I have a dream that leadership opportunities come only to those who demonstrate that their decisions are informed by deeply held core values. Lee Thayer, author of Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing and I are on the same page about that.

Lee says, “The right values and beliefs are the “right stuff.” If you don’t have “the right stuff,” then you are not going to accomplish anything extraordinary, either individually or as a leader of others. And if those key others are not right-minded, right-hearted, and right-spirited (if they don’t have “the right stuff”), then your mission will likely fail. The right values and beliefs are critical because values and beliefs do not take us where we want to go. They take us in the direction they go. Their direction and their ends are inherent in them. They are blind to everything but their own ends. Get them right, and they will carry you along to where you want to go. Get them wrong, and they will carry you along to wherever they are headed.”

In your organization haven’t you observed someone with a title who has position power, but someone else has credibility and whose decisions people would choose to follow? I certainly have. If hiring choices have been good optimally the person with position power also is someone people would choose to follow. That scenario is least stressful on all systems and the people in them. It is also the path to extraordinary success.

Yet when was the last time you had a conversation with someone in leadership about their character as evidenced by the values that underlie their decisions?

Maybe it’s time to bring that background issue to the foreground at an executive session. Your employees know who you are, really.

I invite your comments, questions, and thoughts.

So what is transparency?  Transparency is a choice, a value in an organization that optimizes candor (telling the truth regardless of the impact of that truth, fast and forward).  These authors assert that candor maximizes the probability of success.

Transparency has to be lived as a value from the top of the organization down through its toes, where it does the walking.  And it either walks its talk or it doesn’t.  Like pregnancy, there is no such thing as being partly transparent.  What would that be?  We’ll tell you the truth part of the time but not all of the time?  It’s up to you to guess which part is true, though.

Like humanity, this is a complex subject in application.  We have seen the absence of transparency in highly visible cases where leaders did not intend to dupe their stakeholders, reality just got away from them at Enron, British Petroleum (BP) and most of the global organizational financial failures that created our drop in economic safety in the world.   Reality was known in these cases, it was not transparent to those who could make a difference before the crisis.

Does transparency occur differently inside an organization with the lightening speed of the digital era, where things said cannot be retracted?  The magnitude of emails and sometimes-careless comments and thought, can complicate discerning transparency for actionable matters.

These authors assert that transparency begins at home, in your own organization, where you will build a muscle around being transparent so that when called for in the world at large, you won’t be left without capacity for it like BP’s ex-CEO Tony Hayward, who eventually got around to admitting BP was not prepared for a category disaster he called “low probability, high risk.”    They also call for leaders to empower transparency in both directions — enabling others to “speak truth to power.”

You do know what I mean.  And if you have built a muscle around screwing your courage to the sticking point to look into the mirror, and if you enable your people to show you a mirror, good for you!  If you have not, there is no time like the present.

Tell me your stories, your questions, your thoughts.

But I am not attached to what that looks like.  In other words your version of the triple bottom line is up to you.

That I am committed to accountability paying off and increasing vitality gives me freedom to listen carefully for what is important to you.  It is the access to something.  It feeds my interest in you.  I don’t have to be right about how you get to the triple bottom line.  My ego is not in the conversation.

So what is attachment? Being attached may lead to doing things YOUR way, which might not be the most effective way, or the way with the highest ROI, or the way that works for the most number of people. Donald Trump’s leadership’s style is a good example of attachment.  You will do it MY way or hit the highway.   Emotions usually ride high with attachment .  Ego is very present.

Being committed or being attached are places you come from when moving a project forward or moving toward a goal.  Profit is a goal.  People and the planet are not goals, they are stakeholders in how you reach that goal. As a leader, one of the most difficult dynamics to manage are people’s unmet expectations about how other people should behave on the way to a common goal.

If you have been leading organizations for a while you are probably smiling that little recognition smile.   This means you have to bring people together sometimes to remind them of the value of civility, because each is attached to his or her own opinion of how something should be done.

When attachment is present, listening stops.  Progress is impeded when this happens.  What there is to do is take the conversation back to the commitment that is shared, and see what opens up.

Where are you attached?  Where are you committed?  Can you feel the difference?  I would enjoy hearing your stories.

I propose a new year’s resolution:  Take your leadership insecurities to your peer group for review.  Consider that you might sometimes be “being right” when you are really being arrogant, and it is costing you credibility.

The downside of “being right” when dealing with a subordinate, can be costly.  For example, if an employee isn’t feeling heard, that employee might begin to withhold information which can begin the slippery slope of  mis-information, mis-interpretation, and bad feelings.

If you are feeling the least bit uncomfortable while considering the above possibility of arrogance, it might mean you are tapping into your conscience.

Here lies an opportunity to distinguish between arrogance parading as self-esteem, and challenging your assumptions.  One source for reflection on that topic is “Acting as if your assumptions are the truth,” number two in the downloadable free report on this website, “Seven Costly Mistakes Senior Executives Make that Cause Performance, Productivity and People to Suffer.”

What if you took your inquiry — or any internal discomfort as a leader— to your peers, not as gossip but as an opportunity to seek suggestions in the name of collaboration, cooperation, teamwork, productivity, authenticity, contributing and being contributed to?

As an executive coach I have witnessed the value of doing so.  One manager in particular was reluctant to expose herself to her peers, believing they would think less of her.  However, she took the coaching, rallied her courage, and the result was unexpected.  She actually garnered MORE respect for having been vulnerable in a situation everyone knew anyway!  It was a real lesson for her that the elephant in the room is more visible than most people want to admit.

I recently submitted a white paper for consideration to present at the Conference for Global Transformation in the spring of 2012, the root of which was an inquiry into trustworthiness of business leaders.

The chairman of the review committee said, in accepting the paper for presentation, “I found your paper to be very interesting, particularly how you questioned your own views.  I think this is really an important point that should be brought forward….”  As a result of that feedback I changed the title of my paper from “Transforming Leadership in Business…” to  “Transforming the Leader Within:  Questioning Self as Access to Expanded Thinking Capacity.”

What does this bring up for you?  Your questions and thoughts make a rich dialog.

In our relatively short conversation, I got something incredibly valuable. There are some key distinctions regarding Employee Engagement that, if you don’t know deeply what they mean and how to use them, will stifle any attempt to transform a corporate culture. I am clear John Schierer is a master in these distinctions.

Employee engagement means that people at work will give you their discretionary time and attention. They don’t just show up; they show up engaged, excited, and enthusiastic about making their unique contribution, and accountable for producing results.

Situational. That means you have to first understand the culture you are in before you can expect to garner employee engagement. This takes time, effort, and study. Where is the company in its organizational life cycle? Is it small and growing? Or large and complex? Is it in transition from one stage to another?

Desired Behaviors. Before taking on any transformational efforts, know the outcome you want — greater productivity, quality — improvement over the current state. Here, John collaborated with Sandy and came up with behaviors and created a code of conduct based on Sandy’s book, Excellence at Work: The Six Keys to Inspire Passion in the Workplace (World at Work Press, 2007).

Language. Having clear behavioral outcomes created common definitions, language and understanding for not only employees, but also for the supervisors. Language is unique to a culture, and having intentional language can add strength to the culture. New people pick up on it very quickly.

Alignment. If you hold values, or a code of conduct high, are those values/is that code of conduct in the performance appraisals and the compensation structure? Are you interviewing for preferences around those values? Are you asking employees about them through 360’s?

Buckets. If your language is built around alignment with those values that are aligned throughout the organization, then people will begin to express upsets in the language that mirrors the buckets that were formed. New employees will quickly align to the language and also begin to relate to the buckets. Structural integrity is very quickly discernable.

Transparency. If people know the mission and are aligned, they are self-informed because everything is transparent to them. Transparency is taught by being modeled. It can be tracked anecdotally, by learning where transparency is being rewarded.

Thinking in these terms will help you ask the right questions, so that if you believe, as the Jurdy cartoon suggests, that something is missing from employee engagement, you can look deeply for what will make a significant, measurable, positive difference, as John and Sandy and their team did at Cobham.

Perhaps you have terms that you have found key to employee engagement.  Please share by leaving a comment.

One disturbing finding that led to these conversations is that only 17 percent of the 35-64 year old “informed publics” trust information given by a CEO about his or her company.  This was six-year low.

For better or for worse, my understanding is that, in terms of influence, it only takes about 15% of people agreeing to anything (a philosophy, a code of behavior, a belief) to change the tide and move the masses.  Robert Porter Lynch, who has done considerable research in the area of trust and leaders, posits that trust is the bedrock of democracy, and when our trust is damaged, we are doing damage to the very principles upon which this country is founded.  We are precipitously close to that tipping point.

Since I coach CEOs and their executive teams, I was personally appalled.  But more appalling than the sense that our business leaders have behaved badly and deserve this reputation — some do and most don’t — is my concern that all CEOs have been painted with the same brush as those who deserve to be penalized and put away for a very long time, damaging others’ reputations by association.  There are leaders who do wrong intentionally, and others who are simply careless.  In a Financial Times some months ago, for example, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward admitted that they were not prepared for a category disaster he called “low probability, high risk.” Indeed.

BP, after an estimated $20 bn leak with costs to our environment and the human psyche that are unconscionable and immeasurable finally began looking into their strategy and tools to resolve such risks.  Tony Hayward is not a bad person, but inadequate thinking and planning has exacted an extraordinarily high toll.  Regardless, whether they make a mistake of wrongful thinking, or they are out to get us as was the case with Bernie Madoff, bad decisions of those in power cost us trust in leaders inclusively.

A MUST READ for every executive is Herb Baum’s The Transparent Leader, in which Baum said, “A lot of executives who made headlines (because of a scandal) were just plain white-collar thieves who deserved to do time.  And there were others who were basically good people who made compromises when they shouldn’t have.  They stretched the truth because they thought they had to, and they made some business decisions that were short on integrity. They had risen to leadership positions, but they failed because they didn’t understand how to be open with various constituents and they were unable to build a culture base on trust in the organizations they led.”

Let’s assume leaders should do more to warrant our trust.  BP’s Hayward has admitted the criticism of the oil spill and subsequent inability to stop the damage was ‘entirely fair.”  Ok, it was an event, a mishap.  Let’s look at an ordinary, reoccurring factor.  Who is culpable, for instance, for extraordinarily high CEO wages?   Considerable finger wagging has been going on in the press at CEOs about this.  It isn’t the CEO who sets his or her own salary; it is the board of directors.  Yet they are invisible to the press in these stories.  So often our assumptions lead us to conclusions that malign others without full consideration for the facts.  This disturbs me greatly but I know I have done it, too.  Why is that?

Walking with a friend, I mentioned a situation that was just this kind of wrongful maligning, and she asked me, “How long does it take to find a witch?”  She was alluding to the days in Europe from 1480 to 1700 when legally sanctioned and official witchcraft trials resulted in from 40,000 to 100,000 executions. It was decided someone was a witch, and next thing you know that person was burned at the stake.

While we’ve moved beyond flagrantly burning people at the stake, we still do character assassinations every day, in the form of judgment and gossip.   Some of these finger wagging and witch-hunting and broad-brush painting are projections — making someone else responsible for what we, ourselves, don’t want to be responsible.

I had the opportunity to make the opening remarks at the University Club’s Distinguished Speaker Series presentation on the Future Evolution of Higher Education: What we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and how we need to evolve. Moderated by the consummate professional Robert McNeely, Senior Executive Advisor at Union Bank, the panel included Dr. Lynn Reaser, Chief Economist at Point Loma Nazarene University, Dr. Constance Carroll, Chancellor at San Diego Community College District, and Dr. Randolph Ward, County Superintendent of Schools. They are thoughtful, caring, committed educators and each brought amazing perspective to the subject of the future of education. I have my own view.

Without talking about age, just let me say that once upon a time I was an educator, and I taught primarily English and Journalism. I also have taught in higher education from time to time, including one semester at the University of San Diego, my MBA Alma Mater, in their Masters program, and I currently mentor USD MBA students. I care deeply about education and the future of education, and I think you should too, and here’s why.

Children starting primary school this year will be retiring in about 2070. They start out with extraordinary capacities. I am a big fan of Sir Ken Robinson and I once saw him speak. He is an expert on education and particularly creativity, and he contends that all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them. “Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. “ And I can’t help but mention the standout economic value of creativity to Steve Jobs and Apple.

In a TED talk in 2006, Sir Robinson said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original, and by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They are afraid to be wrong. We run our companies like this, we stigmatize mistakes. We are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. “ Sir Robinson asserts that we are educating our children out of their creative capacities by focusing on not making mistakes.

“We don’t grow into our capacity to be creative, we grow OUT of it,” he asserted. He proposed that the whole education system is designed “to educate progressively from the waist up, focusing on their heads and slightly to the right side of their heads, and there’s a significant human potential cost to the lack of attention to dance, art and other creative endeavors. When education cuts the budget, those are the first things to go in favor of the more “practical” things.”

Here’s another interesting perspective which I got from the same talk. Jonas Salk said, “In 50 years, if all insects were to disappear all forms of life on earth would end. If all human beings were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life would thrive.” Consider that it is possible we are in our own way and we aren’t maturing very fast as a human race at all!

Personally, I assess senior executives for a living, and one indicator that I look at in my assessment tool of choice, the Harrison Assessment is the paradoxical relationship between a preference for an analytical approach to decision-making and an intuitive one. Highly successful people, the research shows, have a preference for BOTH. Mostly, in almost a thousand experiences, I observe that there is a preference for analytical over intuitive among senior executives. Not good, not bad, just very interesting.

I am particularly aware of the paradoxical relationship between both the need for education and the demands being put on education to pull rabbits out of hats to please many constituents, and that Americans aren’t particularly generous when it comes to their spending on things that don’t directly benefit them. It is my opinion that there is a tendency toward popularity rather than common sense being the driver of how decisions are made in the public sector.

So my empathy is great for the job these educators have. My call to action is that we all muster the courage and commitment to look at any limiting beliefs of decision makers in Sacramento (let’s just tackle California for now), and how their limitations keep Dr. Ward, for instance, from being able to provide the progressive education using technology that would enhance student learning as they come to higher education. Stick your nose into education and look at the product we’re bringing into the workforce. Do NOT stick your head in the sand! What I garnered from the presentation is that Legislators want butts in seats to matter, but the world has moved on. Dr. Ward is a proponent of education that is current and relevant. You should care, and you should ask, and you should vote.

Ken is an MIT Alum and sits on the MIT Enterprise Forum Global Board of Directors. Additionally, in the thirteen years (1996 – 2009) that Ken served as Founding Managing Director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, the number of students taking entrepreneurship courses increased from 220 to 1,600 per year while the number of professors grew from 3 to over 36.

He still remembers that first disaster and he talks about it here, at the MIT Enterprise Forum Global Leadership Conference — proudly wearing his “Drama Queen” sash, affectionately given by the Conference organizers. Just before this clip, he was saying that everyone got two weeks’ pay, and the founders got what was left over.

Ken got the furniture, which they re-sold to “the NEXT under-capitalized start-up” — all but two chairs which are his reminders that disaster is always nearby. All was not lost. Quite likely the lessons in that failure helped make him the approachable, warm, person he is today.

Ken promises to make an appearance at the San Diego Enterprise Forum this next year. His witticisms alone are worth the drive and the price of admission.

I am a BIG fan of Robert Edelman’s because he has managed to quantify a very difficult phenomenon to quantify. Trust lives in the “in between,” it isn’t my job nor is it your job to foster trust, trust is in the realm of the relationship and we are both accountable for it. I liken trust to marriage — I have a friend who jokes, “marriage is an institution, and I’m not ready for an institution yet.” Marriage is an AGREEMENT between to people that implies a lot of behaviors must align for the marriage to withhold the test of time.

Similarly, trust is created and destroyed by the actions and words that occur over time between people. By the aggregate of those actions and those words, trust is either buttressed like a fortress or torn down.

Edelman’s message here is that today’s trust buttressing involves more than it used to for corporations, and the U.S. as an aggregate corporate community has been slipping, other countries have been gaining ground.

There is much that could be inferred by this slippage of trust. Suffice it to say, as Robert Porter Lynch says, trust is the bedrock of democracy and we are hanging by a thin thread. We just don’t know when or how our Tsunami might happen, and we are precipitously close to that event, or those events.

Being ever optimists, we take the advice my mother used to share and I have, in turn, shared liberally — “The difference between hope and despair is a good night’s sleep!” So not only am I a good sleeper, but I love the mornings for the optimism that comes with each one.

While our version of holiday season is Christmas, we embrace every expression of the holiday season.  In the broader context of sharing glad tidings and gratitude, we are grateful for the lessons that have come with the bumps in the road.  And we are grateful for the many, many good people in the world and in our lives.  We are truly blessed.  Going into the new year, we hope to find solace and strength in one another and peace in the world.  We wish the same for you and yours this coming year, 2011.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest:  The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733.