The character of your leadership.

Your leadership character is defined by your values, beliefs, and assumptions, as well as the work you choose to do and how you do it.

"Character kept is much easier than character recovered."

These eight simple words of Thomas Paine capture one of the essential tenets and challenges of leadership: Missteps in judgment can undermine all of our positive efforts. Every single thing you say, every single thing you do, weaves a story about who you are and what you believe. This being the case, it is appropriate to reflect on the character of leadership and, more specifically, your desired leadership character.

Martin Luther King, Jr., envisioned a time when individuals would be judged by the content of their character. That time may certainly be now for you as an association leader. Whether it be from intense public or media scrutiny, observations of your board colleagues or the staff, or periodic self-evaluation and reflection, the content of your character will significantly influence your legacy of leadership.

This article explores the character of leadership, examining not only what leadership contributions you make to your organization but also how you provide that leadership.

What you value

Tom Peters recently suggested that every individual in today's society needs to think of themselves as their own personal brand - the "brand you." In association language, your leadership is the product you put on the shelf for the consumer audience of your members, stakeholders, other leaders, and staff to purchase or experience.

Good brands have enduring value because the market associates a set of qualities, values, and characteristics with them. Good brands build trusting relationships with consumers. Good brands form an identity that allows consumers to anticipate the quality of the product being offered.

Good brands have such a powerful value and identity system that it drives not only what the brand would do, but more importantly, what the brand would not do. Starbucks Coffee has intentionally turned down lucrative opportunities to offer its signature coffee varieties in pre-packaged coffee liqueur drinks because it believes such a product would violate its brand identity and the expectations of the market.

What are the values you want others to associate with your brand of leadership? What actions will you intentionally take to support and exemplify those values? What actions would your brand of leadership never take because of the core values you have selected to guide you? As Max De Pree, chair emeritus of the Herman Miller furniture company, noted, "Leaders are walking and talking manuals of behavior."

Thoughtful examination of the core values you want to employ to guide your leadership efforts can help you be more intentional about the work you do. These core values can serve as anchors that hold you in place despite the competing demands for your time and attention.

For example, imagine that you have selected community as a core value you wish to advance with your leadership. From that initial decision, you can then ask yourself, "What specific actions can I take that will advance the value of community? What specific actions could inhibit the value of community?" You could examine all aspects of the work you are doing board or committee meetings, interactions with members or staff, articles in association publications, and so on - and develop strategies for advancing community through each aspect of your work. Further, advancing community, could become an evaluation criterion for how you choose which efforts to undertake in the future, where you focus your attention, and how you choose to spend your time each week.

Selecting and articulating core values is a powerful decision, as others will hold you accountable for them. When your behaviors are inconsistent with those values, it significantly undermines the trust and respect others might associate with you. Individuals are likely to negatively judge people in leadership positions who communicate that they have an "open door" policy but whose door is most open, or only open, to opinions that coincide with theirs. Similarly, if you openly state that you value change and progressive ideas, but rarely allow individuals to challenge the traditions and status quo of your organization, you are unlikely to develop strong credibility.

Yet, despite the fact that core values can serve as powerful anchors, few individuals are ever capable of acting with 100 percent consistency on those values. Just as a car over time needs to be taken in for alignment, so must association leaders (and associations) engage in periodic tune-ups that allow them to measure how well their actions are aligned with their stated values.

Beyond values: your beliefs and assumptions

Your beliefs and assumptions also will be significant determinants of your leadership actions and, subsequently, the character of your association leadership. While your beliefs or assumptions may be implicit or unstated to others, they will be experienced through the leadership you provide and how you provide that leadership.

Making your beliefs and assumptions more explicit and open to exploration and discussion can be a helpful action for those you will be serving. First, it provides a context for your leadership actions. While others may not necessarily agree with one of your beliefs, they will at least be able to see that your actions are aligned with that belief. If one of your beliefs is that your association's members want educational offerings on at least a monthly basis, that could require additional effort from committees and staff. Being able to substantiate that belief is likely to be something they might ask of you.

Second, making your assumptions explicit allows others to provide you with alternative viewpoints that can help influence or challenge the beliefs and assumptions you hold. Your beliefs very quickly become a strong mental model - almost an operating software that silently influences all that you do. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Peter Senge has defined mental models as "the images, assumptions, and stories which we carry in our minds of ourselves, other people, institutions, and every aspect of the world" (The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, by Peter Senge, 1994, Doubleday, p. 235).

As an association leader, you likely have significant experience and tenure with your association. You probably have developed some fairly strong mental models about the way your world operates. The stronger your models, the more powerful the influence they have on your actual daily actions. If we don't periodically slow down our thinking and make our assumptions or mental models explicit and open to examination, we are likely to make ineffective decisions that can jeopardize the character of our leadership.

The work you choose to do

One of the most visible elements of your leadership character will be the manner in which you spend your time. Rightly or wrongly, others will prescribe great meaning to the efforts that you deem worthy of your attention and involvement. Despite the current trend toward less hierarchical models of leadership, we still function in a world where a "commitment from the top" typically carries great weight in an organization. Thus, where you spend your time is a critical decision.

The work you choose to do can be influenced by a variety of factors, including your core values, your job description, what you like to do, your mental models, and your perception of others' expectations. However, in determining the character of your leadership, you might ask yourself, "What does the association most need me to pay attention to?" or "In my leadership role, what am I uniquely positioned to address?"

One common contribution that could reflect well on your character would be thinking and engaging others in conversations about the future. Ask a typical corporate executive how far into the future he or she imagines, and you probably would get an answer of 20-30 years. Clearly, this executive is part of a small group of the company's staff or board who are able and committed to think about that very distant place. Yet if they weren't, who would be - other than their competitors? Certainly not the majority of their employees, who are more consumed by the 3-5 year plan if not the daily to-do list.

At the 1997 ASAE Strategic Leadership Forum, Dee Hock, former VISA chief executive officer and current president of The Chaordic Alliance, Half Moon Bay, California, suggested that a worthwhile endeavor for association leaders would be to focus on purpose. Said Hock, "Success has infinitely more to do with clarity of shared purpose and principles and the strength of the belief in them than all the regulations, resources, and management techniques, as important as they may be."

Focusing on purpose would involve others in an ongoing dialogue about the core values of your association, the contributions it makes to others, and the connections between individual efforts and fulfillment of the association's mission. In short, focusing on purpose would help preserve the conscience of the organization's character.

While what you do will send strong messages to members, staff, and others about the character of your leadership, how you do it can be an equally powerful communicator. For example, the association leader who plans meeting agendas with a strict attention to task work and a rigid adherence to the clock could send a message that interpersonal relationships are not a very important part of the work of the association. In contrast, meetings that begin or end with some brief personal sharing and disclosure can send the message that we are people first and association leaders second and the quality of our interpersonal relationships with each other is important.

The way that you do your work is likely to reflect the core values you hold, as well as your mental models and beliefs or assumptions. It also can reflect shared understanding that you have facilitated among the individuals with whom you will work. Engaging your fellow board members in a conversation about "How do we want to be with each other?" can lead to powerful shared agreements about the way you will collectively do your work.

These shared agreements can address any of the work you will be doing, including board or committee meetings, board orientation, interaction with the staff and other stakeholders, visioning or strategic planning, preferred methods for communicating with each other, soliciting input and feedback from your membership, and so forth. Possible agreements could include these: We will explore at least one strategic question in depth at each board meeting. We will end each meeting with an opportunity for personal reflection and sharing by each participant. We will identify and celebrate our accomplishments on a monthly basis.

While facilitating shared agreements with others is valuable, the ultimate judge of your leadership character in this area may simply come from how others experience you in one-on-one interactions. De Pree has noted that "In building good relationships between leaders and followers, each person has the right to be taken seriously" (Leading Without Power; Finding Hope in Serving Community, by Max De Pree, 1997, Jossey-Bass Publishers, p. 65).

How will you shape your interpersonal interactions to demonstrate that you take others seriously? What can you do to foster and build strong bonds of trust with each person you meet? What questions can you ask or actions can you take to communicate a commitment to open and honest communication? How can your interpersonal interactions exemplify the core values you wish to anchor your behaviors?

The content of your leadership character can be experienced in the smallest of ways. It can be experienced when you intentionally focus on the person who is speaking with you rather than thinking about the next five things you need to do that day. It can be experienced through simple notes of appreciation you send to others that communicate you not only are paying attention to them, but are grateful for the work they do in service of your association's mission.

A recent best-selling book tells you: "Don't sweat the small stuff." But in determining the content of your character, the difference truly is in the details.

Character kept: easier said than done

Most leaders do not make an ineffective or unethical decision intentionally. Leaders genuinely believe they are doing the right thing at the time they make their decision. Only in hindsight does the error of their ways become apparent, often too late for leaders t seriously repair the damage that may already have been done.

As suggested earlier, building in frequent and regular times of reflection on your stated values, how you are spending your time, and your alignment between values and behaviors can be a useful habit to develop. Being open to alternative perspectives and building a deep pool of trusted feedback providers can help you overcome the potential pitfalls of strong beliefs or mental models.

One of the most pressing challenges to your leadership character, however, can be one of the most difficult to realize: acting to preserve self-interest. In A Higher Standard of Leadership; Lessons From the Life of Gandhi (1994, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, p. 30), author Keshavan Nair notes that, "All of us have attachments. Attachments are relationships, privileges, and other components of our life we do not want to give up."

As an association leader it is likely that you have several perks or privileges that are attachments to your position. Over time, we become accustomed to the benefits these attachments afford us. The danger comes when these attachments begin to influence the decisions we make and the values we honor.

To avoid this danger, Nair suggests, "The first step is to understand the rationale for the various privileges you may have acquired as a leader. . . Every privilege should assist in meeting organizational objectives - and it is the objective you should be committed to, not the privilege."

Effective leaders are able to look inside themselves when making decisions and probe what self-interest might be influencing the action they are considering. Acknowledging and questioning that motivation is likely to result in an action or decision more consistent with your core values and more likely to enhance your leadership character.

Your leadership legacy

It can be tempting to think of your leadership legacy as some major initiative created during your tenure or a significant piece of legislation that passed because of your persistent lobbying efforts. Contributions like those are certainly an important reflection of an individual's (and an organization's) leadership capabilities.

The most lasting legacy of your leadership, however, will be the work you choose to do and how you choose to do it. Ultimately, those decisions will send powerful messages throughout your association about the values and beliefs you hold in trust, the values and beliefs that will form the content of your character.

As John Luther has observed: "Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece - by thought, choice, courage, and selfdetermination."

Every single thing you say, every single thing you do, tells a great and powerful story about who you are and what you believe. Choose wisely.

RELATED ARTICLE: Compelling Questions

The late business leader and statesman Bernard M. Baruch once noted that none of the technological revolutions he witnessed in his lifetime did away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think. The following list of compelling questions are offered to help you think about your leadership character.

* What are the core values you want others to associate with your leadership contributions?

* What are the assumptions, beliefs, or mental models that will influence your leadership? How will you keep yourself from being blinded by them?

* How do you want others to experience your leadership?

* What privileges come with your leadership position that might inhibit your effectiveness if you consciously or unconsciously are too committed to preserving them?

* What self-interests could challenge your objectivity?

* How does your organization most need you to spend your time?

* How can your leadership foster a higher level of integrity in your organization? In its relationships with others?

* What actions can you take to promote a greater commitment to the truth?

* How will you engender trust in your interactions with others?

* What mechanisms will help you keep aligned with your core values as you lead your organization?

Jeffry Cufaude is a principal with Like Minded People, Indianapolis. Cufaude designed and facilitated the 1998 ASAE Future Leaders Conference. E-mail: [e-mail].