In our Facilitative Leadership Program (FLP), we spend a great deal of time discussing roles and role descriptions. We believe that the purpose of Role Description is to learn how to perform the role better today than yesterday, on your way to the goal of becoming not only competent, but a virtuoso, in the role you play.

There are many facets to becoming a virtuoso in your role. Arguably, the most important is passion and purpose for your role, team, and company. Passion and purpose, or lack thereof, manifests itself in how engaged a person is in their job.

The moral bucket list requires an on-going process, to become the kind of virtuoso Brooks describes. This list parallels what it takes to be a facilitative leader as well as a good human. Becoming a great leader has all the elements of becoming a great person.  It too is an ongoing process to become a virtuoso.

"It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?" David Brooks

This month I was privileged to be on a panel of presenters on the topic of Building and Sustaining High Performance Teams. We spoke to a a diverse audience of community business leaders and Human Resource professionals. 

Steve Mostyn wrote a review of Noel Tichy's new book, SUCCESSION-Mastering The Make Or Break Process of Leadership Transition.  If you are not familiar with Noel's work, he's known for leading GE's company leadership institute and transforming the leadership pipeline under Jack Welch.  He is a trusted adviser on management succession to many leader companies.  

His book examines why some companies fail and others succeed in training and sustaining the next generation of leaders.  He reviews case studies of H-P, IBM, Yahoo, P&G, Intel, and J.C. Penny. Tichy concludes that the most important responsibility is to grow transformational leaders from the inside so that you never need to go outside.

In an article by Brian deHaaff, Why This CEO Will Never Hire Another Salesperson, he states what seems to be a very controversial belief, that the traditional sales role is endangered.  He tells us,"I will probably never hire another VP of Sales or commissioned salesperson again."  That is some statement.

Why, because today's buyers are way more savvy than ever before, and geting more savvy every minute. This is due to endless internet information we can find on a company or product before ever talking to anyone about buying. And with almost endless social media, we can find out what people we know, think about the product we want to buy. That's a more powerful influence than any salesperson.

A CEB (Corporate Executive Board) study of more than 1,400 B2B customers found that those customers completed, on average, nearly 60% of a typical purchasing decision – researching solutions, ranking options, setting requirements, benchmarking pricing, and so on – before even having a conversation with a supplier.

70% of business technology buyers are at the RFP stage (request for proposal) by the time the vendor becomes aware of the opportunity – UBM Techweb.

In our last blog post, we asked the question, what would happen to you, to your family, team or organization, if you kept score of "promises made and promises kept"?  Our CEO and Key Executive groups, have been doing this for awhile now and have come up with some unique ways of scoring - almost as unique as each of them. How pretty it is, doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is your commitment to it. 

Now that we are in the third week of January, it's fitting to revisit Promises Made, Promises Kept.  I did this 12 minute TEDx presentation on the topic, and wanted to share it with you now.

Three weeks into the new year, are you living up to your commitments? Are you keeping score? 

How often have you heard someone say, or even a business, promise that we "do what we say we will do."  Nary once have I ever heard say, "we don't keep our commitments."  Working with business leaders lead me to the observation that far fewer promises were being kept than made. Indeed there may even be a bit of a charade going on that the promisor and promisee (sorry terminology left over from my lawyer days creeps in periodically) never had clarity in the first place about what the promise was.

In thinking about 2015 goals, and reviewing all the well-wishing emails at the end of 2014, I ran across an article published in the Harvard Business Review by Sarah Green and Gretchen Gavett and this Bob Newhart skit, "Stop It." If you haven't seen it, take a look.  

So, what are the top 5 things that are not serving you well, that you will stop doing in 2015? Let me know. I'm compiling a list and will publish my findings later in the year.

Let’s stop and think about doing business in a digital world. At first glance one might conclude that creating a company in a technological world, one that invites opinionated conversation, will involve a whole new focus. After all, the tools and tactics have changed. Convention has been toppled like a brick building in a tornado. Today’s youthful leaders, of all ages, do business on their yachts, or in their basements, or on their back yard decks. Offices are open spaces with video game machines and free lunch. No ties, thank you.