Flight director Keith Comeaux, right, celebrates with Martin Greco after a successful landing of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on August 5, 2012 in Pasadena, California.
Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Les McKeown for Inc. magazine. To read the complete article, please click here.
Photo: Pool/Getty Images
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It’s been quite a year for leadership lessons. Let’s check out what events should shape your leadership goals for 2013. Any one of a multitude of events in 2012 (Hurricane Sandy, The London Olympics, Benghazi and its fallout) would provide a case study in how to lead–and sometimes, sadly, how not to.
Here [is the first of] my personal top five leadership lessons from 2012:
1. Institutionalize your Vision (with a capital V).
It’s over a year since he died, but Steve Jobs was still handing out leadership lessons in 2012.
The question everyone began asking almost immediately his sad, early death was announced was: “Will Apple survive the loss of its Visionary founder?”
This year showed that, while the jury is still out as to whether it will be exactly the same company or not, Apple isn’t going to disappear any time soon–far from it.
Unlike CEOs at companies such as Starbucks, Gateway, and Dell, Steve Jobs clearly succeeded in institutionalizing his vision by driving it deep into the very warp and woof of the company and instilling it into Apple’s management DNA.
Howard Schultz, for example, hasn’t yet achieved this at Starbucks. He’s still the personification of “his” company’s vision.
Are you the personification of your company’s vision? If you left, would it leave too? Or have you hired, mentored and coached your vision into the company, so that it would stand without you?
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Les McKeown is the author of the bestseller Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization on the Growth Track–and Keeping It There and is the CEO of Predictable Success, a leading advisor on accelerated organizational growth. His latest book is The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success.