W09 Disciple Leadership

Hello everyone, this week I learnt a great deal from the materials and videos of this week on Disciple Leadership. From the video “Aspect of building trust”, Guy Kawasaki explained that “Trustworthiness occurs when you first of all trust others. The sequence of events is that you trust people and they will trust you. The onus is upon you to trust first.” To build trust, we have to learn to build our trust in others first especially when it comes to people we do business with. For the business to go well you have to trust each other and it starts with you trusting the person first.

He also used an illustration of bakers and eaters, when an eater sees a pie, an eater is thinking, “Zero sum gain. I need to get as much of the pie as possible. My gain of the pie is your loss of the pie. I need to get as much of the pie as possible.” A baker by contrast sees the world as an opportunity to make more pies and bigger pies. Trustworthy people are bakers, not eaters and they see the world as a non-zero-sum gain. Another quality of trustworthiness is you need to default to “yes.” Defaulting to yes means that when you meet people, you are always thinking, “How can I help that person?” Which is very different than when you meet people and you’re always thinking, “How can that person help me?” Default to yes, you are not always thinking of receiving, instead you are thinking of how to give to the world, how to do something that people will benefits from.

I also learnt from the material GOOD TO GREAT Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by JIM COLLINS, I learnt that the key to making a good-to-great transition isn’t setting the right objective, Instead, concentrate on getting the right people on board, and then they will figure out what the most important objective should be and the more people with initiative and skills that join the team, the better. Also, you can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.

“Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority have become quite good – and that is their main problem. That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem. If we have cracked the code on the question of good to great, we should have something of value to any type of organization. Good schools might become great schools. Good newspapers might become great newspapers. Good churches might become great churches. Good government agencies might become great agencies. And good companies might become great companies.” – Jim Collins