By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to encourage you to write more personal notes. Reading time: 3:14.

If your word is your bond, then your signature is your imprimatur. No wonder a leader’s personal handwriting in general and signature in particular is a meaningful leadership tool.

Making a Signature Statement

Through their personal handwriting, leaders more directly dip into the ink well that bottles their being.

Write-sizing leaders become more reflective than reflexive; more self-less than selfish and more personable than procedural.

Through their personal handwriting, leaders more readily squeeze their most productive and instructive feelings and thoughts onto the page like so many drops of blood, sweat and tears embedded within the drops of ink.

With that emphasis on personal handwriting, the most effective leaders invest mightily in their fountain pen of choice as a validating tool of their leadership. Their fountain pen of choice prescribes their personal elan and the savoir faire requisite in a leader. Their fountain pen of choice also projects as much of the leader’s performance portfolio as the Rolex on their wrist.

The investment is well worth it since the pen just may be mightier than the sword.

After all, handwriting analysis as a behavioral tool — a key leadership indicator-predates the formal study of psychology, according to author Bart Baggett, a leading handwriting analysis expert and founder of Handwriting University. And today psychologists focus on handwriting to better define that person’s personality and fears.

That’s why the most effective leaders recognize and realize the emotive value in their personal handwriting to orchestrate on paper what they are thinking deep inside. Their handwritten notes more personally package memories; more poignantly preserve promises and more permanently promote relationships.

Facing that blank page with pen in hand, leaders focus more thoroughly on an issue or challenge and then invest more thought into making even more profound, heart-felt decisions.

With their personal handwriting process well developed and honed, leaders reinforce the viability of their leadership to bring out the best in themselves and others.

No wonder the most effective leaders write handwritten notes of appreciation to special employees, customers, dealers and vendors. These specially handwritten notes say much more than the words they contain.

In fact these specially handwritten notes convey feelings that cut though the e-mail clutter and tweeter fodder so poignantly you can almost hear the heart beating in one leader as he made a profound Signature Statement in apologizing to a staff member. Read -and heed it-for yourself.

Then do the write thing. By hand. Ink the way you think.

Today’s ImproveMINT

Write personal notes to keep your leadership thinking in mint condition.

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