Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

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.