Page 58 - Stephen R. Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Eff People.pdf

customer buying habits and motives, and provide the force necessary to organize
resources in the right direction.

Such changes as deregulation of the airline industry, skyrocketing costs of health care,
and the great quality and quantity of imported cars impact the environment in significant
ways. If industries do not monitor the environment, including their own work teams, and
exercise the creative leadership to keep headed in the right direction, no amount of
management expertise can keep them from failing.

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual phrased it, "like
straightening deck chairs on the Titanic." No management success can compensate for
failure in leadership. But leadership is hard because we're often caught in a management
paradigm.

At the final session of a year-long executive development program in Seattle, the
president of an oil company came up to me and said, "Stephen, when you pointed out the
difference between leadership and management in the second month, I looked at my role
as the president of this company and realized that I had never been into leadership. I was
deep into management, buried by pressing challenges and the details of day-to-day
logistics. So I decided to withdraw from management. I could get other people to do that.
I wanted to really lead my organization.

"It was hard. I went through withdrawal pains because I stopped dealing with a lot of the
pressing, urgent matters that were right in front of me and which gave me a sense of
immediate accomplishment. I didn't receive much satisfaction as I started wrestling with
the direction issues, the culture-building issues, the deep analysis of problems, the seizing
of new opportunities. Others also went through withdrawal pains from their working
style comfort zones. They missed the easy accessibility I had given them before. They still
wanted me to be available to them, to respond, to help solve their problems on a day-to-
day basis.

"But I persisted. I was absolutely convinced that I needed to provide leadership. And I
did. Today our whole business is different. We're more in line with our environment. We
have doubled our revenues and quadrupled our profits. I'm into leadership."

I'm convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm,
thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.
And leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We're into managing with
efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

Rescripting: Becoming Your Own First Creator

As we previously observed, proactivity is based on the unique human endowment of
self-awareness. The two additional unique human endowments that enable us to expand
our proactivity and to exercise personal leadership in our lives are imagination and
conscience.
Through imagination, we can visualize the uncreated worlds of potential that lie within
us. Through conscience, we can come in contact with universal laws or principles with
our own singular talents and avenues of contribution, and with the personal guidelines
within which we can most effectively develop them. Combined with self-awareness,
these two endowments empower us to write our own script.

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