John A. Bunting, founder and former CEO of Precorp, Inc., presented his lecture “Leadership Begins with You,” to students during March’s Leadership Lecture, sponsored by the BYU Weidman Center for Global Leadership.
Bunting focused his remarks on four stories that illustrated the positive qualities of a leader. He encouraged students to exemplify the type of leader they wish to someday follow, and emphasized four major principles of respect, honesty, strategic vision and patience. Bunting explained that coupled with technical abilities, no matter what the field, those are the ingredients to being a strong and effective leader.
The first story Bunting related focused on earning the respect of employees. While working at his first industrial assignment for a minerals, pigments and metals division of Pfizer, Bunting found himself at odds with an employee who wanted to have very little to do with management and had an attitude of “Why should I listen to you?” Bunting was then faced with the question, of “why should he listen to me?”
“I was able to convince him that I can make this plant a better plant than it is today, if you work with me,” explained Bunting. “And then your job will be more secure.”
His second account related the importance of honesty. While still working for Pfizer, he was promoted to manage three major areas of production and was looking for ways to improve their performance. After looking over numbers on paper and comparing them to the physical amount of product available, he found an immense discrepancy. He discovered that an employee had been “fudging” his numbers of the monthly yield and the actual amount of product.
“Slowly over three years he was starting to accumulate this massive deficit of $3 million of non-existent product in the plant,” said Bunting. “But it didn’t just hurt his career, he hurt 400 employees in that plant because of the choices he made.”
Bunting explained that in today's numbers that deficit would be closer to $20 million. Had the employee been honest they could have spent three years fixing the problem rather than accumulating more debt. Because of this experience and many others, Bunting believes that being honest is one of the most important characteristics of leadership.
The third aspect of leadership Bunting focused on was having a strategic vision. At one of his later positions, Bunting and his colleagues were taking products from the lab to the field. They had been working with new types of drills and after reaching a very shallow distance, the drill broke. Rather than getting discouraged or pessimistic, Bunting’s superior was excited to solve the problem. He explained that confidence with our technical abilities and having a strategic vision can help us solve problems.
His final point illustrated an employer’s treatment of his employees, and about caring for other human beings and their personal welfare. Employers and leaders should be able to look beyond themselves and have a selfless ability to care about the people around them.
Bunting closed his lecture by explaining that the key to success as a leader is based on the kind of person that you become. He encouraged all listening to start becoming the type of leader they would one day want to follow and promised that if they can couple their technical abilities with positive attributes then they will be able to make a tremendous impact on the world.
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