Archive for November, 2011
One More Leadership Lesson from a Chilean Miner November 4 2011 one response
One of the greatest leadership feel good stories in recent memory ended just over a year ago when 33 Chilean copper miners were rescued from their mine 70 days after they were trapped inside. Their survival and rescue were triumphs of leadership, courage and ingenuity. While they were still underground, I wrote a post called What We Can Learn About Leadership from the Chilean Miners. It was one of the most read and commented upon posts I’ve written. There were three basic lessons in that article:
- Leaders share the role.
- Leaders leverage their gifts.
- Leaders keep the whole person in mind.
You might remember the story about the miner, Edison Pena, who ran three to six miles through the tunnels every day to keep himself sane and fit while trapped. Just a few weeks after the rescue, he came to the U.S. to run the New York City Marathon. He appeared on Letterman and sang Elvis songs (his favorite singer). It was a challenge, but he finished the race a few days later in under six hours.
As the New York Times reports, Edison is back in New York this year to run the marathon again. It’s been a tough year since the last race. The stress of captivity got to him and he dealt with through drinking and drugs. He checked himself in for help and feels like he’s back on track now. As he said in a brief press conference in New York this week, “I’m here despite the fact that I’ve fallen down to show that I’ve risen up.”
So, we have at least one more lesson in leadership from a Chilean miner. When we fall down, as we inevitably will, we can seek the help we need to get back up.
Good luck with the race this weekend Edison. I hope you beat last year’s time.
Lessons in Integrity from Madoff? November 2 2011 2 responses
This is one of those “learn by doing the opposite” kinds of posts. It’s inspired by a few New York Times stories earlier this week on a new book that the surviving son of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff has released. I don’t intend to read the book but I noted with interest that the son had talked his mother, Ruth Madoff, into giving some interviews to promote it. If you can get past the outrage that Bernie Madoff induces, there were some poignant and instructive lessons about integrity in what his wife had to say.
Apart from the huge amount of money he stole from his clients, I think the biggest source of outrage with Madoff is the way he presented himself as a pillar of the philanthropic and financial communities when, in fact, he was running a criminal enterprise. In her interviews, it seems that Ruth Madoff was as fooled by her husband’s double life as just about everyone else was. She sounds devastated that the man she thought she was married to was not that man at all.
In thinking about how Madoff scammed everyone who was closest to him including his wife, the word integrity kept coming to my mind. As I’ve noted here before, the first definition of the word integrity in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is “Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.” In a case like Madoff’s it goes without saying that, by definition, integrity was not in the picture. The third definition of the word offers a more nuanced guidepost for those of us who are not inclined to engineer a massive financial fraud. Here it is: “The quality or condition of being whole or undivided, completeness.” The definition goes on to explain that the root of the word is the Latin word integritas. The word, integrate, has the same root. The primary definition for that word is “To make into a whole by bringing all parts together. To unify.”
So, all of that leads me to this conclusion. A life lived with integrity is one that is integrated. It’s one in which everything hangs together and there is internal consistency. Sure, integrity is about honesty and ethics, but it’s more than that. It’s about living, leading and presenting yourself so that your actions in one domain are integrated with what you think, do and say in other domains. When you start to notice that your actions across domains are not integrated or unified that’s a sign that your integrity is at risk.
I’m pretty sure that that wasn’t much of a concern to Bernie Madoff. He made a conscious decision to go in the other direction. For the majority of us, though, challenges to our integrity can sneak up on us. Regularly stepping back to assess your level of integration can be a useful way to stay true to yourself and guard your integrity.
What do you do to ensure that you live up to your goals around integrity?
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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