سمینار آنلاین استیفن کاوی با موضوع رهبری مبتنی بر اصل

Introduction to the Course

Welcome to Principle Centered Leadership with Dr. Stephen R. Covey. Stephen Covey has gained worldwide recognition for his work as a leadership consultant and for his two best-selling books, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” now available in over 25 countries, and more recently, “Principle-Centered Leadership.”

Here are some of the issues Stephen will address in this presentation. How do we unleash the human resources of creativity, talent, and energy in those whose jobs neither require nor reward such resources? Why do leaders need the equivalent of a compass not a roadmap in today’s organizational wilderness? Why are quick fix short-term improvement strategies absolutely fruitless in trying to impact the long-term success of all types of organizations?

Albert Einstein once said the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. In this program, Stephen will present timeless principles of leadership effectiveness which enable leaders to respond to these significant problems with more effective ways of thinking.

Now, let’s join Stephen Covey in a live seminar as he responds to these and other critical leadership challenges which confront each of us as we continually strive to improve ourselves, our relationships, our organizations, and ultimately, the quality of our lives.

Stephen Richards Covey

My friends I would like to begin with the bottom-line. The development and the nurturing of leaders, of leadership at every level of the organization. I suggest is the competitive advantage of the future. I suggest that everything flows from. Now, to go to the second part of the bottom-line, I believe that if that nurturing and development of leaders and leadership is principle-centered, that will enable organizations, families to make literal quantum leaps in improvement. Major breakthroughs will take place.

Victor Hugo said “There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” I believe the idea of principle-centered leadership time has come. I think it’s the key to this decade. I think it pertains to families and social organizations, religious organizations, as well as professional and business organizations.

And what I’m going to try to develop is what principle-centered leadership is. Now you’re going to have to really work with me, because this is a process of understanding that will build in a sense line upon line, and the hope is that we will come to understand what you might call, what science calls a paradigm, a way of thinking, that surround the whole concept of principle-centered leadership.

If you want to make small improvements in your lives, in your relationships, in your families, in organizations then work on your behavior or perhaps shape your attitude up a little. You know get a little more positive, a little more cheerful. Work harder. But if you want to make major improvements, quantum leaps in performance as an individual in your family life in your organizational life, don’t work on your behavior, don’t work on your attitudes; work on your paradigms. Behavior and attitudes will inevitably follow.

A paradigm is a way of thinking. A paradigm is like a mental model, a good way of thinking about a paradigm is that it’s a map. If you had an accurate map of the city that you’re in, and you’re trying to find a certain location, what success would you have? By working on your behavior, that is doubling your speed really going at it, you’d be lost twice as fast. If you shaped up your attitude, if you went and studied positive thinking and applied positive thinking, now you wouldn’t care you’re lost. But you’re still lost.

The problem had nothing to do with behavior, had nothing to do with diligence, it had nothing to do with attitude. It had everything to do with the fact that you had a wrong map, a wrong way of thinking. I suggest that the key he is to learn how to examine your maps or your paradigms to see if they are really accurate, to see if the map reflects the territory accurately and correctly.

They used to bleed people in order to heal them. That was a paradigm. Before Simol and other the great pioneers developed the germ theory, which was a paradigm about disease, you would find more people in the back lines dying from wounds than the front lines. Women were dying from childbirth unnecessarily and preferred midwives because they washed themselves, they didn’t know the reason.

Eventually, the paradigm was developed and the understanding came. In every field of science, the significant breakthroughs were always break widths. Ptolemy, the Egyptian astrologer, had a paradigm that the earth was the center of the universe. In fact, the sun was the center of our universe and that paradigm or theory or hypothesis or model, whatever you wish to call it, wasn’t developed until later by Copernicus. And it was tremendous resistance to this concept.

Take our government today, our constitution, the founding of this country was based basically on a paradigm that broke with the paradigm of the Middle Ages. No more Devine Right of Kings. It became the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Recently, I visited Russia. This was just a little before all of these recent events had taken place. The problem was not in the people it was in the paradigm underlying their governmental structure. This may be the case in many of the problems that you’re facing in your own lives, in your families, and in your organizations.

Hopefully, you’re becoming provoked in your thinking to examine your paradigms. The flaw is not in the attitude. It is not in the behavior. It is the fundamental underlying paradigm. I suggest the same exact problem exists in the field of management today. It is operating on an obsolete paradigm. One that isn’t necessarily totally wrong, but it is incomplete. It is partial. Einstein rewrote the rules of physics, yet, Newtonian physics, a clockwork paradigm, could put us on the moon but couldn’t explain the basic atom of the universe. It wasn’t that it was wrong but it was partial. It was incomplete.

One Japanese industrialist put it this way. We are going to win and the industrial West is going to lose in there is nothing they can do about it. Because the seeds of their failure lie in the way they think. They think that it is the nature of things that the people of the top do all the important thinking and the rest whirl the screwdrivers. Our concept is that leadership is the art of mobilizing and energizing the intellectual and creative resources of all people at all levels of the organization. And what is he basically saying? He’s talking about a paradigm shift, a different way of thinking, about organizations, about leadership, about management.

How do you know you’re dealing with the bad paradigm? Simply, see if you have confusion. See if your present way of thinking solves your present problems. See if you’re buried by dilemmas. Dilemmas means you want two things, and you’re torn. You don’t know which way to go. If you get one thing you lose the other. And yet, you want them both. That’s a dilemma. It’s one of the evidences of a bad paradigm or an incomplete paradigm. And out of this confusion, out of this dilemma is real pain.

And if you get up against say world-class competition in the business field and you see such superior competition that produces quality and speed the market and other tremendous competitive advantages and you realize you are so far behind that working harder, working Smarter, with the old paradigm, thinking more positively will correct it. That’s a good evidence. You’re probably working out of a incomplete a partial or perhaps even and erroneous paradigm.

I’ll briefly mention 10 dilemmas that are common today. These are dilemmas that I have found to be so common and so generic over a couple of decades of working with organizations that I think almost everyone who deals with organizations we relate to them.

One: how do we achieve and maintain a wise and renewing balance between work and family in between professional and personal areas of life in the middle of constant pressures and crises? I’ll see if that is not a real dilemma. In other words, you’re always waiting for tomorrow when the pressures and the crisis have been removed. They never are. How do you yet maintain balance? And peace of mind in the middle of it. And how do you create it so that’s part of the culture of the organization.

Two: how do we unleash the creativity talent and energy of the vast majority of the workforce whose jobs neither require or even allow such use? I frequently ask people in your organizations answer this question. Does the vast majority of the workforce possess more capacity, talent, energy, creativity than their jobs allow or require them to use? They always raised their hand. Almost everybody. But that doesn’t tell us something. Is it possible or operating on an incomplete or obsolete paradigm of management leadership?

Three: how do I create team spirit and harmony among people and departments that have been attacking and criticizing each other for years while playing political games and working from hidden agendas? In other words, how do you have peace in a culture and harmony when you have such baggage, such history of contention and adversarialism in our personal interdepartmental rivalries.

Four: how can we realize that the choice between the hardball, that is tough management that tries to force a better bottom-line, and softball you can call that kind management that hopes for a better bottom-line or a bottom-line at all is transcended by a third alternative that is both tougher and kinder.

A lot of people have written off this so-called soft subjective touchy-feely stuff because it isn’t really macho, it isn’t strong, it isn’t visionary. So they go for the tough strong approach, the authoritarian approach, but then that has so many other things in its wake that eventually that causes other kinds of problems and people vacillate back and forth and the pendulum swings and knocks out plaster on this side of the wall and plaster on this side of the wall. There’s another alternative coming out of a totally different paradigm that transcends either of those approaches. They’re both foundationally wrong.

Five: how can we have a culture characterized by change, flexibility, and continuous improvement and still maintain a sense of stability and security? You see a lot of people get their sense of security from the fact that they can predict what the life’s going to be about. All of a sudden you start to change that. I. makes them feel insecure. How can you achieve security in the middle of change? Not only live with that, but thrive on it, run with it, optimize it. How do you create that?

Six: how do we get people and culture aligned with strategy so that everyone in an organization is as committed to the strategy as those who formulated it? I mean how common it is to see only a few people really committed to the strategy. What if we did create a sense of ownership by everyone in that organization, social, psychological, perhaps even financial ownership, so that there is this deep sense I am committed to what we are about. I’ve even known consulting firms that are expert in the field of strategy, developing, feasibility studies and market research studies in order to produce good strategies and know for well that the culture in the organization will not implement it but essentially that’s no longer there responsibility.

Seven: how can all people at all levels of an organization internalize the principles of total quality and continuous improvement when they are so cynical, fatigued, and disillusioned with all of the past programs of the month. So many people been beat up by short-term psyche up approaches, by quick-fix approaches, by the new buzz words to where they are so fatigued and disillusioned. How do you create this kind of commitment to the most significant movement in this country today and that is the quality movement? And we must focus on that movement in order to maintain our competitive viability in the global marketplace, the whole world is different. How do you do that? When people are so beat-up and fatigue and cynical.

Eight: how can we create a complementary team based on mutual respect when so few value, diversity, and pluralism? You know what prejudice is? Free judgement. Why do we use prejudices? It protects us. It protects us from being vulnerable, from being hurt. I don’t want to deal with you any longer. I just know that you belong to a certain class, a social economic class or certain gender or a certain race or a certain nationality or a certain religion or I have some social and psychological tests that I give you so that I can categorize you in some quadrant.

Then I can better treat you as a thing with kindness. But I know what’s best for you. And then I will paternalistically and condescendingly in kind ways manipulate you about. How do you get away from prejudice? How do you get away from the emotional anatomy of the need for prejudgment?

Nine: how do we turn a mission statement into a constitution, the supreme guiding force of an entire organization? Instead of a collection of nebulous, meaningless and cynicism inducing platitudes. So that it has actual effect on a day-by-day basis. So that is the frame of reference. So that it is literally like a constitution, the supreme law of the Land. How do we do that?

Ten: how do we maintain control and yet give people freedom and autonomy that they really need in order to be effective and fulfill? See? That’s a dilemma. If you control, there’s no freedom. If you get freedom, then you might have perhaps some loose cannons and you have to bring back the control. What if you could come up with a paradigm that can resolve that and all of these other dilemmas? That’s what we are about in this discussion. And this presentation is going to require tremendous mental energy, because I’m going to move slowly but sequentially. And each part will build upon the prior part so really go to work with me.

All I’ve done at this point is try to introduce you to the whole concept of paradigms and the necessity to really look at your paradigms if you want to make quantum improvements in life and organizations. We’ve also looked at these dilemmas so that we become aware of the consequences of old partial incomplete paradigms. I want and I’ll present a paradigm. it’s really a new theory of management if you examine it in its entirety. That will resolve everyone of those dilemmas. If properly understood and applied literally will resolve those dilemmas. Now, that’s saying a lot, “properly understood and applied” I admit.

But let’s first work on the first part, the understanding. Now, the metaphor I would like to use is that of a compass. I like it because I compass heads to North. In other words, a principal is an objective reality. See, a principle is something that is external, a value is internal. A principle is objective. A value is subjective. We would like to have our values of course in harmony with principles.

So often times we can use the words synonymously. But I’m suggesting that the concept of true north that there is some objective reality, some magnetic pole that inevitably, no matter where that compasses put, points there, represents the concept of principle-centered leadership. I’d like to give you some reasons why I suggest that the compass or principle-centered leadership is truly an idea whose time has come. I’d like to give four of them. Think carefully about each of them.

Let me ask you first this question. Today’s world, if you’re to think about it and all that’s happening, would you describe it like a freeway system or a wilderness? Which would be the most apt description?

Audience: wilderness…

Stephen R. Covey: Why? Why isn’t it the freeway system?

Audience: rate of change…

Stephen R. Covey: Okay, the rate of change. And if it were the freeway system, what would that mean?

Audience: Organized… getting more predictable… less predictiable…

Stephen R. Covey: Okay, the change is so dynamic and so constant and the rate of it is increasing that is very hard to get a handle on the future at all. Would you not agree?

I mean I think it’s almost a expression of future shock. You could hardly deal with it. It is so rapid and so complex and have been everywhere at so many different levels and the problems and issues that are emerging from all of that change are throwing us, throwing our institutions. See, a freeway system is a very well-established highways with patterns and maps.

And you know that if I go here then I’ll arrive here. But in the world of business, in the world of organizations, you don’t know that. The old model, strategic planning model of setting up long-term goals and strategic plans to achieve those goals.

Those almost have to be written annually because of the dynamism that is happening out there in the marketplace. now the concept of a compass is regardless of what is happening in the wilderness, in the world, you will have something that is steady and dependable. Something that has essentially changed less.

When people have something that is changeless that they deeply buy into, they can live with change. In fact, they thrive on change and if they’re in the competitive environment they really thrive. Because others may be very addict and even obsessed with heavy pattern of what you might call freeway maps a policies, procedures, and so forth.

And heavy bureaucracy that make people dependent upon them, so that they cannot adapt and be flexible.

Rosabeth Kanter, the editor, was appointed editor of Harvard Business Review and has done a great deal of work in the field of corporations and organizations of the future that are truly entrepreneurial and innovative focuses on what she calls the four basic Fs: to be Focused, to be Flexible, to be Fast and to be Friendly. And she says only those organizations that have those basic characteristics that we could call principles will survive in the future, will maintain their economic viability. So I suggest that is the first reason why the compass is a powerful metaphor for principle-centered leadership.

It makes people so they are not dependent. Makes them so that they can develop their own capacities. But this gets into the second reason. Just as a kind of an acronym to help us remember these four reasons we’ll be all starting with C. They’ll all start with C like the word Compass. So, the first one is Change. The second which we’ve also briefly described his Competition.

The third is Capacity. You see very few people really tap their full capacities I think that the more people advance to higher responsibilities, the more their capacities are tapped into. But the vast majority of the workforce had many cylinders in their engines that’re not being used. Would you not agree with that?

Everywhere I go I ask audiences do you agree with that, that the vast majority of the workforce possess far more creativity, resourcefulness, and initiative than their present jobs allow or require.  And they all agree. It’s almost universal. Then I asked them is that not the great waste of resource? What could be done to tap into that resource? So that you could really reach those creative and resourceful and ingenious capacities in everybody.

This completes Side A. Please fast forward this cassette to the end, then turn it over and continue with Side B.