The Quintessential Leader

Quintessential leadership is not glamour. It is grit and grace held together by character. Lead people. Manage things. Put people first. Take responsibility for everything you touch. That is the work. Start with character. Character shows up in the small choices you make each day. Show up on time. Keep your word. Tell the truth. Finish what you start. Admit when you fall short. Make amends fast.…

What Are People Who Are Hiring Looking For? Many job applicants wonder why they never hear anything back from the job sites where they apply for so many jobs. You may be one of those who have submitted seemingly hundreds of job applications and never even got a nibble of interest. As a leader, I’m on the other side of those job applications, and I’ll give you some tangible reasons why and some…

How do leaders fail? Let’s face the facts. We’re human. As such, we’re imperfect. None of us knows everything and none of us is good at all things. We have strengths and we have weaknesses. Quintessential leaders recognize this about others and about themselves. Quintessential leaders are always looking for team members who will offset their weaknesses. They have no problems with people who shine…

Lack of Parental Accountability is a Quintessential Leadership Problem

The local and national news is full of stories about children killing and being killed. When I read stories about young teens being hit by a car when they’re outside walking in the wee hours of the morning or about teenagers being shot in cars or at parties on school nights between 1 am and 5 am, I shake my head and ask myself, “Where are their parents?” When I read stories about children as…

Erasing History is Not the Way to a Better Future – The Quintessential Leader Perspective

Black lives matter. The history of black slavery, oppression, injustice, and murder for a very long time is an abomination, then and now. Period.

Anyone who denies that, doesn’t believe that, or thinks that’s okay, is both a liar and a murderer (hate, as Jesus says in Matthew 5 is the same thing as murder). If you call yourself a Christian and you fall into this way of thinking, then you are…

Firing People and the Bottom Line – The Quintessential Leader Perspective

No matter what perspective you view things from here in the middle of June 2020, the global economy and the American economy are in dire straits (despite what the people in leadership positions in the United States say) because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many companies are not in a position to survive, not because there isn’t a way, but because they cannot think outside the box and see different…

What Quintessential Leaders Do and Are

There are a lot of people in leadership positions who have no business being there. They are the epitome of unquintessential leadership and the consequences of that are destructive to many people beyond their own teams.

It’s actually easy to know what quintessential leaders don’t do. Look at what these unquintessential leaders are doing and determine what the opposite action should be. It’s,…

I’ve watched more live news coverage in the last week than I have in the last five years. I cut cable several years ago, and I limit myself to daily perusal of the headlines from several credible news outlets, stopping only to read in-depth if it’s a topic I’m interested in or that I need to know.

I have had, by listening to the daily briefings on COVID-19 from the White House, the opportunity to…

Book Review – “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Jonathan Haidt

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While Haidt makes his case in a very narrow sense that focuses on the current higher education environment, the reality is this is the current pervasive American (regardless of age) mindset. We’ve, collectively, just turned off our brains from any…

Quintessential Leaders (Almost) Always Take a Step Back

We find ourselves, in the middle of 2019, living in a completely unfiltered world. It was, until recently, a world reserved for people who had neurological impairments caused by dementia, mental illness, tumors and cancer, or neurosurgery that was imposed in the dark ages of neuroscience (frontal lobotomies) or that went wrong (even the best neurosurgeons make mistakes).

Now, however, almost…

Coaching Millennials – A Quintessential Leader Perspective

Coaching millennials and breaking the Peter Pan syndrome and perpetual adolescence that helicopter parenting and snowplow parenting has created and embedded in Gen Y is a process. A long process that is not for the faint of heart, the impatient, or the unmerciful.

Courage, patience, and mercy are traits of people who are striving to be quintessential leaders. Millennials will test these – not…

Got Millennials? Watch This.

This video I’m including here is called The Millennial Question, but, in fact, some of the deeper issues raised here may have infiltrated all of lives because of our ubiquitous access to technology. (more…)

Why Introverts Make People Uncomfortable – A Quintessential Leader Perspective

Introverts make people uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.  It’s not intentional nor is it deliberate, but the further away from introversion people are, the more discomfort they will experience around introverts.

Why? (more…)

John McCain, United States Senator from Arizona, died on August 25, 2018, a little more than a year after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive, and always fatal, type of brain cancer.

Senator McCain’s life could have been much different then it turned out to be. He grew up in a very elite and privileged world, and one that afforded him the opportunity, if he chose, to live for…