Finding your true north a personal guide pdf download

G Andrew McLean dedicates this book to his wife, Kathleen, and his son Aidan, in the hope that authentic leaders will make a difference in the world. Nick Craig dedicates this book to the authentic leaders in his life, who showed him the way by being just themselves. It matters a great deal—to our organizations and institutions, to the people who work in them, and to the people who are served by them. For our society to function effectively, we need authentic leaders who can encourage people to perform at their best and step up and lead themselves.

I wrote True North because I have a passion to see more people in all walks of life lead authentically and because I wanted to help people like you discover your authentic leadership. Finding Your True North: A Personal Guide will enable you to take the ideas and lessons from the book True North and apply them to your personal leadership development.

This will enable you to become a highly effective—and authentic— leader who knows your True North and stays on its course.

It is not much different from becoming a great musician or a great athlete. To become great in any endeavor— whether it is in your career, your family, or your community—you must use the unique strengths you were born with and develop them to the fullest, while acknowledging and learning from your shortcomings.

After searching for a role model for many years, I learned that I could never become a great leader by emulating someone else or by minimizing my shortcom- ings. But you might be a star—unreplicatable—by following your passion. To realize your potential as a leader, you need a detailed development pro- gram that will enable you to become an excellent leader.

I encourage you to have as many leadership experiences early in life as you can. Seek them out! After each experience, you should process them by going back to your develop- ment plan to see what changes you need to make or further experiences you should have. It starts with an exploration of your life story and its relationship to your leadership. Then, you will examine the leadership experiences you have had thus far in your life, as well as your challenges and disappointments.

You will have the opportunity to explore ways that you might get pulled off course from your True North. After that, you will be ready to delve more deeply into the greatest crucible of your life and to understand and frame your experiences at a deeper level. Next you will go to work on the five key elements of your personal develop- ment as a leader: gaining self-awareness, clarifying your values and principles, understanding your motivations, building your support team, and leading an inte- grated life.

In the final section, you will author your leadership, exploring your leader- ship purpose, understanding how you can be an empowering leader, and examin- ing ways to optimize your leadership effectiveness. This is a dynamic document that you can return to in future years to assess your progress, update your plan based on experiences since it was created, and prepare for the next phase of your leadership journey.

Your responses to the exercises and your notes in this personal guide are your con- fidential work. However, we do encourage you to share them with others, includ- ing your trusted mentors, coaches, support team, and leadership discussion group. This feedback will be invaluable to you in developing your PLDP. As you share yourself, your story, and your answers with others close to you, take the risk of revealing your vulnerabilities. You will find that sharing with oth- ers in this way is a very liberating experience.

There are several ways you can use this guide: 1. As an individual, you can do the exercises on your own and prepare your PLDP. You can work through this personal guide as a group with friends or even new acquaintances, as each of you completes the exercises indi- vidually, discusses the results openly with the other members of the group, and solicits their feedback.

Then it can be helpful to go back to the exercises and update them, based on the feedback. Your group can be led by a professional facilitator, who guides your discussion and keeps the group on track. Or you can create a peer- facilitated group, in which leadership of the group rotates to a different group member for each session. See Appendix B for suggestions on forming such a group. To enhance your work on your leadership, you can use Finding Your True North under the guidance of a coach or mentor.

Your coach or mentor can work with you on each of the exercises, give you valuable feedback, and encourage you to explore yourself and your story more deeply. You can use this personal guide with your team at work. It will enable team members to discover their authentic leadership and help the team function more effectively because they understand each other better through sharing their stories.

As team leader, you can guide your team through the process, or you can use a professional team-building consultant and facilitator. You can use this guide along with True North as the basis for a course on leadership development, either in an academic setting or in an organization.

In the case of a larger group, you will need a professor, teacher, or leadership development professional to structure the material and lead the group.

Such a course should include the cases listed in Appendix C that were specifically developed for use in leadership development courses. In addition, it is highly recommended that your group be bro- ken into smaller LDGs for discussion of more personal matters. I encourage you to be completely open and transparent as you look inside yourself and answer the very challenging and difficult questions posed in the exercises. Have the courage to explore your life story deeply to understand who you are as a human being, where you fit in this world, how you can use your leadership to impact the world in a positive way, and how you can leave a lasting legacy.

I am excited about the opportunity that you and thousands of leaders like you have to transform organizations and institutions in business, the nonprofit world, governments, education, and religion, as you bring authenticity to the workplace and encourage others to lead in the same way.

Your dedication to becoming an authentic leader will indeed make this world a better and richer place for all of us to live in. Something ignited in my soul. And I went my own way, deciphering that burning fire.

There are many leaders who get ahead in organizations who are anything but authentic. You have certainly met them. They may be domineering people who use their power to rise up the ladder and are willing to take advantage of less powerful people to get ahead.

They may be constantly directing, controlling, and dealing with others aggressively. Often they seem incapable of accepting honest feedback. Sometimes they willingly use other people to hit their numbers. They might stretch the truth or seize political advantage if it makes them look good. They are likely to make a lot of money on their way to fame and glory.

You could be this kind of leader. Leaders like these cannot motivate people toward a common goal. They are incapable of building trust within organizations. In short, they are inef- fective leaders. Worse, leaders like this destroy good people. They destroy great organiza- tions. Although they may be successful in the short term, over time their behav- ior catches up with them. Then they either move on or watch their organizations steadily decline.

Do you want to be an effective leader who can sustain success over an extended period of time? This personal guide will enable you to become an authentic—and effective—leader. It will help you understand your True North and develop a plan to stay on course, no matter how difficult the challenges you may face. Leading in the twenty-first century is vastly different from leading in the twentieth century.

Nor will they be impressed by charis- matic leaders who say one thing and do another. Over the last fifty years, all of us followed powerful leaders who seemed to know where they were going, only to discover that often they were leading us down destructive paths. Or that these leaders were only out for themselves and were unconcerned with our well-being. Organizations expected us to be loyal to our leaders and wait in line for our turn to lead, if it ever came. And then we learned that our loyalty was not returned, as we witnessed many people lose their pensions and their health care.

As a consequence, we lost trust in our leaders. In recent years, many of us were dazzled by charismatic leaders who impressed every- one with their charm, yet went off the deep end. People in organizations today seek authentic leaders whom they can trust, but they are not so easily fooled or so quick to offer their loyalty.

They are knowl- edge workers who often know more than their bosses. They are will- ing to work extremely hard, but will do so only for a cause they believe in, as they are seeking meaning and significance in their work.

They are willing to trust their leaders only if these leaders prove themselves worthy of their trust. If you want to be effective as a leader, then you must be an authentic leader. What does it take to be both authentic and effective as a leader? You should serve as a role model for these values.

This is not easy. It is the hard side of leadership. The easy side of leadership is getting the short-term numbers right. Lots of smart people can figure out how to do that. It is much more difficult to get peo- ple aligned, empowered, and committed to serve all their constituencies.

Being authentic as a leader creates a virtuous circle, as the best people will want to work with you. As a result, the performance of your teams will be supe- rior, and you will be able to take on greater challenges. The bottom line is this: in the twenty-first century, without authenticity in leadership, there will be no sustained effectiveness in organizations. With authentic leadership, the potential for organizations to compete and to excel is unlimited.

To be an authentic leader requires you to be genuine and to have a passion for your purpose; you must practice your values, lead with your heart, develop connected relationships, and have the self-discipline to get results. You must stay on course of your True North in the face of the most severe challenges, pressures, and seductions. Because people trust you, you will be able to motivate them to high levels of per- formance.

Rather than letting the expectations of others guide you, you must be prepared to be your own person and go your own way. As you develop as an authentic leader, you will be more concerned about serving others than about your own success or recognition.

This does not mean you have to be perfect. Far from it. Like all of us, you can have your weaknesses and be subject to the full range of human frailties and mistakes, and still be an authentic leader. Yet by acknowledging your shortcom- ings and admitting your errors, you will connect with people and empower them.

Purpose To find your purpose, you must first understand yourself and your passions. In turn, your passions show the way to the purpose of your leadership. Values As a leader, you are defined by your values, which are the deeply held beliefs that guide your actions. Your values are personal: they cannot be determined by any- one except you. To lead by your values is to give expression to your most deeply held beliefs through your leadership. The test of your values is not what you say, but how you behave under pressure.

If you are not true to the values you profess, people will quickly lose confidence in your leadership. Heart As an authentic leader, you must lead with your heart as well as your head. This means having passion for your work, compassion for the people you serve, empathy for the people with whom you work, and the courage to make difficult decisions.

Connected relationships enable you to build trust and commitment through the openness and depth of your relationships, and to engender commitment from people. Self-Discipline Competing successfully takes a consistently high level of self-discipline on your part in order to produce results. Such discipline enables you to set high standards for yourself and to hold others accountable for their performance.

When you fall short—and you will—it is equally important to admit your mistakes and initiate immediate corrective action. To develop as an authentic leader, you start with your own experiences and your life story as grounding and inspiration for your leadership. You identify your pres- ent leadership development profile by reviewing your experiences in order to learn from them. You examine the reasons why leaders lose their way by being an imposter, rationalizer, glory seeker, loner, or shooting star, and how this might happen to you as well.

You explore the greatest crucible of your life and discover how it impacts your leadership. These elements are covered in Part One of this personal guide. Part Three focuses on authentic leadership in action. In conclusion, you will bring together all you have learned from the exer- cises that you worked on in this guide to prepare your Personal Leadership Devel- opment Plan.

Authentic leaders can take their leadership to a higher level of performance because they inspire confidence, trust, and loyalty in their organization and in their work. They have an advantage in aligning others around a common pur- pose, empowering other leaders, and using the full range of their leadership capa- bilities.

If there is a problem, I call all the smart people I know and get them in a room and have them figure it out. How do you think of yourself as a leader? The truth is, these leaders are constantly leading and working on develop- ing themselves as leaders, regardless of what they label themselves. These examples give you patterns from which to learn. They are the raw material from which you build the conceptions of leadership you carry into your work and your life.

The purpose of this exercise is to draw on the thinking that you have already done on the topic of leadership. The exercise starts with your existing models of leadership. Think of five leaders, past or present, whom you have admired.

Write their names below, and then answer for yourself the questions that follow. Which of these leaders have had the greatest impact on my idea of leadership? What specific examples of leadership stand out in my mind for each of these leaders? What reservations or concerns might I have about following each one? How did the context of the leaders I identified differ from what I face in my life today?

What qualities, if any, of these three leaders would I like to emulate? What qualities, if any, would I like to avoid? Even the most widely admired leaders have very human weaknesses: notable failures as well as successes, startling inconsistencies in relationships or behaviors, times of intense struggle with their values and principles.

Indeed, effective leadership teachers and mentors must know and understand their own developmental needs in order to help you work on yours. What are the most important qualities I bring to leadership? All good leaders are continuously developing. Which of my leadership qualities would I like to develop further? It is important to keep in mind the leadership qualities that you would like to develop. This book is intended to help you fulfill your aspirations to become an authentic and effective leader as you stay on the course of your True North.

No one can give you the leadership qualities you seek. You already have those leadership qualities within you. This guide is designed to help you bring out those qualities and put them into your everyday practice of leadership. You will go beyond the standard signposts of leadership by looking through the lens of your life story, learning from times when you lost your way, and examining the greatest crucible of your life.

On Becoming a Leader. Reading, Mass. Boyatzis, R. Resonant Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, Collins, J. Good to Great. New York: HarperCollins, Gardner, J. On Leadership. New York: Free Press, Kanter, R.

America the Principled. New York: Crown Books, Kopp, W. One Day, All Children. Cambridge, Mass. Your development as an authentic leader begins by analyzing your life story and your formative experi- ences. As you learn from your past experiences, you will be able to develop tools to see yourself clearly, understand your leadership achievements, and embrace your goals for future leadership development.

In Part One of this guide, we will begin with your life story. We are the mosaic of all our experiences. In this chapter you have the opportunity to look back at your life story and understand the important elements in your experience.

You will be exploring how they fit together to define you as a unique individual and provide your capac- ity to lead. This is the starting point for gaining greater self-awareness and for understanding what your life and your leadership are all about. During the interviews we conducted with authentic leaders for True North, these leaders consistently told us that they found their purpose for leader- ship through understanding their life stories.

Their stories enabled them to remain grounded in who they are and stay focused on their True North. These leaders did not define themselves by their characteristics, traits, or styles. Some interviewees did not see themselves as leaders at all, even though they had been identified by others as exemplary leaders. Instead, they viewed them- selves as people who wanted to make a difference and who inspired others to join with them in pursuing common goals.

By understanding and framing their life stories, they found their passion to lead and were able to discover their True North. As a result, they were able to sustain their leadership purpose, achieve lasting success, and realize the fulfillment of leadership. On the facing page is a workspace for drawing your own path of life. Figure 1. Include mountains and valleys, cities and wilderness, forks, bridges, cliffs. Add in houses, buildings, and so on along the path, representing places you have lived.

Likewise, indicate key people and key events with pictures or a dia- gram along or across the path. Add representations of your family, your work, your spiritual life, other life pursuits you have had.

Be creative and allow your story to unfold in front of you. Looking at the path, divide your life story into four or five chapters marked by major changes or transitions in your life. Give each chapter a descriptive title and add it to your path.

There are three elements to bear in mind about the life story work in this personal guide. First, the story you have to tell depends on the point of view you take in regard to it.

For our purposes, it is sufficient to draw the distinctions between telling your story as a hero, a victim, or a knowledgeable bystander.

Your story work will be most helpful if you cultivate the perspective of a knowledgeable bystander rather than that of a hero or a victim.

If you are a hero, you will miss out on what you need to work on. As a victim, you will miss out on your strengths. Second, your story may change dramatically depending on the time that has passed since it happened and the situation you are in when you tell it.

When telling the story of your leadership, try to relate both the long sequence of events and all the smaller details you remember. Do your best to tell the story from start to finish so that you can capture the heart of each episode.

Third, a story differs depending on whether you are seeking balance and res- olution in telling the story or are cultivating a dialogue and opening up points of tension. Telling the story of your struggle to make a leadership decision can capture the uncertainties and possibilities in your leadership that remain to be resolved. When it comes to the story of your leadership development, it is unlikely that there will be a clear res- olution. But the messy, problematic aspects of your story may be the most inter- esting and useful in thinking about where your life experiences are leading you.

Choose the leadership experience of which you are proudest. In this exercise, put yourself back in that time and describe it as if it were happening to you right now. Describe your proudest leadership experience, starting with the specific events. What happened? What was the history or climate of the organization I was in? What triggered the experience? What caused me to step up and lead? What changed in the people in the organization as a result?

How did I feel. Before stepping up to lead? When I first stepped up to lead? When facing the challenges of the situation? After the results were in? What things did I just learn about my leadership as I told this story? Telling your story is an important part of authentic leadership development. Writing your story down gives you a point of reference and helps you gain perspective on yourself. What leadership qualities did I bring to that leadership experience?

How did those qualities contribute to the outcome? Link an outcome to each of the qual- ities you listed above. Draw on what you have read in True North about the dimensions of authen- tic leadership. I practiced my values. I understood my motivations. I used my support team. I was an integrated leader. Turn back to this story again and look at it from the perspective of the leader you have become since that time. If I were mentoring myself at that time, what advice would I give?

In the same spirit, make a list for yourself. You have thought about what happened, who you were then, and how you can learn from that peak leadership experience. You may worry that by being truly authentic in the workplace you will sacrifice the performance edge that has got- ten you this far.

You may be concerned about deviating from expected norms, or not being recognized as a leader. You may worry that you will be exposed to dis- appointment when you put yourself on the line and things do not work out. These are understandable concerns. There are many constraining models of lead- ership that discourage us from exploring our authentic leadership. They per- form at superior levels because they are intensely focused on a powerful purpose for their leadership.

They are also able to remain grounded through success or failure. By being committed, they are able to pick themselves up and keep mov- ing even after the most devastating setbacks. Next we will explore the relation- ship between your authenticity and your effectiveness. I have the following thoughts about being both authentic and effective as a leader: 1. How does being authentic make me more effective right now? Experience is, however, not neces- sarily a kind or clear teacher.

Your life story is in part a chronicle of your experi- ences in the world. Looking at earlier and later chapters, you will notice contrasts. In one chapter, you may have been preparing to lead. In another, you may have focused on leading or simply trying to make your way in the world.

Some passages may be marked by education or apprenticeship—times when you were operating in the context of rules that structured and measured your activities. Later chap- ters may come in a different context, perhaps marked by increased responsibili- ties and fewer rules and structures.

At any given moment, you will prob- ably not have the feeling that you are preparing or training. Our home and native land! True patriot love in all of us command. With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. Bilingual version O Canada! True North Pdf free download. Read the full history of 'O Canada', and learn about the lives of the people behind the anthem. Now expanded and updated to introduce 48 new leaders and new learning about authentic global leaders, this revisited classic includes more diverse, global, and contemporary leaders of all ages.

Alongside these studies, former Medtronic CEO Bill George continues to share his personal stories and his wisdom by describing how you can become the leader you want to be, with helpful exercises included throughout the book.

Being a leader is about much more than title and management skills—it's fundamentally a question of who we are as human beings. Discover Your True North offers a concrete and comprehensive program for becoming an authentic leader, and shows how to chart your path to leadership success.

Once you discover the purpose of your leadership, you'll find the true leader inside you. This book shows you how to use your natural leadership abilities to inspire and empower others to excellence in today's complex global world. Discover Your True North enables you to become the leader you were born to be, and stay on track of your True North..

Der Welterfolg endlich im Taschenbuch! Sie wollen dem Geheimnis auf den Grund gehen, aber das kleine Volk der Kobolde, Trolle, Feen und Elfen tut alles, um das zu verhindern Fantastische Kinderunterhaltung vom Feinsten.. Author : Richard J. Leider release date category. Weil die meisten Kaufentscheidungen auf unbewussten Programmen beruhen.

Download or read online Wanderlust PDF. Overall though, I can't say that I'm much closer to finding my true north after reading this book. May 29, Saurav Sharan rated it did not like it. Another self help book. Feb 22, Troy Tegeder rated it liked it. Nov 29, Rebecca rated it liked it Shelves: business-sales. An excellent, motivational read with plenty of thought provoking questions that force you to examine what kind of leader you are, and what your True North is.

Highly recommend for sales professionals or anyone in a leadership role. Aug 02, Caroline Cameron rated it really liked it Shelves: leadership , self-help. Practical and inspiring, this book steps you through effective leadership principles and helps you discover your authentic leadership style. Creating your own personal leadership plan then helps you consciously choose how you want to be and what action to take to be a truly great leader. Mark Bergstrom rated it it was amazing May 15, Debbie Lopez rated it it was amazing Sep 24, Beth Lucy-speidel rated it really liked it Jan 14, Amelia rated it it was amazing Feb 17, Peter rated it liked it Dec 06, Brian Lawrence rated it it was amazing Sep 29, Lara rated it liked it Jun 07, Robert rated it did not like it Sep 25, Emily A rated it it was amazing May 05, Rachel rated it it was ok Jan 03, OJ rated it really liked it Dec 31, Lawrence Colby rated it really liked it Sep 26, Tim Plett rated it really liked it Jul 16, Karen Kritsch rated it liked it Sep 04, Alex Swanson rated it really liked it Feb 10, The Learning Collective rated it it was amazing Sep 19, Anthony rated it it was amazing Apr 10,