In fact, the gifts are cumulative at every level so that mentoring involves conscience and self-awareness. Organizing involves conscience, self-awareness, and willpower. And teaching involves conscience, self-awareness, willpower, and imagination.
You Are a Leader in Your Family
As you look at these four leadership roles and how they relate to the four basic human needs and the four human gifts, you can see how fulfilling them well will enable you to create change in the family.
You model: Family members see your example and learn to trust you.
You mentor: Family members feel your unconditional love and begin to value themselves.
You organize: Family members experience order in their lives and grow to trust the structure that meets their basic needs.
You teach: Family members hear and do. They experience the results and learn to trust principles and themselves.
As you do these things, you exercise leadership and influence in your family. If you do them in a sound, principle-centered way, by modeling, you create trustworthiness. By mentoring you create trust. By organizing you create alignment and order. By teaching you create empowerment.
The important thing to realize is that no matter where you are on the destination chart, you are doing all four of these things anyway. You may be modeling the struggle for survival, goal setting, or contribution. You may be mentoring by putting people down, “rewarding” success with conditional love, or loving unconditionally. The organization in your family may be a system of repeated disorganization, or you may have calendars, job charts, rules, or even a family mission statement. Informally or formally, you may be teaching anything from disrespect for the law to honesty, integrity, and service.
The point is that, like it or not, you are a leader in your family, and one way or another you are already fulfilling each of these roles. The question is how you are fulfilling them. Can you fulfill them in a way that will help you create the kind of family you want to create?
Are You Managing or Leading? Doing What’s “Urgent” or What’s “Important”?
For many years now I have asked audiences this question: “If you were to do one thing you know would make a tremendous difference for good in your personal life, what would that one thing be?” I then ask them the same question with regard to their professional or work life. People come up with answers very easily. Deep inside they already know what they need to do.
Then I ask them to examine their answers and determine whether what they wrote down is urgent or important or both. “Urgent” comes from the outside, from environmental pressures and crises. “Important” comes from the inside, from their own deep value system.
Almost without exception the things people write down that would make a tremendous positive difference in their lives are important but not urgent. As we talk about it, people come to realize that the reason they don’t do these things is that they’re not urgent. They’re not pressing. And, unfortunately, most people are addicted to the urgent. In fact, if they’re not being driven by the urgent, they feel guilty. They feel as if something is wrong.
But truly effective people in all walks of life focus on the important rather than the merely urgent. Research shows that worldwide, the most successful executives focus on importance, and less effective executives focus on urgency. Sometimes the urgent is also important, but much of the time it is not.
Clearly, a focus on what is truly important is far more effective than a focus on what is merely urgent. It’s true in all walks of life—including the family. Of course, parents are going to have to deal with crises and with putting out fires that are both important and urgent. But when they proactively choose to spend more time on things that are truly important but not necessarily urgent, it reduces the crises and “fires.”
Just think about some of the important things that have been suggested in this book: building an Emotional Bank Account; creating personal, marriage, and family mission statements; having weekly family times; having one-on-one dates with family members; creating family traditions; working together, learning together, and worshiping together. These things are not urgent. They don’t press on us in the same way as urgent matters such as rushing to the hospital to be with a child who has overdosed on drugs, responding to an emotionally hurting spouse who has just asked for a divorce, or trying to deal with a child who wants to drop out of school.
But the whole point is that by choosing to spend time on important things, we decrease the number and intensity of true emergencies in our family life. Many, many issues are talked over and worked out well in advance of their becoming a problem. The relationships are there. The structures are there. People can talk things over, work things out. Teaching is taking place. The focus is on fire prevention instead of putting out fires. As Benjamin Franklin summarized it, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
The reality is that most families are overmanaged and underled. But the more quality leadership that is provided in the family, the less management is needed because people will manage themselves. And vice versa: The less leadership is provided, the more management is needed because without a common vision and common value system, you have to control things and people to keep them in line. This requires external management, but it also stirs up rebellion or it breaks people’s spirit. Again, as it says in Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
This is where the 7 Habits come in. They empower you to exercise leadership as well as management in the family—to do the “important” as well as the “urgent and important.” They help you build relationships. They help you teach your family the natural laws that govern in all of life and, together, institutionalize those laws into a mission statement and some enabling structures.
Without question, family life today is a high-wire trapeze act with no safety net. Only through principle-centered leadership can you provide a net in the form of moral authority in the culture itself, and simultaneously build the mind-set and the skill-set to perform the necessary “acrobatics” required.
The 7 Habits help you fulfill your natural family leadership roles in the principle-based ways that create stability, success, and significance.
The Three Common Mistakes
People often make one of three common mistakes with regard to the Principle-Centered Family Leadership Tree.
Mistake #1: To Think That Any One Role Is Sufficient
The first mistake is to think that each role is sufficient in and of itself. Many people seem to think that modeling alone is sufficient, that if you persist and set a good example long enough, children will eventually follow that example. These people see no real need for mentoring, organizing, and teaching.
Others feel that mentoring or loving is all-sufficient, that if you build a relationship and constantly communicate love, it will cover a multitude of sins in the area of personal example and render organizational structure and teaching unnecessary, even counterproductive. Love is seen as the panacea, the answer to everything.
Some are convinced that proper organizing—which includes planning and setting up structures and systems to make good things happen in relationships and in family life—is sufficient. Their families may be well managed, but they lack leadership. They may be proceeding correctly but in the wrong direction. Or they’re full of excellent systems and checklists for everybody but have no heart, no warmth, no feeling. Children will tend to move away from these situations as soon as possible and may not desire to return—except perhaps out of a sense of family duty or a strong spiritual desire to make some changes.
Others feel that the role of parents is basically to teach by way of telling and that explaining more clearly and consistently will eventually work. If it doesn’t work, it at least transfers responsibility to the children.
Some feel that setting the example and relating—in other words, modeling and mentoring—are all that is necessary. Others feel that modeling, mentoring, and teaching will suffice, and organizing is not that important because in the long run, it’s relationship, relationship, relationship that really counts.
This analysis could go on, but it essentially revolves around the idea that we don’t really need all four of these roles, that only one or two is sufficient. But this is a major—and a very common—mistake. Each role is necessary, but absolutely insufficient without the other three. For example, you might be a good person and have a good relationship, but without organization and teaching, there will be no structural and systemic reinforcement when you are not present or when something happens that negatively affects your relationship. Children need not only to see it and feel it but also to experience it and hear it—or they may never understand the important laws of life that govern happiness and success.