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alciccioli, Greg. The Enemies of Excellence: 7 Reasons Why We Sabotage Success. Crossroad: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2011.
Few people consider how to sustain their success because they’re too busy trying to achieve it.
Most leaders want to be the best people they can be and to lead with excellence. They want to thrive, and they want the people around them to thrive. They have the best of intentions.
Success is inherently unstable. The skills it took to establish success cannot sustain it.
A high-profile leader is surrounded by people who are hungry for the leader’s success. They want him to succeed, and if the price for that is to overlook a few red flags here and there, so be it. The greater the success, the greater the danger.
To deal the fatal blow to egotism, you must identify what you desire as the outcome of your life and leadership. You need to ask yourself: Are you striving to reach just another self-centered summit, or are you leading people and the organization you serve towards something higher?
…influence, more than intelligence, is the sign of the greatest leaders.
Have you noticed that work is always present and, like fire, is never satisfied?
The best way to build character is to define it, practice it, and defend it. Once you define your character so that you clearly understand it, you can practice it in everyday life and leadership. This increases your character competency and prepares you to defend it when you face the Enemy of Indulgence.
We need to invite the right people into our lives and grant them permission to review who we are and how we live. When we choose our own accountability partners, we gain people we can trust, and that trust leads to greater vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to be open to correction and criticism.
The self-deception of many leaders begins with the Enemy of Egotism. A leader believes “I really know what is best for me, my team, and this organization.” Notice I say that he believes it, not that it is true.
Yet herein lies the problem. Most leaders who enjoy rapid success experience a serious gap. Because success has come so quickly, and character is slower to develop than talents and abilities, their character is inevitably less developed than their talents. Yet, like all of us, they need character to sustain success.
A leader in emergency mode is just trying to put out fires in his personal life. He is too tired to do things right and well, so he tries just to “get it done.” This approach inevitably can’t solve problems, breeds more Bad Habits, and merely fuels the leader’s failure.
You need to succeed, but in fact, we all need you to succeed.