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| Bert Hursh |
Our last five meetings have been held via Zoom, the easy-to-use virtual meeting technology that now has over 300 million users. I’ve been quite impressed by the skills some of these other members have developed. Also, attendees get an opportunity to hear some very interesting speeches.
When Bert Hursh, a Social Studies teacher at Ashland High School, gave his speech 10 days I knew I wanted to share part of it here. Hursh’s insights on leadership were no doubt partially formed by his service in the U.S. Navy and in Desert Storm.
Hursh began his speech with a statistic, citing how many hundreds of billions of dollars businesses lose each year because of bad leadership. The scope of his message was business leadership, not political leadership where trillions can be frittered away through careless decision making and poor oversight.
My Leadership Style
“It has been loudly expressed that in our society today there is a crisis in leadership, a crisis that if left uncorrected could be the demise of a once thriving culture,” he said in his intro.
Most of us are familiar with the Peter Principle which states that employees tend to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence. Bert, however, identified a different cause of this problem. “It turns out,” he said, “that the characteristics of these managers often fit the desire of the corporation-- Ambition, Competitiveness, and Perfectionism--and who has had these characteristics the longest, that is, tenure.”
He quickly pivoted, pointing out that this bureaucratic style is not his own favored leadership style.
“There are certain segments of society that like, and even love, bureaucracy,” he said. “I am not among them.”
What else is a leader to be if not ambitious and competitive?
The last time he checked, Bert found that Amazon lists 57,136 books on this topic. After a quick read of their titles he found an interesting common thread weaving its way through them all. It was the word LEADERSHIP.
He then gave us a little etymology lesson.
“Being a leader means… just that, to lead. To be up front, nothing interesting there.”
1. Adding ship to some nouns creates a new one that implies STATUS Like chairmanship or citizenship
2. Adding ship to other nouns makes it part of a collective in a group as with Membership, for example, or kinship.
3. Adding ship to yet other nouns will speak to the art or skill in something. Craftsmanship comes to mind or penmanship.
4. To express quality or the condition of something you can add ship to other nouns. Having the principalship was a condition I had for a while. Partnership is another example.
“Why I think this is interesting, if not exciting, is that when I looked down the list of 915 words that are in our language that end with this ship, only Leader fits all four cases: condition, quality, status and being part of a special group.”
Leadership has only one synonym that denotes all of these ideas and this is my style, he asserted, and that is Coaching.
A COACHING style of leadership looks like this:
*Prepares others for the future
*Excels with those who have potential
*Motivates others by challenging
*Uses positive statements
*Mentors/disciples
*Strong personal relationship
*Promotes high morale
Hursh closed with this tidy affirmation, “This is just my style. Thank you.”
Related Links
Duluth Toastmasters Club 1523
Toastmaster Close Ups: Dave Boe and Randine LePage
Toastmaster Close Ups: Katy, Wulfgar and Yana
Toastmasters Club 1523 Facebook Page
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