Daily Now
August 13, 2007

LEADERSHIP
PARTNERSHIPS
DIVERSITY

LEADERSHIP
Touch a life. That is the important thing you can do as a leader, says Lieutenant General James L. Campbell, director of the Army staff. In yesterday’s Thought Leader Super Session, “Your Army in Support of the Long War,” Campbell told the story of his red “Hero of the Day” folder on his desk. The left pocket contains the names and phone numbers of every person on the Army staff. Each day Campbell dials a different number to say, “Thank you for what you do, and I am very proud of you.”
Campbell also offered up some other keys to leadership:
The number-one leadership trait is humility. “Always get your own coffee,” Campbell says.
Recognize how you are viewed as a leader. “I consider myself Jim Campbell, not Lieutenant General James Campbell,” he says.
Show those you work with that you want to be right there with them and nowhere else. “If you want to be somewhere else, you’re in the wrong job,” he says.
Remember that you’re on display 24/7. “You have no luxury to go out and do something stupid,” Campbell says.
You need a sense of humor. “If things get so bad that you can’t laugh, you have to take a step back,” he says.

PARTNERSHIPS
The counterintuitive definition of partnering. In her session “Leveraging Critical Internal and External Business Relationships,” Larraine Segil defined the necessary components of businesses partnerships. The author of Measuring the Value of Partnering: How to Use Metrics to Plan, Deliver and Implement Successful Alliances defines partnering as a business relationship for mutual benefit between two or more parties with compatible or complementary business interests or goals.
In parsing this definition, she made a couple of interesting distinctions.
Looking at the term “business relationship,” people tend to think they will like their partners. “The chances are, if you’re in a very strategic relationship, you likely will not like your partners,” she says. “You could dislike them quite a bit if you are partnering with someone who is a major competitor.”
Trust is of course critical for a partnership to succeed. The question then becomes, how do you trust your competitors who you do not like? The answer is simple: “If they do what they say they are going to do, then you can trust them,” she says. So as you plan this partnership, it is important to have short, measurable milestones that build up over time.
Another factor to consider, Segil says, is mutual benefit. The definition does not say the benefit has to be equal to both parties. In fact, it won’t be, she says. Organizations should go into partnerships realizing the goal of mutual benefit—and resist the inclination to make the benefits equally distributed.

DIVERSITY
Diversity is imperative. Ethnic, gender, and racial equality and diversity are facts of modern life, and every organization needs to embrace them to better serve customers and members in the global economy.
That message came from Ted Childs in yesterday’s Thought Leader Session on “The Diversity Imperative: Strategies for Success in the Global Marketplace.” Childs is the former vice president of global workforce diversity at IBM and currently principal in his own diversity consulting company, Ted Childs LLC, South Salem, New York.
The global diversity imperatives he described included the advancement of women, the diversity of the leadership team, multicultural awareness and acceptance, and work/life balance.
Childs identified four goals of a diversity strategy:
• Identify, attract, and retain the best people from every ethnic, gender, and racial group.
• Create a workplace where that talent can perform at its best.
• Assess and understand the diversity of customers as they are, and reflect that understanding in the workplace.
• Use external contributions to eliminate disadvantage and increase the diversity of the talent pool.