Overstepping Stones
We’re sure you’ve heard of stepping stones. Today we want to talk about overstepping stones.
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We’re proud residents of the State of Illinois. We’re dismayed, however, that our great state has been getting some bad press recently because of the actions of our Governor, Rod Blagojevich. While he hasn’t been convicted yet of any wrongdoing, it appears that he’s in deep trouble.
A state of dissatisfaction
It’s rumored that he felt he had reached a stalemate in his career. He wanted to make more money. He even had aspirations of running for President. But even before this scandal broke, his approval rating was incredibly low (the last number we heard was 4%). If you look at the state of our State, you can understand why.
He looked at every opportunity for a stepping stone, which culminated in what appears to be illegal activity. That got us thinking – we all need stepping stones to help us get to the next level of success.
Overstepping the bounds
But there’s a fine line between a stepping stone and what we’ll call an overstepping stone.
We abuse our stepping stones when we overstep our bounds. It appears our Governor did this on at least three levels:
Clinton Korver wrote a great article for Harvard Business Publishing. He talks about his experience running a start-up and 
One of my radio managers did that when our company wasn’t doing so well. I appreciated the honesty and how it put all of us on the same page. 
I’ve come to believe strongly in open-book management. As a general rule, I think the more you share with your employees, the better. Having said that, I have found you also have to know your employees. Open-book requires a higher level of maturity from your employees. If that’s not present, sharing more just creates undue emotional distress.