Category: Leadership Skills

Many of my coaching clients have me help them with overwhelm. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it all. Balancing work, family and other obligations stresses them out. They feel like they are always rushing. Does this sound like you?

I came across a helpful article regarding this by Joe Robinson in the November 2010 Entrepreneur Magazine entitled: Tick, Tick Boom – Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs.

Joe talks about “time urgency” – a stressful behavior that focuses on the scarcity of time. He gives a number of practical tips to manage “time urgency”. Here are some that may be helpful to you.

Reframe the panic – Understand that it’s not the clock or the deadline that’s causing the stress but what you’re telling yourself about the stress.

Do speed checks – Look for the signs when you’re racing. Take a deep breath and deliberately slow down.

Cut clock-checking by 75% – Watching the clock wastes time and increases overwhelm.

Take time to get more time – Spend 15 minutes each morning to prioritize and organize your most important tasks for the day. Prioritizing and list-making tells your brain you’re handling things.

Be realistic – Time urgency breeds overoptimistic deadlines. Change this by adding 20% more time when you estimate how long a task will take you.

For more resources, see the Library topic Personal and Professional Coaching.

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Pam Solberg-Tapper MHSA, PCC – I spark entrepreneurial business leaders to set strategy, take action, and get results. How can I help you? Contact me at CoachPam@cpinternet.com ~ Linkedin ~ 218-340-3330

Guest Submission by Amanda Trosten – Bloom

Strengths Spotting

In my last post, I offered history and some detail on the Five Core Strategies of Appreciative Leadership. Today, instead, I’ll share some of the practices of Appreciative Leadership. But first, I must make a confession. We’ve all heard it said that we teach what we need to learn. Not surprisingly, co-authorship of Appreciative Leadership has reminded me of things I know and believe – but may not consciously enact on a daily basis. It’s also brought me face to face with new frontiers in my own appreciative leadership.

Take Illumination, as an example. I know about Illumination. I’m privileged enough to be surrounded by people who deeply acknowledge my strengths. I regularly, intuitively and clearly see other people’s strengths. But do I share what I see just as regularly, maintaining a 5-to-1 ratio of positive-to-negative comments about who people are and how they operate? Absolutely not. In fact, when I’m in the thick of things, I have an unfortunate tendency to comment only on what’s broken, what didn’t get done, and what’s still on the horizon. In our book, we describe a practice called strengths spotting that helps me address this unfortunate tendency. It’s a simple but profound process:

1. Ask someone to tell you about something they’ve done that they feel proud of.
2. Listen, watch their expressions, and make note of the underlying strengths that they’ve expressed or described.
3. Share what you heard.

Strengths spotting can occur in a casual conversation, or formally: in a job interview, performance development session, or career planning process. “By asking for and listening to stories and thereby illuminating strengths, you can easily identify what a person wants to do and is capable of doing. You can then consider if this person’s strengths are a good fit for the available job.” (Appreciative Leadership, p. 69).

Positive Questions

There are other examples like this for me: principles I know, but forget to turn to … practices I believe in, but forget to apply. For example, “The Wisdom of Inquiry” suggests that we ask more and tell less. I’m profoundly aware of the power of positive questions to engage. But when I really get going, there are very few people who have more answers (or are more certain in their answers) than I. On balance, my “ask-to-tell” ratio (Appreciative Leadership, p. 31) is a great deal lower than I wish it were. How has this book helped me boost it? It’s elevated my awareness, and encouraged me to plan ways and times that I will ask more questions. Speaking engagements, meetings with clients, in the face of criticism: these are all opportunities to ask more questions, rather than lead with answers.

Conscious Decision Making

Here’s another example. The strategy of Integrity calls us all to conscious decision-making. It suggests that every decision we make affects other people, and other choices. When I automatically say yes to too many things, or take on too many projects or responsibilities, I feel great about sharing my gifts and helping people out … but at what cost? I start “speeding” – perhaps forgetting to consider other people in the process. I sleep badly, and get grumpy. I get absent-minded – perhaps forgetting other obligations, or dropping balls that other people have to pick up. In other words, my unconscious decision to over commit regularly and negatively impacts the people around me … not just me. It hinders the greater good. “Appreciative Leadership consciously attends to the choices they make, both personally and collectively, to create a world that works for all.” (Appreciative Leadership, p. 170)

Appreciative Development

Why, you might ask yourself, do I share these challenges of mine? My hope is to remind myself (along with those who read this blog) that we are all on this Appreciative Leadership journey together. We’ll never fully “arrive” … instead, we’ll do the best we can a day at a time, using the best tools and resources that are available to us. The book Appreciative Leadership – co-authored with Diana Whitney and Kae Rader – offers generative stories and practical tools that can help each of us walk that path a little more consistently and consciously. In so doing, it may help others do the same – and make the world kinder, better place. Lena ecunk’unpi, hecel oyate ki ninpe kte. (“We do these things so the people may live.”)

Amanda Trosten-Bloom, Managing Director, Corporation for Positive Change, Twitter: @ATrostenBloom, amanda@positivechange.org

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[A1]Link to last post

This is a guest post from Dr. Greg Waddell.

Management and Leadership are two very different systems of human behavior. Both are essential to the success of an organization; yet, like the repulsing polarity of two magnets, they push against one another and, if not kept in balance, can end up ejecting one or the other causing great damage to the organization and its people. It is difficult, yet necessary, to maintain both strong leadership and strong management simultaneously.

People are naturally reluctant to step into change and the discomfort we experience when we find ourselves in the midst of ambiguity. Much of what we call “organization” is the struggle to reign in that ambiguity and bring things back to a state of equilibrium. Management is about developing systems and processes that enable us to take dominion over chaos. It is an attempt to create a semblance of order and constancy in an inherently complex situation. It’s about designing plans and systems for monitoring progress and controlling outcomes. It involves solving problems, giving reports, having meetings, and developing policies, all for the purpose of bringing things to a place of efficiency, where the ambiguity is dispelled and people can feel comfortable again.

The problem is that, in a rapidly-changing environment, equilibrium can be deadly. The external environment today is a bit like whitewater rafting. To survive, you have to constantly shift your weight from one side of the raft to the other, thrust your paddle first to the left and then to the right, or use it to push off a rapidly approaching rock. This is when you need leadership rather than management.

Leadership is about change. It’s about helping the organization define its vision, one that can take advantage of opportunities and avoid oncoming threats. It’s about challenging people to grow and to unleash their yet untapped potential. It’s about inspiring people to step into uncharted territory. Leaders get nervous when things are running too smoothly; often introducing innovative ideas just to stir things up a bit. CEO, Renato Beninatto of Milengo, a translation and localization industry, uses the term “chief instigator” to describe his job. Whereas managers constantly try to adjust to change, leaders are in the business of producing change.

It’s important to understand that both are necessary for success. Unfortunately, some organizations I have been acquainted with continue to value management over leadership. In these situations, the leadership function can be mistakenly identified as subversive to the organization’s welfare. The call for unity is often a demand that those with innovative thoughts keep them to themselves. The status quo is confused with the sacred. If organizations are to stay afloat and thrive in today’s volatile environment, they must recognize that leadership is essential. In the Bible there is a saying about putting new wine into old wineskins and thus causing the wineskins to burst because they lack flexibility. The new wine must be put into new wineskins. Management tries to hold the wine in a manageable form. Leadership is the process of changing from the old, dried-out, leaky wineskins to the new, more resilient, more adjustable forms.

You can email Dr. Greg Waddell at DrGregWaddell@gmail.com, Also, see his website at www.SpiritOfOrganization.com

Bias for Appreciative Leadership

This blog entry – consistent with my entry from October 7 — is a commentary on Whitney, Trosten-Bloom, and Rader’s book Appreciative Leadership: Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization. I want to be transparent about my biases related to this current series of blog entries on Appreciative Leadership (AL). I am a big advocate and believer in Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and have been using it in my work with organizations for many years. I have also been trained in AI by Amanda, Diana, David Cooperrider, and numerous other AI thought and practice leaders. Now while my wholehearted faith in the principles of AI might predispose me to an automatically favorable response to AL, having a strong familiarity with AI should also equip me to proffer an informed, honest, and critical analysis of the author’s integration of AI into a leadership model. I hope that this balance of bias and knowledge will make for some worthwhile and helpful commentary.

In a nutshell, I am really pleased with AL as a leadership model. My opinion is that AL, and the Five Core Strategies in particular, provide a wonderful framework that consultants can use in leadership development, executive coaching, succession planning, organizations change, and a myriad of other areas. My initial reaction to reading the AL book was to assess how consistent the model was with the core principles of AI itself. Once satisfied that there was indeed a high level of alignment, my second response — not unlike that of Shona Garner in her response to my original blog on AL – was to assess how clear, tangible, and applicable the core elements of AL might be to leaders and this consultants, like myself, that work with leaders. In my estimation, the AL model of leadership put forth by Amanda and her co-authors provides a coherent and accessible initial framework that is nicely grounded in theory, examples (aka stories), and competencies (i.e. knowledge, skills, abilities, and qualities). I would like to provide a quick overview of some of the KSAQs that are explicit (or that I am interpreting as KSAQs) in the Five Core Strategies as outlined by Amanda in her October 13 blog entry.

Strategy 1: Inquiry

• Emphasizes “asking” over “telling”
• Employs purposefully positive and value-based questions
• Invites people to share thoughts, feelings, stories of success and ideas for the future
• Cultivates environments in which people feel both empowered to make decisions and take risks, and encouraged to learn, experiment, and innovate

Strategy 2: Illumination

• Actively seeks to discover the unique skills, abilities strengths and positive potential of every person and situation
• Looks and listens for what works, when individuals and groups are operating at their best
• Share stories of success and disseminates best practices
• Anticipates and at seeks to fulfill people’s need for recognition and celebration
• Aligns strengths by providing opportunities for people to do more of what they do well
• Finds opportunities to facilitate collaboration with others whose strengths are complementary

Strategy 3: Inclusion

• Acknowledges and addresses people’s need for belonging and creativity
• Brings diverse groups of people “to the table” for crucial decisions and planning
• Engages people in a manner that fosters safety and encourages equal voice
• Accommodates conversational differences
• Enables people to contribute in ways that are both comfortable and empowering

Strategy 4: Inspiration

• Acts in ways that are energetically positive
• Uses elevated language and broadly shares uplifting stories
• Puts forth visions of what’s possible or “hopeful visions”
• Provides the resources and paths for attaining the “hopeful visions”

Strategy 5: Integrity

• Demonstrates honesty, transparency, authenticity, and moral or ethical conduct
• Employs holistic approaches to support the authentic expression of human potential, and to foster the design of life-affirming products, services and organization
• Makes conscious choices to serve the whole (i.e., whole person, whole organization, whole world), and encourage or empowers others to do the same
• Encourages and expects others know they are expected to give their best for the greater good

Conclusion

I hope is okay with Amanda that I have attempted to create a bullet-pointed delineation of the Five Core Strategies. It is my default setting at this point in my career to try and simplify and functionalize any leadership approach. I am sure that this is an inadequate attempt to achieve this goal and would be interested of Amanda, or others, think that I am capturing some of the key KSAQs of AL.

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Steve Wolinski provides leadership development, organizational change and talent management services to numerous public, private and non-profit organizations. Website, Email.

Many of my coaching clients have trouble delegating. It’s an essential skill of managers and leaders because delegation frees up time as well as develops people.

Here is a simple 5 step delegation model to assure what you delegate meets your expectations.

1. Identify the need – What are you doing that someone else could do? What gaps need to be filled? What is important that is not getting done?

2. Identify the person – Who has the appropriate skill set? Who needs to be developed?

3. Meet with the person and partner to create the delegation plan

Let them know why you chose them

Communicate what entails a successful outcome

What are the non-negotiables – budget, time, new equipment, people resources?

What are the performance standards/expectations?

At what milestones/dates will the person report back progress to you?

4. Have the person implement the delegation plan

5. Follow up with support and coaching

Be sure to check-in if milestones/dates are missed

Acknowledge a job well done as appropriate

For more resources, see the Library topic Personal and Professional Coaching.

Pam Solberg-Tapper MHSA, PCC – I spark entrepreneurial business leaders to set strategy, take action, and get results. How can I help you? Contact me at CoachPam@cpinternet.com ~ Linkedin ~ 218-340-3330

Leading and Working in Complex Human Systems

-For Diane Hetherington-

The importance of human systems: We spend much of our lives as part of human systems. Examples include the organizations in which we work, the teams and groups of which we are members, our families, our communities, and our world. In fact, I would argue that we as individual human beings are part of larger human systems, and we as individuals are human systems. Each of us is a human system we call an individual, and we are part of larger human systems that comprise our arenas of activity.

Model Building as a Route to Mastery: Are there ways we as leaders, coaches, and consultants can understand more fully and work more effectively with human systems? I believe so. Three of those ways are:

• Create an explicit model depicting how we think about human systems
• Create approaches and tools that help us work with those systems
• Continue refining the model, the approaches, and the tools by reflecting on our practice over time.

We all have more or less implicit/explicit models of ourselves and of other systems. Model building is the work of making our implicit models explicit and continually testing them.

Learning through Practice and Reflection: For the better part of the last 20 years, I have been engaged in such an endeavor. In the early 90s, David Kantor1, Joel Yanowitz2 and I, with input from many others in Innovation Associates3, began to focus on team learning. In doing so we worked with these questions:

• “What are the forces at play in and around teams that impact their productivity, i.e. their ability to produce desired, and hopefully, outstanding results?”
• “How can we, as leaders, team members, and team coaches, interact with these forces so that we help teams perform at higher levels?”

In doing this work, we soon realized that what we were really about was building a model of a human system–a model of the system itself, of how it changes, and of how we work with it so that it changes in fruitful ways.

In the mid to late 90s and early 2000s at Innovation Associates and Arthur D. Little4, I worked with Kantor, Michael Shanahan5 and many others in large systems change projects. Examples of our work included shepherding company turn-arounds, designing and implementing new business models, implementing new strategies, and improving total quality. In these projects, I continued to apply and grow/refine the above human systems model and accompanying approaches.

In the mid 2000s, I continued to enhance the model in my practice and conducted workshops with other practitioners and executives on how to apply it.

From 2008 to the present, I have been working with a group of colleagues from the Society for Organizational Learning6 on developing a systems approach to leadership coaching. We call ourselves Systems Perspectives, LLC7, and we have developed an educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective8, that we are offering to coaches and companies around the world. This work has presented yet another opportunity to further refine the model of human systems and the practice of working with them. As we focused on teams in the early 90s, the work of our Systems Perspectives group today includes the same questions applied to the coaching relationship:

• “What are the forces at play in and around a coach, client, and their relationship that impact their ability to produce desired, and hopefully, outstanding results?
• How can we, as coaches and leaders, interact with these forces so that we increase our effectiveness?”

In doing all the above, hopefully I have learned a few things about how human systems behave and how we can work with them. My next few posts will be about this territory: What are human systems? How do they tend to behave? What are their key elements and how do these elements tend to interact? How can we work in and with Human Systems to help them increase both their business and humanistic impact? I will address these questions by reviewing what we now call The Butterfly Model of Complex Human Systems, walking us through its various sections, and referencing associated approaches and tools.9 In my next post, we will continue our “dance with the Butterfly” by beginning to look at the specifics of the model and what it suggests to us about the behavior of human systems.

If you would like to learn more about leading in complex systems, feel to call or email me. My contact information is below.

Meanwhile, good journey…

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1. David Kantor is one of the world’s leading family systems therapists and systems consultants. He has written numerous books and articles about families and other human systems and has developed an elegant theory and practice of face-to-face interactions called Structural Dynamics. David has been my mentor in the work I describe here. His first book, Inside the Family, is a classic in the fields of family and human systems. David currently leads The Kantor Institute in Cambridge, MA.
2. Joel Yanowitz was the Director of Consulting at Innovation Associates. Under his leadership, we built a substantial consulting practice that complemented IA’s already flourishing training business. Joel currently lives in California with his family, manages an investment firm, and continues his consulting work.
3. Innovation Associates was founded by Charlie Kiefer, Robert Fritz, and Peter Senge. IA pioneered transformational leadership development with its groundbreaking program Leadership and Mastery, which has influenced literally hundreds of leaders in almost every field—from banking, to insurance, to high tech, to heavy industry to education. In the 80s and 90’s, Innovation Associates was the leading learning organization consulting firm in the world.
4. The original Arthur D. Little was the oldest consulting firm in the world. Founded by Dr. Little in the late 1800s, its work encompassed scientific, technical, environmental, and organizational/strategy consulting.
5. Michael Shanahan was a Director at Arthur D. Little, where he led many highly successful large systems change consultations. Along with the author (Steven Ober) Michael did pioneering work in bringing together human and technical, expert and process consulting in ways that had never been done before. Michael is currently a director at Boston Consulting Group in Boston, MA
6. The Society for Organizational Learning, founded by Peter Senge, is a global network of practitioners, researchers, and organizational leaders who focus on helping organizations learn to transform themselves.
7. Systems Perspectives, LLC is a group of senior coaches from the Society for Organizational Learning’s Coaching Community of Practice. The group has consisted of Jeff Clanon, Miriam Hawley, Richard Karash, Carol Mase, Jeffrey McIntyre, Steven Ober, Heidi Sarkes-Guber, and the late Diane Hetherington.
8. Coaching from a Systems Perspectives is a breakthrough educational program for practicing coaches that we have developed and are offering worldwide.
9. Many thanks to my Systems Perspectives partners, and, in particular, to Dr. Carol Mase, for helping evolve the model to its current iteration. Dr. Mase’s areas of expertise include living, self-organizing systems. Her headquarters are in Doylestown, PA.

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Steven P. Ober EdD

President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant. He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time. He and a group of partners have created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach. See http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com

In this posting, I build on the October 7 blog, in which Steve Wolinski introduced Diana Whitney’s, Kae Rader’s and my book, Appreciative Leadership: Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization. Expanding upon Steve’s clear summary of our book’s content, I provide some history behind the approach and the design of the text, along with more detail about the five core strategies that together unleash positive power.

The Origin of Appreciative Leadership

Appreciative Leadership was born over a period of years, during which we worked as Appreciative Inquiry consultants and authors. We noticed how some of the initiatives we worked on resulted in “transformational” change (Bushe and Kassam, 2005); while others started strong but lost momentum or effectiveness over time. Patterns of leadership began to emerge among the successful initiatives – and we followed them. Through one-on-one interviews and focus groups, we identified five core strategies that are at the heart of Appreciative Leadership: qualities, strengths and capacities that compel people to follow and foster winning performance. We collected many of the stories from which the strategies had been gleaned, and wrote a book “by leaders, for leaders,” whose purpose was to simultaneously heighten readers’ awareness, affirm their capacities, and enhance their capacities. The Wisdom of Inquiry: Leading with Positively Powerful Questions

The first of the five core strategies is Inquiry. By “asking” more than they “tell” and employing purposefully positive and value-based questions, appreciative leaders actively invite people to share their thoughts, feelings, stories of success and ideas for the future. As committed practitioners of Appreciative Inquiry, we had already seen the power of positive questions. Over years of consulting, however, we discovered that leaders who practice The Wisdom of Inquiry help cultivate environments in which people feel both empowered to make decisions and take risks, and encouraged to learn, experiment and innovate. These capacities, in turn, enhance organizational performance.

The Art of Illumination: Bringing Out the Best of People and Situations

Second comes the strategy of Illumination. Individual and collective strengths are a deep well of potential just waiting to be tapped. By recognizing and shining a light on strengths, appreciative leaders transform raw potential into positive results. They do so by actively seeking to discover the unique skills, abilities strengths and positive potential of every person and situation. They also keep their eyes and ears open to see and hear what works, when people are at their best. They tell stories of success, anticipating and fulfilling people’s need for recognition and celebration and disseminating best practices. Finally, they align strengths – providing opportunities for both individuals and organizations to do more of what they do well, and collaborate where appropriate with others whose strengths are complementary.

The Genius of Inclusion: Engaging with People to Co-Create the Future

By acknowledging and addressing people’s need for belonging and creativity, the third strategy – Inclusion – opens the door for commitment, alignment and co-creation among today’s multicultural, multigenerational and multitalented workforce. New realities are crafted in relationship and conversation; so the act of bringing diverse groups of people “to the table” for crucial decisions and planning is itself transformational. But Inclusion also speaks to how we bring people to the table. It calls us to engage people in a manner that fosters safety and encourages equal voice … that leads to deeper and more intimate connections and accommodates conversational differences, which enable people to contribute in ways that are both comfortable and empowering. The Courage of Inspiration: Awakening the Creative Spirit

The fourth strategy – Inspiration – breathes new life into possibilities, offers hope in the midst of crisis, and gives people a reason and way to go forward. Seeing, experiencing and knowing the hardships of the world, appreciative leaders choose to live and work in ways that are energetically positive. They use elevated language and broadly share uplifting stories. And drawing from the wisdom of the many, they put forth visions of what is possible (i.e., hopeful visions), along with resources and paths for getting there. Together, their language, stories, visions and paths forward give people courage to shed habitual ways of living and working, and to move in new, innovative and more life-affirming directions.

The Path of Integrity: Making Choices for the Good of the Whole

Integrity is perhaps the most important and least understood of the five strategies. It speaks to qualities of character such as honesty, transparency, authenticity, and moral or ethical conduct. But in the end, the strategy of Integrity is about wholeness. Appreciative leaders walk the path of integrity by employing holistic approaches to support the authentic expression of human potential, and to foster the design of life-affirming products, services and organization. They also make conscious choices to serve the whole (i.e., whole person, whole organization, whole world), and encourage or empower others to do the same. By embracing Integrity, appreciative leaders let others know they are expected to give their best for the greater good, and that they can trust others to do the same.

Appreciative Leadership Practices

On October 11, Sharna Garner asked for “simple suggestions or techniques” for the average manager who is super-busy and looking to be Appreciative Leadership on a daily basis. In my next posting (October 26), I will specific practices that leaders can use to bring these strategies to life and unleash positive power – within themselves, and among the people they serve.

Amanda Trosten-Bloom, Principal, Corporation for Positive Change

303-279-2240 (v), 303-277-0659 (f), amanda@positivechange.org, www.positivechange.org

This blog entry is intended to be a quick and basic introduction to the theory and practice of Appreciative Leadership, as espoused in a recent book by Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, and Kae Rader. The name of the book is Appreciative Leadership: Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization. In the next couple of weeks one of the authors, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, will be sharing some of her thoughts about appreciative leadership in this blog. Amanda will undoubtedly provide a more nuanced and intelligible overview of Appreciative Leadership in her entries. And she may be inclined to respond to the overly simply comparison of Appreciative and Transformational Leadership contained in this blog entry.

Appreciative Inquiry

The foundation of Appreciative Leadership is in a theory and approach to organizing known as Appreciative Inquiry (AI). The fundamental difference between AI and other approaches to working with organizations is that instead of focusing on what is wrong or broken — and trying to fix it — AI seeks to discover the uniquely positive qualities and capabilities of an organization and uses these as the foundation for future development or change. It is a highly participatory approach that involves asking strategically crafted questions about an organization’s collective strengths, achievements, success stories, positive traditions, and visions for the future. AI is based on the assumption that organizations will change in the direction of the questions asked. If inquires are into problems or difficult situations, that is what you will keep finding. And if the focus is on what the organization is at its best, that you will move the organization in that direction, and be able to build sustainable changes that are grounded in these emerging narratives. AI is firmly grounded in social constructionist theory, ideas around the power of generative conversations, and the centrality of relationships and language in the functioning of organizations.

Definition and Five Core Strategies

The model of leadership put forth by Whitney, Trosten-Bloom, and Rader is extremely well aligned and consistent in theory and practice with AI. The authors define Appreciative Leadership as the relational capacity to mobilize creative potential and turn it into positive power – to set in motion positive ripples of confidence, energy, enthusiasm, and performance – to make a positive difference in the world. With very little effort, this could be made into a definition of AI itself. The authors introduce the Five Core Strategies of Appreciative Leadership: Inquiry, Illumination, Inclusion, Inspiration, and Integrity. Again, nicely consisitent with the basics of the AI approach to organizational change. I will leave the more detailed description of these strategies for upcoming entries – whether by Amanda or this writer.

Comparison with Transformational Leadership

The similarity between the Five Core Strategies and the familiar 4-I model of Transformational Leadership are interesting. It isn’t just that Idealized Influence, Inspirational Motivation, Intellectual Stimulation, and Individualized Consideration begin with the same letter as the 5-I model in Appreciative Leadership. There is some definite overlap between the two models in terms of how leadership is conceptualized. In my opinion a significant difference is that Appreciative Leadership is firmly grounded in one of the most widely used and innovative approaches to organizing to emerge in the postmodern times. The authors have effectively taken the theories and practices of Appreciative Inquiry and translated these into an attitude and approach to leadership that can be embraced and put into practice in a fairly step-by-step manner. It seems to me that these are not claims that can be made by proponents of Transformational Leadership. Appreciative Leadership is obviously in its infancy compared to Transformational Leadership when it comes to the amount of research and analysis that has been conducted in an attempt to determine correlations with organizational effectiveness and other success metrics. But having AI as its foundation, in my mind, immediately establishes Appreciative Leadership as a legitimate and worthy peer with Transformational Leadership. It will be fun to see whether this opinion holds up.

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Steve Wolinski provides leadership development, organizational change and talent management services to numerous public, private and non-profit organizations.

At our last week’s coaching session my client was stressed by a decision she needed to make. She couldn’t decide if she should go ahead with a project or not do it. Both solutions caused her angst. If she went ahead with it, she felt that competing work demands would interfere with this project’s success. If she didn’t go ahead with it, she felt that she would miss a great opportunity. Her thinking was very black or white – either yes or no.

Through our coaching conversation, she realized she had another option – “yes, not now”. With this option, she decided to begin the project in 6 months instead of at the present time. Her stress level diminished because she had a strategy that felt doable.

What about you – when is “yes, not now” the best decision?

For more resources, see the Library topic Personal and Professional Coaching.

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Pam Solberg-Tapper MHSA, PCC – I spark entrepreneurial business leaders to set strategy, take action, and get results. How can I help you? Contact me at CoachPam@cpinternet.com ~ Linkedin ~ 218-340-3330

In his last post, Steve Wolinski amplified the conversation I started this month on women and leadership. He ended his blog entry with an assertion based on recent research that shows while more and more women have reached the ranks of middle management, still woefully few of us are represented at the top. His conclusion was that it seems that women are not perceived as possessing enough of the more so-called masculine traits, such as “being keenly focused on the financial bottom line, capacity for critical and strategic thinking, and the ability to make risky and independent decisions.”

I would argue that it is actually more complicated than that. In her 2010 book, Developing Women Leaders, Anna Marie Valerio presents a compelling case regarding the factors that impact women’s rise to the top. Many of the issues relate to gender stereotypes and how they affect how a woman is perceived as a leader. She offers a number of strategies that HR professionals, managers and female leaders can undertake to address and surmount these perceptions.

Valerio groups personality attributes under two broad categories, agentic, as Steve mentioned, a term which is usually associated with masculine traits, and communal which is usually associated with feminine traits. Research shows that there is little gender difference in fact in terms of whether men or women possess greater or lesser amounts of agentic or communal traits: we are about equal. Managerial behaviors are often associated with agentic qualities. However, when women display too many of these agentic behaviors we are likely to be seen as too aggressive or strident, and when we display too many communal behaviors (listening, sensitivity, preference for harmony, giving, etc.) we are seen as too soft. Herein lays a double bind!! Women cannot simply display assertive behavior, independent thinking, because it may be to our detriment. So, I wonder what is really at play in the research that Steve quotes – do these women actually have less of those desired traits? Or are they carefully treading the double bind, because they lose if they are perceived as having too few of them or too many of them?

Here’s the advice, first for women leaders themselves, and then for HR professionals and these leaders’ managers. A strategy women leaders can employ is to use a feminine typified communal strength – a penchant for collaboration – as a basis for our leadership style. For example, a collaborative leadership would call for listening to others and taking their opinions into account (communal), as well as then moving the conversation forward to action in a facilitative style (agentic), rather then displaying the more masculine typified decision making style of command and control. For those of us for whom this may not come naturally, this may require skill development, but it will likely be perceived as effective, and is, all in all, a desired trait for a leader to have anyway.

Other advice for HR professionals and managers comes from research that shows that women often receive fewer stretch assignments than men, and also get less performance shaping feedback. Whether it’s based on the feminine culture’s somewhat conservative attitude toward risk taking, or a masculine reluctance to give out these assignments to people (women) who do it differently than them, women are often not picked for these leadership-skill developing assignments. Coupled with this, women often receive less feedback, either because men are afraid of how women might take it (will they cry?) or that they might be perceived as being discriminatory or perhaps harassing if they try. Therefore, managers and HR professionals concerned about women’s leadership need to look for ways to make sure women get these assignments. They also need to make sure that women get the feedback they need, either about the assignment itself or just in general about their performance at work. (Valerio, 2009) Bottom line, promoting women’s leadership is also about promoting diversity – in thought, style and execution. And other research shows that corporations who avail themselves of this gender diversity at the highest ranks of the corporation, including the boardroom, reap tangible rewards: they report these corporations perform better with respect to profits as a percentage of revenue, assets, and stockholder’s equity by a range of between 18% and 69%. (Cohen and Kornfeld, 2006). So, not only is women’s leadership a matter of gender equity, it’s just plain good business.

Cohen, R and L. Kornfeld, “Women Leaders Boost Profits,” Barron’s, Sept. 4, 2006

Valerio, Anna Marie, Developing Women Leaders, 2009, John Wiley and Sons, Malden, MA.

To learn more about Kathy Curran, PhD, and her upcoming workshop, Using Power in Relationships with Women and Men at Work, go to her website at www.powerandleadership.com or contact her at 651-293-9448 begin_of_651-293-9448 or kcurran@powerandleadership.com