Personal and Professional Leadership Values and Objectives:
A 1990 Position Statement of Dr. Robert D. Parlotz
1. Live your vision and its strategies, for leadership is a process with focused vision and goals in group interaction.
a. Focus on productivity.
b. Approach situations synergistically.
c. Build on strengths.
d. Concentrate on priorities.
e. Put the "consumer" of your services and work first.
2. Believe and invest in people.
a. Mentor functional autonomy through empowerment.
b. Communicate directly, clearly, and empathically.
c. Make teamwork functional and effective. Collaboration works when ideas are judged on the basis of their merits rather than on the power of the individual.
d. Be a midwife to creativity. Tap the brainpower of everyone in the organization.
e. Choose diversity over compliance. Compliance is a sick basis for relationship and it undermines integrity.
f. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship.
g. Approach others and their work as a connoisseur, not as an inspector. Connoisseurship is the act of knowledgeable perceptions, the art of appreciation, and a private act of sharing together.
3. Be a student for life.
a. Know yourself.
b. Be open to knowledge.
c. Listen to many voices.
d. Improve constantly.
4. Keep a steady course--focused on defined and achievable goals and implemented proactively.
a. Strategic planning based on values precedes tactical planning. The past is history; present action produces the future.
b. Make decisions based on data, not passionate whims or fad. Separate fact from fiction, and faith and hope from magical thinking and wish. Measure quality so it can be managed.
c. Capitalize on opportunities.
d. Change is a constant. Approach chaos as an ordered existence in search of definition and understanding.
e. Focus on the multiple stakeholders of the organization as constantly changing rather than as a constant.
f. Never defend a stupid mistake.
g. Never give up.
h. Maintain and implement collective action, agreed-upon purpose, and belief in attainment.
Copyright 1990, Dr. Robert D. Parlotz