The Edafe Ikoko CEOS BRIEFINGS Podcast: Recent Episodes
Edafe Ikoko
Helping business owners, CEOs, executives, and managers create more value, improve performance, a increase profitability
It is about why good workers become disappeared or bad managers and what it means to be a manager
Integrity - The idea of being faithful to what is true and right in your words and actions all the time and in all situations. Integrity is the mother of all principles, for it keeps every principle going. Integrity leads others to trust you. You must earn the trust of others by being worthy of it. Integrity breeds trust and credibility that are so vital to cooperation and long-term personal and interpersonal effectiveness.
These principles are given by the inspiration of God and they are profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and instruction in how to live right and thoroughly furnished for every good work. These principles are etched deep in the heart of everyone, no matter the social conditioning and devotion to them, although they might be overwhelmed or disabled by such conditions or unfaithfulness. God says, “I will put my law in their minds, and write them in their hearts.”
Leadership mentality is the mindset that flows out of the leadership nature. Your mentality is a mental way of seeing yourself, others and the world that predetermines your response or reaction to life and life situations; and the way you see those situations through your eyes of perception, assumption, understanding, explanation, impression, conception or interpretation but not in terms of eyesight. The way you see determines what you see and what you don't see.
You are created a leader. This truth comes from the word of God, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let him rule (have dominion or rulership) over the rest of creation.” In other words, God created everyone to rule, control, govern, master, and lead over all nature, not people. God created us out of his own nature to be leaders to reign with him according to his purposes. God created you to reflect his essential nature, his nature of leadership, so you have the capacity and innate ability to lead in a specific area of gifting, and can be responsible for letting what is happening in heaven to happen on earth.
Business is essentially about making meaning in the lives of people by developing a concept of a product or service that enhances the lives of people and glorifies God. Business is about enriching, ennobling and benefitting the lives of others through the use of your products or services. Business is about serving the needs of others not your own needs. In other words, you go into business to create products or services that meet the needs of others; help the helpless; create jobs for the jobless; provide answers to people's questions; provide solutions to people's problems; scratch the itches of people; heal the hurts of people; give shape to shapeless lives; feed the hungry; and so on.
In order to go into business you need a product or service, and you're endowed with a product or service by God that you can trade with in the marketplace. Every business is built around a concept of a product or service. Without the concept of a product or service there is no business. Therefore, your business starts with a concept of a product or service that you can offer the marketplace at a price they are willing to pay you for the work needed to offer it.
Your business is in what you have - your endowed product or service. You can only offer what you have. What you have is your offering to the marketplace which terminates the suffering of people, that is, meets needs, solve problems, answers questions, heals hurts, scratches itches of people. Your product or service is in the area where you can make meaning and contribute to the divine mandate for managing the earth's resources on God's behalf. Your product or service is something beyond you that you produce to offer the marketplace.
Business is about being rich in good works, helping people and solving their problems through your products or services not about making money, profit, fame, power, or prestige. While making profit is important, it is not the reason for the business; it is a byproduct of helping people and solving the problems of people. The reason for making profit is so that you can continue to do good works or help more people, and to do so even better and more abundantly. Another reason for making profit is so that you can enlarge your distribution to the world not to enlarge your possessions or accumulation. Profit making alone is superficial and uninspiring.
Your leadership success is largely a function of the success of your successor or the people you groomed to succeed you. This is why the ultimate responsibility of leadership is grooming future leaders. You must assume the responsibility of identifying and grooming leaders who will ultimately take over from you. Grooming people who will take over from you is a must not a should do responsibility. It's your responsibility to groom all the boys and girls hanging around you to become as powerful as you, even more powerful. You become a true leader through the leadership of your boys and girls.
You cannot leave the future soundness, strength and continuity of your family, department, organization, community, state, or nation to chance. You cannot afford to let your great accomplishments and accumulated skills, knowledge, wisdom, understandings, and experience that took you virtually a lifetime to acquire go to waste. It will be a grave error if an unprepared person succeeds you and ruins, devalues, or neglects virtually everything you spent your lifetime working to create. Certainly, you want your vision, good works, and all that to keep speaking long after you have gone. However, the only way your good works can keep speaking long after you have gone is to prepare your successors and prepare for your own transition to a new role in this life or a place in the following one. Your number one duty is to ensure that you leave your legacy in people, not in bank accounts, buildings or tombstones.
Your success is really a function of the success of those who take over from you. Successful succession makes certain progression or extension. True leadership is about progression or dovetailing. You should identify several young people with potential and groom them for leadership. It is imperative that you groom people to step into your shoes at the end of your tenure in any position. Your prepared successor will uphold your wonderful works or deeds and even take them to greater heights.
In order to be an effective manager, you must have a good understanding of the necessary ingredients of management. In this podcast, I am sharing with you six necessary ingredients of effective management.
Commitment is saying “I must work the works” and mean it. Commitment comes from believing in your heart of heart that you can do good works in your chosen field of human endeavour, and making a firm decision to pursue doing good works.Commitment means setting your mind and keeping it set on doing good works by willingly doing all that you need to do to do good works as long as it takes, regardless of how hard it may seem sometimes.
Experience talk about events that have happened to you and people you have net, the rewarding and especially the painful ones, which God intends to use in great ways. Examine where you're coming from. Somebody said, "Life can only be understood backwards but it can only be lived forward." Do an audit of your life and think about the people, things, activities, or circumstances that have affected who you are now and draw lessons you have learned. Review all your experiences, "the good, the bad, the ugly."
Your work is an external representation of what's in your heart. Your work is in your heart and your heart is in your work. Personality is the unique way God made you to journey through life and fulfill your peculiar purpose. Everyone is truthfully unique! No one is exactly like anyone else.
To discover who you are, you must engage in reflective thinking. You're endowed with spiritual gifts to empower you to express the love of God and serve others. This is why you must identify and develop your spiritual gifts. You're also endowed with abilities to trade with for the purpose of profiting. Cross examine and test yourself honestly to get a clear picture of what you can do well and what you can't do well. You need to have sane estimate of your capabilities.
The most appropriate way to declare the end from the beginning in mind and prevent distraction from what really matters most is to constitute a personal purpose statement. Your personal purpose statement is like a watchword that states what your life is all about. It is blueprint of your life. It expresses who you are ordained to be and what you are to do and the principles you choose to guide your life. It clarifies your roles.
Everyone has a core! Your core, your pearl of great value, which is the wellhead of security, guidance, wisdom and power has all-embracing impact on every area of your life. This is why you need to discover the one pearl of great value centre, wherein you will unfailingly receive a high level of security, guidance, wisdom, and power, enabling your responsibility and giving constancy and compatibility to all aspects of your life.
Discover the one thing you are created to do. Stop doing many things. Life is too short to spend your time doing many things. If you want to be a true leader, let your eyes be single and your life will be full of light. Discover your purpose such that if someone were to wake you up in the middle of the night and ask, "Who are you?" "What do you say about yourself?" "What's your purpose?" you have a ready answer.
Vision means you declare the end from the beginning in mind and map out a plan on how to accomplish that end. A vision gives you a better understanding of where you are now, what it will take to accomplish your purpose and how prepared you are to get there. Although vision applies to all levels and areas of life, the basic application of vision is to have a clear mental picture of the end of your life as your frame of reference by which everything you do is evaluated.
You become a true leader by discovering and pursuing your purpose to serve a unique function no one else can like you. The purpose of your life is to fulfill your peculiar potential by discovering, developing and deploying who you are to add value to the lives of others and doing it in such a way and manner no other person can. Your purpose is the one thing you can do to build others up in some way unselfishly from your heart by expressing and manifesting your true essence.