The Sanford Berenberg Experience: Message of the Day

Good Morning,

I must warn you, this message has a little, ok, a lot of passion in it.

In leadership we make decisions, and these decisions can and often do have effects which extend beyond the scope of the situation the decision was made for. And as leaders, we need to understand this and be responsible for our decisions and those who feel the change.

In many cases, decisions are made for business reasons, to save a company, to help a customer, to appease the stakeholders, etc. In some cases, these decisions are made due to ideological reasons. This is more highly prevalent in non-profit and government sectors.

When the decision costs jobs, and depending on in what venue decisions are made, lives, we need to be accountable for those decisions.

Why is that job being lost, why is the life being sacrificed?

As leaders we need to answer these questions, and these answers must be well founded or there can be heck to pay.

This morning, as I was walking Bo, the temperature was in the mid teens. The coldest day so far this fall. And as I walked I thought about a shelter I heard about in New York who took people off the streets in whether like this. That this shelter is Christian and as part of their caring for those they took off the streets included teaching the Bible. The New York Government decided to pull their funding from this shelter because of the way they help people, specifically because of the use of the Bible.

This was an ideological decision, and I can understand that constituents of state of New York may not approve of this type of care.

Yet, there was a bigger part of this decision which really bothered me.

No other shelters were set up to compensate for the reduced capacity of these shelter. That the people who were out on the streets had one less place to go because of this decision. That people could die in the cold (and it gets COLD in New York, I lived there for 33 years).

Because of an ideological decision by the government, people could die. That makes those who made the decision accessories to whatever befalls those who would have had a place to be warm and well fed and now have to stay on the streets.

What do we tell the families of those who die because this decision? The money pulled should be given to either create a new shelter or expand an existing shelter, so as to not allow people to get sick and die.

That decision was irresponsible.

We, hopefully, will never have to make decisions which have such repercussions, but as leaders we may never get that chance to live and work in completely sterile environments where our decisions have no further impact than the people in front of us.

The challenge as leaders is to think a bit longer into our decisions and try to understand what impact they will have before we make them.

And as leaders, we must take responsibility for the decisions we make.

We can and should learn from each situation, to help us make better decisions as we go forward.

Remember, our responsibility as a leader starts when we take on the role, and often does not end, even after we leave the position, as the decisions we make why being a leader often last longer than we do.

Something to think about.

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net
http://www.berenberg.net

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/
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