Is that too bleak?  I’m not a pessimist even while I try to stay realistic.  Since the worldwide “reset” (recession, currency devaluation, drop in trade–whatever you want to call it) that began in 2008, the signs are clear that we’re looking for direction and the old order has passed.  We’re not too sure what the new order is, while many act confused, some put their heads down and soldier on while the true entrepreneurs smell opportunity and are moving aggressively into action.  You’re going to hear their stories become public in the coming years, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

What are some signs of the times?  First, lackluster performance in the markets.  Investors continue to seek places to put capital to work and get a good return, but the old rules no longer apply.  Stock markets gyrate up and down.  Currency markets are in a frothy turmoil (euro, yen or dollars anyone?).  Property prices are stagnant except for some bubbles in Asia.  After big bailouts in the US private sector in 2008-2009 (financials and autos particularly), now it’s Europe’s turn with sovereign debt (the PIIGS are ready for slaughter).

Second, geopolitical unrest.  Voter disenchantment in the US and now in the UK brought about regime change, but the “changers” have brought little that is new or innovative, just more of the same old.  The tone may be different, but the substance is the same.  The Middle East is no closer to peace and in fact destabilization in the region seems certain with Iran playing the spoiler.  Pakistan remains the premier jihadi training ground.  The brightest spot is the economic vitality of Asia as the faster developing nations (China and India principally) expand their realm of influence.  Even in Asia the picture is not all bright as Thailand finds it hard to shake it’s political unrest and Japan enters its third “lost decade”.

Third, there is the unsettling feeling that the earth itself is not resting easy.  Whether it is natural or manmade events–major earthquakes (Haiti, Chile and China), a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a lack of consensus and will to act on climate change–the planet itself seems more restless and also vulnerable.

A real defining sign of our times is the lack of leadership.  Name 3 great leaders today.  Not famous people or inspirational people, but real leaders.  It’s tough, isn’t it?  Those in power are either disappointing us or making people madder.  Ineffective leaders linger on instead of making way for those who are more competent and able to step up and lead.  Executive pay continues to rise even as performance plateaus or declines.  Those in charge seem very capable of growing their personal power, their budget and their spending, but unable to make the tough decisions.  Even as Asia leads economically, the lack of leadership is felt acutely.  The experience and “bench strength” is just not there, so today’s leaders resort to trial and error–a slow and inefficient way to learn.

What is most needed in these uncertain times is true leadership, great leadership.  A clear mark of great leadership is looking out first for the people you lead.  This is not simply a high-minded ideal; it is essentially what all effective leaders in any time period do.  Shaun Rein recently wrote about this in Forbes, and he came to same conclusion.  Make the work, the life of those around you better, and people will follow.  Take from people, steal from them (either legally or illegally, there is little real difference), tell them untruths or half-truths, and the real truth will eventually come out.  Truly serve and you are on the path to leadership.  Take that path long enough and you’ll find yourself at the head of a line of people willingly taking the same path and following as their own lives improve.  This mark of great leadership is not complex or hidden, but it is in short supply in these times.  May more true leaders emerge soon!

But I think it’s important to look at the fuller context of this speech which I’ll show with some select quotations and my own comments as they relate to personal development.  Roosevelt addressed an educated French audience and his topic was about the kind of citizenship that makes a republic strong.

“In the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues.”

Roosevelt knew he was addressing an audience of privileged listeners, and he warns them against an aloof attitude or being out of touch with the concerns of common people.  This is a danger for our “talking head” pundits on tv, but even more so for our CEO’s and leaders of organizations.

“A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities – all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness.”

Next comes the famous quote about the man in the arena:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Beyond this inspirational passage is another part of the speech that never gets quoted, yet I believe it holds the key to the kind of character that Roosevelt praises.  For me, it is the center of gravity of the speech, and it speaks to the personal development and mastery that are necessary for good leadership.  It really paints a picture of what it takes to develop top talent.

“There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character – the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution – these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside.”

Roosevelt goes on to emphasize the need of a strong moral sense, the inner compass that must guide the true leader:

“Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly.”

Finally, to keep all of this grounded and practical, Roosevelt reminds us that:

“The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize.  Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized.”

What do you think about the qualities Roosevelt praises and how practical it is to develop top talent?

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The full text of the speech is at http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

If you want more of the back-story to this quote, you can find it here

This speech, along with his earlier one on “The Strenuous Life”, are some of Roosevelt’s most memorable words.  (Full text of the Strenuous Life speech can be found here).

We learn some of the truths of leadership by listening to people who are great practitioners of the art of leading people.  

1.  Leadership is not about the leader. There are plenty of narcissistic “leaders” who have a strong personality cult.  As much as we find this mesmerizing, if you look at what these leaders actually use their celebrity or influence for, you learn a lot about how genuine or real their leadership is.  The truth is, leadership is not about the leader at all.  Instead it is much more about a shared vision or mission, and when a leader is possessed by a captivating or enrolling vision, it tends to infect and inspire others in a similar fashion.  In their passionate embodiment of a vision, they often display confidence and charisma and other desirable personality traits, which is one reason we often confuse those very traits with leadership.  It’s the genuine leadership that lies at the source of the traits, not vice versa.

2.  There are many paths to leadership.  When you begin to study a large number of leaders, it is striking how little they have in common in terms of their background.  Some were born to privilege, some in poverty.  Some people have lots of raw ability, others appear to have no natural gifts or advantages.  Some face great adversity, others have few bumps along the road.  For some leaders a window of opportunity opens, while others have to create their own opportunities from nothing.  The various combination of factors in different leaders is truly staggering.  The bottom line is that leadership can be learned and developed over time, and natural talent by itself is not enough to lead people effectively.  Despite where people begin, leaders end up embracing a larger vision or mission and leading others to do the same.

3.  Leadership is really about developing others. Combined with the first truth (it’s not about the leader), true leaders know that it is imperative that the vision or mission not die with them.  They must intentionally attract, hire and cultivate talented people.  Leaders are not concerned about grabbing all the attention or credit themselves; instead they generously promote their team’s accomplishments.  This builds loyalty and confidence in those they lead.  Talk to a leader about what they’ve accomplished and usually they will bring up various people around them who made it happen.  Real leaders know how to work with and through other talented people.

4.  Leadership is shown by full-spectrum communication.  Many bosses try to lead with their words.  Strong leaders know that they communicate by their own example, their actions and non-verbal behavior, how they speak, and by the decisions they make.  This full-spectrum communication is personally challenging to master, but it is the key to ensuring an entire organization is aligned and working toward a common goal.  Although leadership is not about the leader, they do become a living embodiment of the vision and higher mission that is their reason for being.  Leaders realize that they communicate in many ways besides their words, and they take this reality very seriously.

There are other truths of leadership, but these are some of the key ones I’ve observed and heard from those who are great leaders.  Have you seen these exhibited in the leaders you know?  How do these truths speak to you?

January’s resolutions are long gone–time to get moving on what you’re really committed to.  I’m still hearing from people who are writing their own version of what the year ahead looks like using my free workbook “The Year Ahead 2010″.  You can get a copy for yourself and start  moving yourself, then watch out–the world will move too.

I have seven axioms in my personal philosophy of choice, and these guide me when I get confused or bewildered or just need perspective.  What about you?  Do you have a personal philosophy of life and are you willing to share any of it with us?

I always have a choice, and I’m going to make sure I make better choices today from greater awareness and wisdom.

Today, I posed a challenging question to myself:  What is the most important, greatest impact, longest lasting activity or objective I could get involved with right now?

I wrestled with this question for over half an hour and came up with three answers.  The third answer had seven sub-parts to it.  Asking myself questions like this allow me to go deep, to inquire into my real motivations, to examine what is truly important to me.

Leaders who want to develop top talent need to examine themselves periodically and be in touch with their deeper drives, motives, touchstones.  I find that when I do this for myself, I’m in turn more likely to take other people further and deeper in developing themselves.

Grab a journal and pose a challenging question or set of questions to yourself and then wrestle with the answers for a while.  It will do you good and it will help you grow as a leader too.  Then commit to do this on a periodic basis to keep your authenticity and integrity honed to a sharper edge.  It makes all the difference when the going gets tough.

Turn down the external noise (it helps to visualize actually turning down the volume).  Now look on your own situation as if you were a visitor from another planet trying to learn about humans.  Answer this question after some reflection:  “What is this person (remember, the visitor is looking at YOU)… what is this person actually able to control?  Where does this person exert the greatest influence?”

I know, these are strange questions.  We don’t think much about these things.  But if we did, I think we would notice that each person is able to control only what actions they take and the thoughts they think about.  There’s a lot of power in that, much more than we realize.  We’re usually so busy looking outside ourselves for answers, for cues about how to act that we forget where the center of our own power lies.

Our main source of power lies in what we think about and what we choose to do about it.  The people who most take this to heart look a lot like entrepreneurs.  We say they have initiative.  They strike out and take chances.  They do things that others often admire.  Entrepreneurs, instead of looking for a job, look for areas to be of service to other people (and make a profit in the process too).

“What then is to be done?  To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens.” Epictetus, Discourses

I found a pretty extended elaboration of this on Tim Ferriss’ blog that speaks philosophically to entrepreneurs.

When it comes to developing top talent, look for entrepreneurialism first.  I look for an attitude that is willing to tackle things, that will look for what’s possible, not the opposite.   What’s important to you?

Leadership and change always begin with personal responsibility and truth-telling.  If you want to develop top talent, start by leveling with people.  Tell them the truth and enlist their help in being part of the solution.  Now is the time for responsibility and assertive (yet humble) leadership.