If you’ve been following along with the last few posts, you have read the description and application of our three core values, the pillars of Embracing Risk, Expecting Results, and Pursuing Relationships.
These three pillars are central to my understanding of leadership, and they have held up the bridge over my own experience of failure and loss. I call them enduring values because you have probably heard them before.
- Embracing Risk, at its heart, is the action of Faith.
- Expecting Results is the action of Hope.
- Pursuing Relationships is the action of Love.
Bridging the Physical and the Spiritual
For me as a human being and business owner, there is profound meaning behind the values of faith, hope, and love. These values held up a bridge that enabled me to make the transition from Africa to America. That bridge was not just a means to get over the chasm of crisis and failure—it was also the way for me to understand the connection between the physical and the spiritual in my life.
Many of my clients know that I am an ordained minister and that my first two degrees are in theology. Before I was president of a university, I was a missionary. When I returned to America and entered the marketplace in Dallas/Fort Worth to work with business leaders, I felt an urge to reconcile the different parts of my life and make sense of what I had experienced.
Today, I understand that building leadership bridges is my vocation, a word that also means a calling. Through executive coaching, my work is to walk alongside CEOs and help them construct bridges to achieve meaningful results through people.
Doing Your Own Deep Work
I believe that leaders must wrestle with themselves before they can consistently achieve results through others. A significant part of the task of leadership happens on the inside—what some leadership gurus call “deep work.”
I have invested years in this kind of deep work, which included the process of reflecting on my own failure and recovery, translating my personal values into professional terms, working out the business implications, and articulating a path that other leaders might find helpful.
Finding an Internal Bridge
In doing this deep work, I discovered an internal bridge. When you take purposeful action to connect your spiritual values and your business values, you build a bridge between leadership and life—and you become an integrated person, leading a unified life.
You might define your own spiritual values in different terms than I do, but you have the same task of deep work to connect those values to what you do every day in your business and achieve that same unity of life.
That unified life is the bridge that let me cross the chasm of crisis, fear, and failure. It was built with daily business decisions and deliberate personal choices, staring risk in the eye, lifting my vision from safe small-ness to expect greater results, and pursuing relationships with new humility.
This year, I invite you to decisively set your own leadership course with renewed clarity on what matters most.
Follow us on LinkedIn to get thoughtful articles on the bridges leaders must build and cross to inspire greater performance.
