THE BRIGHT IDEA

Leaders who radiate goodness build an enterprise that is rewarding for leaders, employees

and customers. Its about getting powerful people working together around a compelling

plan. Good leaders blend together the Seven Fs: faith, family, finances, fitness, friends,

fun and future to build an environment with less stress and fear, more fun and higher

productivity. With so many external events out of our control, why choose to work with

leaders or colleagues who spread toxic energy? Goodness pays today.

A Bright Paper

By Paul Batz

Leadership Expert on Why Goodness Pays

Founder and President, Good Leadership Enterprises

Author, Speaker, Executive Coach

Why Goodness Pays

ê

How to Build Positive Momentum for Leaders,

Employees and Customers with Good Leadership

TENSIONS ARE HIGH TODAYWe’re working longer and harder than we ever imagined, and the rewards are often hard to see. The internet in our hands 24/7 is constantly delivering anxiety-inducing news: upside-down mortgages, declining school safety, a rocky economy and a never-ending election cycle is eating away at our hope. The pressure causes many of us to eat and drink more, exercise less and hunker down in front of our TVs.

From my perspective as an executive coach, I see a rapidly evolving “new normal” that is a stressful place to be, both at home and at work.

A Career Builder survey found that 26% of workers have experienced health issues tied to stress on the job. That’s consistent with my own experience, past and present. The increasing pressure to do more with less is taking a toll, and the instant information in our smartphones is forcing a business culture of I need a response right now that’s difficult to escape.

Do we ever get time to actually think anymore?

Another study conducted at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, revealed women who rate their jobs as highly stressful are significantly more likely to have a heart attack, stroke or heart disease than those with lower stress jobs. Men are not immune either — depression and diabetes are on the rise, and our waistlines continue to expand. We’re now learning even the recent rise in road rage may be due to on-the-job stress.

And that’s just at work. Across the political, community and family spectrum, we’re more polarized, anxious, isolated and concerned for the future. Many of us are not feeling equipped to embrace a culture that’s blending right in front of our eyes. The racial mixture in our culture is accelerating, and we are more openly discussing highly personal topics like sexual orientation and marriage rules.

There’s a cumulative effect from these varied stresses and pressures. It’s no wonder so many of us are feeling stretched thin and frayed at the edges.

“New normal” is a

stressful place to be.

Introduction

CHANGING THE DYNAMIC

• Accepting personal accountability• Shifting the perspective from “me” to “we”• Working together

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Leadership advice is plentiful and overwhelming. In just over a tenth of a second, you can find more than 89 million search results on Google.

From corporate social responsibility and servant leadership models, ethics and compliance initiatives, to spiritual leadership approaches, there are many methods designed to get leaders to ward away temptations and “do the right thing.” So why are we still struggling?

WE SEE A FEW ROOT ISSUES

• Surface skimming Sound bites and 140-character clips provide just enough to stay in touch, but not enough white space to really think, reflect or be inten-tional about our leadership.• Out-of-whack alignment Momentum is only possible when people are all rowing in the same direction. It takes time and follow-through to rally people around a compelling plan.

• Leading with our heads in the sand It’s never been easier to get real em-ployee and customer input. And it’s just as easy to be distracted by meaningless drivel.

• Failing at work-life “balance” Feeling guilty for never measuring up to both sides of the equation at once. The Teeter Totter is exhausting.

THE GOOD LEADERSHIP MOVEMENTThe antidote to what we’re experiencing today — what really works — is good leadership.

Good leadership is a quality that radiates outward. It starts with leaders who have con-sciously and successfully blended their personal and professional aspirations so they are able to live and operate with everyday integrity. Good leaders aren’t Dr. Jekyll at home and Mr. Hyde at work (or vice versa). They know what they stand for and so does every-one around them.

Good leadership doesn’t end with the leader. It extends — and as a result, magnifies — its impact because good leaders energize people by building shared commitments, by motivating their teams to work together effectively toward bigger, brighter and bolder accomplishments.

And that’s when goodness starts to multiply.

The essential ingredient of good leadership is to get powerful people working together around a compelling plan in spite of overwhelming circumstances. So, in today’s world especially, if we want people to follow our lead, we have to convince ourselves and others that our best days are ahead of us.

The simple truth is we are 100% accountable for the mood, tone and mindset we take into work every day and home every night. With tensions so high today, why choose to live or work with leaders who are toxic?

With the extraordinary amount of external events seemingly out of our control, we need to grab hold of our own personal leadership, move forward in a positive way and make a commitment to radiate goodness.

Goodness is what customers expect. Goodness is what employees, colleagues, vendors, friends and family expect as well. And goodness is something that can be coached, de-veloped and nurtured, in ourselves and our followers.

To get the conversation started, we’ll look at these specific areas:

WHY GOODNESS PAYS

â Defining Goodnessâ Putting Customers First

HOW TO BUILD POSITIVE MOMENTUM

â Personal Leadership and The Seven Fsâ Working Together

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MIKE’S STORYA number of years ago, I was asked to work with a leader who unexpectedly was pro-moted to CEO of his rapidly growing organization. He was very young and the pressure was significant. For purposes of this Bright Paper, lets call him “Mike.”

Mike hadn’t necessarily thought of himself as “next in line” for the top spot. Trained as a CPA, he had humble beginnings in the collections department, where his first job entailed making calls to collect on bad debts. Not exactly the fast track.

One of the people I interviewed as part of the coaching process with Mike was the CFO, a woman ten years his senior who strongly advocated for his promotion.

“You’ve seen a lot of leaders, some good and some otherwise. What made you think Mike was the right one for the job?” I asked.

“He radiates goodness,” she said strongly, without hesitation.

I’d never heard that before. She didn’t say he was strategic, or goal-oriented, or driven, or razor smart. Instead, she said he was uniquely qualified because he radiated goodness.

When I asked her what she meant, she very articulately explained. He excels at getting people to work together because he sets such a strong example of personal leadership:

â He promotes and rewards excellence by expecting it of himself and those around him.

â He lives generously, whether it’s with his time, energy or money, and shares the spotlight, giving credit where credit is due.

â He demonstrates fairness, honesty and transparency, from the mail room to the boardroom.

â He is consistently positive in all areas of his life.

She also said he was impatient, demanding and competitive, but these were all tolerable, because he radiated goodness. At the core, Mike made the choice to bring a mindset and tone to work that caused people to want to follow him.

“The trusted leader is followed. The trusted sales person is bought from. For the

trusted brand people will pay more, come back, and tell others. In the Twenty-First

Century, trust has become the world’s most precious resource.”

Dave Horsager

Defining Goodness

What is goodness in leadership?

GOOD LEADERS

• Rewarding excellence Rewarding, promoting and fostering the best in yourself and others

• Living generously Sharing time, attention, credit and knowledge, and investing in the broader organizational community

• Demonstrating fairness Operating with objectivity, inclusiveness, candor, transparency and honesty

• Consistently positive Modeling positive intentions at home and at work, every single day

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Why Goodness Pays

Over the course of coaching him, I also found that he modeled that same commitment in his home life. He frequently visited his aging mother in his childhood home. He found time to work out, to see his daughters play hockey and soccer, and even made commitments to schedule an occasional “date night” with his wife.

What I discovered was Mike had a well developed sense of his own Personal Leadership that came from and was guided by his success in blending his work and personal lives in ways that worked for him and made a positive impact on those around him.

This was particularly apparent when looking at what happened with the team of seasoned, somewhat challenging leaders he had inherited. When I first began working with Mike, I was told these leaders would chew him up and spit him out. That prediction seemed like a safe bet, given the circumstances, but it couldn’t have been more wrong.

Mike’s personal leadership — his everyday integrity — combined with his ability to rally people around shared commitments soon had the leaders synchronized, inspired and working together in ways they’d never seen before. The end-result was explosive and unprecedented growth. It got me thinking.

GOOD LEADERSHIP MAKES GOOD BUSINESS SENSEDuring the seven years Mike and I worked together, his business tripled and the company ultimately sold to a strategic buyer. His team was the highest performing executive team I’ve ever experienced, and they really had a lot of fun!

Working with Mike cultivated my initial point of view about goodness. I saw firsthand the business impact it makes. More than just a “nice-to-have,” this was about bottom-line numbers, too. And I also realized this wasn’t something that lay just within the reach of a select few who, by virtue of personality or natural disposition had some special advan-tage. With the help of a few simple, practical techniques and tools, anyone could — and should — radiate goodness in their leadership and business.

Now we write, speak and coach on the subject and are learning more about the impact of goodness every day. In our experience, we’ve found when you operate by the pillars of rewarding excellence, living generously, demonstrating fairness and remaining consis-tently positive:

â People want to work hard for you.

â Customers want to do business with you.

â You are more energized, inspired and fulfilled.

â You have the mental breathing room and the support you need to make great things possible.

“There’s a clear chain reaction between leadership and the level of revenue

and profitability a company experiences. The one factor that every organization

ought to put first is the effectiveness of leaders.”

Jack Zenger, CEO, Zenger Folkman

RADIATING GOODNESS BENEFITS

• Leaders • Employees • Customers • Community • Friends & Family

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BUILDING ENTERPRISES PEOPLE WANT TO DO BUSINESS WITH What’s interesting about Mike’s story is he made the choices to intentionally create a vi-sion that would be both personally and professionally fulfilling, but the focus wasn’t just about him. He was consumed by maintaining an external perspective, always keeping his customers front of mind.

There’s a good reason we live in an era that has spawned the term “Chief Executive Customer.” Customers have access to more information and more choices than ever be-fore, and they are exercising those choices in ways that impact an organization’s financial and reputational health every day.

And while social media has taken over our collective consciousness, we’re also begin-ning to see the next era isn’t about being social, it’s about being personal. Customers want to be understood and they want to engage at an authentic level. They don’t want to be told what they think or what the “data” says they should want.

The implications? There’s a clear line being drawn from the leader’s mindset directly to the customer’s decision-making process. An attitude of goodness when applied to leadership and business paves the way for the long-term customer relationships that are more personal and therefore more sustainable in today’s hypercompetitive world.

Here’s just one example:

Recently, the leadership at Park Nicollet Health Services faced patient engagement rank-ings hovering in the lower quartile for healthcare organizations. They realized their inter-nally focused processes and systems were completely losing sight of their “customers.” They were not consistently producing excellence in the eyes of their patients, nor were they generous with their time.

Senior leadership made an intentional commitment to change their thinking, one that Paul Dominski, then Chief HR and Marketing Officer, describes as simply: “Let’s stop focusing on ourselves and start focusing on our patients.”

A complete cultural overhaul followed, which involved realignment of everything from compensation and recognition systems to selection and promotion decisions. They em-braced a new set of intentions and the results were remarkable.

In just two years, the organization went from being in the 18th percentile on patient en-gagement to the 80th percentile. The impact was felt on the inside too, as employee rat-ings of pride in working at Park Nicollet rose from 80% to 97%.

“We saw huge, massive results,” Dominski says. “Leadership had to change, everything had to change, but it’s a simple mind shift away from focusing only on ourselves to being ‘other’ centric.”

The lessons are clear: Customers today have so many choices. If we want our organiza-tions to remain relevant, we need our leaders truly working together to create positive momentum in the marketplace.

“When managers

focus their attention

and emphasis only on

organizational indicators

of vitality such as

profit, they have their

eye on the scoreboard

and not on the ball.”

The Ken Blanchard Companies, “The Leadership - Prof i t Chain”

Putting Customers First

GOOD LEADERS CREATE A

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

• Building positive marketplace momentum• Making meaningful customer connections

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At the same time, the connectedness of our world also makes it now so much smaller. We have the opportunity to make more authentic, positive connections with our customers and reap the advantages that brings, but only if our leaders have built a well-developed sense of their own personal leadership.

“We all had to examine our basic commitment to do the right thing consistently for our patients,” explains Dominski. “That meant we had to embrace the changing demograph-ics and desires of all our patients and that meant we had to all grow together as leaders.”

EMBRACING A BLENDED MARKETPLACEMy business is headquartered in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Unlike New York or LA, the Twin Cities are just now learning to embrace a more diverse multicultural environ-ment. One of the leaders in that movement is General Mills.

In 1996 General Mills made the important decision to change the face of a beloved 75-year-old brand icon: Betty Crocker.

No longer a white suburban mom, Betty is now a composite of various racial and ethnic backgrounds — a multicultural blend more closely reflecting the diversity of the real-life customers who buy the Betty Crocker products. This bold step for General Mills has paid off for the business because it was driven by a desire to connect with the custom-ers “to stop focusing on ourselves and start focusing on those we serve,” to paraphrase Dominski.

It seems obvious, but the racial, ethnic and lifestyle mix of our customers, employees and competitors is blending right in front of our eyes. Factually, it’s impossible for tomor-row’s customers and followers to be as disproportionally white or male as they are today. Embracing the blended marketplace through a commitment to fairness isn’t just a feel-good sentiment. We need to be cultivating multicultural leaders faster than the changing face of our customers to ensure we continue to be positioned to serve the needs of the market. It’s a business imperative for anyone who intends to create a strong foundation for the future.

“Level 5 leaders want

to see the company

even more successful

in the next generation,

comfortable with

the idea that most

people won’t even

know the roots of that

success trace back

to their efforts.”

Jim Col l ins,

Good to Great

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GOODNESS STARTS WITH PERSONAL LEADERSHIP: BLENDING THE SEVEN FSAs proven in physics, the most powerful momentum comes from full and complete align-ment. Good leaders have their personal and professional aspirations aligned to maximize their own positive energy.

Yes, I said the personal as well as the professional. It’s rarely emphasized in leadership coaching and literature, or it’s dismissed as the “soft” side of business, but there is a real hard-line business connection. As a recent Forbes article noted, “The idea that you’re at work when you’re at work, and you’re not when you’re not, clearly isn’t true.” To think the two have no connection beyond superficial discussions of work-life balance is to com-pletely miss the reality of today’s business environment.

In the book What Really Works, Blending the Seven Fs for the Life You Imagine, my co-author Tim Schmidt and I offered this insight:

â We don’t believe in the notion of work/life balance. Mostly because the reference implies one is a sacrifice for the other. Work is life. Life is work. Human beings were made to enjoy working hard and building things.

Our conclusion: Trying to keep our personal and professional lives separate — or bal-anced like a Teeter Totter — doesn’t work. The people we admire most are good leaders in our communities who know how to blend the Seven Fs: faith, family, finances, fitness, friends, fun and future.

Where many leadership theories get hung up in practical application, the Seven Fs is a simple, powerful concept. Here’s a quick summary of what we mean:

FAITH Our spiritual life. Spirituality is a peculiar and amazing thing. We are all spiritual beings; regardless of our chosen “religion,” most humans find a source of identity and strength by listening to and nurturing our spirituality.

FAMILY Our loved ones. In the research for the book, more than a thousand col-lege-educated, knowledge workers rated Family as their most satisfying of the Fs, and they also said Family was their highest priority for increasing their satisfaction.

“Feeling powerful—

feeling ‘able’—comes

from a deep sense of

being in control of your

own life…When you feel

able to determine your

own destiny, when you

believe you are able to

mobilize the resources

and support necessary

to complete a task, then

you will persist in your

efforts to achieve.”

Jim Kouzes and Barr y Posner

Personal Leadership and the Seven Fs

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How to Build Positive Momentum

FINANCES How money funds our priorities. While some see our income on the rise, most people today see the opposite. Here’s the deal about finances: The only way to be truly satisfied with our finances is learn to be grateful for what we have, not spiteful about what we don’t have.

FITNESS The health of our body. In our survey, Fitness finished dead last in satis-faction and dead last in the priorities. Fitness really should be easy, except for the fact that we have to eat less (and better), drink less beer and break a sweat more often. How’s your Fitness, really?

FRIENDS The people who share our joys and disappointments. The book research reveals that women tend to be more satisfied with their friendships and they also place a higher priority on friends. How are you doing with your friends?

FUN The part of life that is playful and joyful. With so much of our life spent work-ing, can’t we make it more fun? Would the people you spend the most time with describe you as fun?

FUTURE The hope that we have for ourselves and others. Future is less about optimism and more about the commitment we make to a better world and the steps we take right now to make it possible. Future is a major driver for good leaders, how about you?

Anyone who is building a team and growing a business, while also raising kids, trying to lose weight, caring for aging parents, and on and on, knows the issues surrounding personal finances or family dynamics are impossible to ignore at work. It seems like ev-eryone has my cell phone number today! The “personal” calls come on my “professional” time constantly.

Good leaders know this, understand it and embrace blending The Seven Fs. Personally, I find my leadership stress to be manageable when I am effectively blending all of the Seven Fs into my daily and weekly routine.

Figuring out this blend is the key to developing your personal leadership and being able to radiate goodness. If you’re drowning under the weight of the issues or avoiding dealing with them entirely, you can’t build the positive momentum to move forward.

NOTHING SIGNIFICANT IS EVER ACCOMPLISHED ALONEWe operate our firm with the mantra: When good leaders work together with good inten-tions, great things are possible. Good leaders know sustainable results and satisfaction are impossible without a team united by shared commitments and a compelling plan.

It’s a two-way street: Even strongly independent people living alone build support sys-tems to stay healthy and vital, and we’ve found the most effective leaders tend to cred-it their success to what they’ve learned from and were able to accomplish with those around them.

“When a spirit of

inclusion takes hold,

engaged employees can

adopt important new

roles, creating content

themselves and acting

as brand ambassadors,

thought leaders, and

storytellers.”

Bor is Grovsberg and Michael Sl ind, “Leadership Is A Conversat ion”Working Together

75% OF EXECUTIVES SAY GOOD

PHYSICAL FITNESS IS CRITICAL

FOR CAREER SUCCESS AT THE

EXECUTIVE LEVEL.

— TheLadders.com

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Ken Blanchard, one of the preeminent minds in modern leadership, agrees: “Lots of com-panies don’t use their people as business partners. But transparency keeps people in-volved — they’re motivated to help. For a business owner or manager, that means you’re not alone trying to solve problems.”

The glue that keeps the team together is simple: When we demonstrate we actually care about one another — personally as well as professionally — we have endless positive energy…and we truly want to help each other. Radiating goodness is about spreading it for the good of everyone.

GETTING MORE PRODUCTIVE AND HAVING MORE FUNA funny thing happens when you shift your perspective to goodness. Positive momentum multiplies. When people are truly working together, fueled by a collective sense of good-ness, there is more laughter, less tension and more fun, and you’re getting more done at the same time.

When we talk about goodness as an antidote for the stresses and pressures of today, this is where the small things really add up to make a huge difference.

The best way to get started is by focusing on your Personal Leadership. Goodness starts with you. Perhaps you may learn something about yourself by assessing how the Seven Fs are moving through your life?

â Contact me at paul@goodleadership.com to take the Seven Fs Personal Leadership Benchmark: this 15 question survey will give you a Seven Fs Score and a benchmark to help you identify important areas in your leadership that will help you have more fun and be more productive.

When you radiate goodness, people want to work hard for you and be your customer — because goodness always pays.

Carpe Diem

ê

Join the Goodness Movement

Good leaders, working together with good

intentions make great things possible.

Seize the day!

GOOD LEADERSHIP

SUCCESS HABITS

1. Blending the Seven Fs2. Building a team fueled by Goodness

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Join the Good Leadership Network on LinkedIn

The Key Missing Ingredient in Leadership Today

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steve-denning/2012/07/27/the-key-missing-ingredient-in-leadership-today/

The Weakness of Positive Thinkinghttp://www.strategy-business.com/article/re00199?pg=all

Leaders Communicate, and Communicators Lead

http://smartblogs.com/leader-ship/2012/07/27/leaders-communi-cate-and-communicators-lead/

How much does good leadership affect the bottom line?

http://managementisajourney.com/2011/09/fascinating-numbers-how-much-does-good-leadership-affect-the-bottom-line/

Four biggest challenges facing industry leaders

http://smartblogs.com/fi-nance/2012/07/31/in-my-view-john-spence/

Seven deadly sins of leadershiphttp://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/2012/05/the-7-deadly-sins-of-leadership/

“Leadership Is A Conversation,” Harvard Business Review

http://hbr.org/product/leadership-is-a-conversation/an/R1206D-PDF-ENG

Good to Great, Jim Collins

Don’t wait for burnout to pack your valise

http://yourbiz.nbcnews.com/_news/2008/05/27/4355726-dont-wait-for-burnout-to-pack-your-valise?lite

IBM: The New CEO and the Science of Giving People What They Want

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_marketing/overview/?cmp=usbrb&cm=p&csr=agus_brmar-kettrans-20110914&cr=wsj&ct=usbrb301&cn=wsj_vanity_long

Yes, please meet the Chief Executive Customer

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2012/06/19/yes-please-meet-the-chief-executive-customer/

3 Ways to Make Everyone Around You Smarter

http://www.fastcompany.com/3000623/3-ways-make-every-one-around-you-smarter

Arrogance: A Formula for Leadership Failure

http://www.siop.org/tip/july12/04silverman.aspx

What Customers Want: Companies That Bend the Rules

http://www.forbes.com/sites/elaine-pofeldt/2012/06/30/what-customers-want-companies-that-bend-the-rules/

How Strong is Your Leadership Bench?

http://saleschallenger.exbdblogs.com/2012/06/19/how-strong-is-your-leadership-bench/

What Really Works: Blending the Seven Fs for the Life You Imagine, Paul Batz and Tim Schmidt

http://www.goodleadership.com/books/what-really-works

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Bibliography

ABOUT GOOD LEADERSHIP ENTERPRISES

The publishing and consulting company Good Leadership Enterprises is

a branded statement of founder Paul Batz’s belief in practical everyday

wisdom that makes a difference.

Through the combination of leadership consulting, research-based

publishing, and speaking and events, the firm creates positive momentum

in both the personal and professional lives of leaders.

Paul Batz Founder and President,

Good Leadership Enterprises

Author, Speaker, Executive Coach

Get in touch with Paul â paul@goodleadership.com

Connect with Paul

ABOUT THE AUTHORPaul Batz is a leadership expert on why goodness pays. A successful entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience in professional services, he knows how to get powerful people working together, motivated by what’s best for customers.

A best-selling author of f ive books, his most recent, What Really Works: Blending the Seven Fs, explores the funny and compelling stories of real people who are successfully blending their personal and professional lives around the Seven Fs: faith, family, f inances, f itness, friends and future. In weekly installments on his popular blog, www.paulbatz.com, he writes with clever clarity, sharing stories of practical wisdom on good leadership.

A member of the National Speakers Association, clients f ind his speaking style entertaining and inspiring, and they always leave with an extra bounce in their step.

Paul is an avid golfer, a church musician, and a happily married father of three living and working in Minneapolis, where he strives every day to radiate goodness.