.amazon.com/Personality-Plus-Understand-Understanding-Yourself/dp/080075445X
• Bible reference, Psalm 139
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