LeadershipOpportunity
Integral Leadershipin Business and Life Through Coaching
Volume I, No. 4 - June 2001
Table of Contents
- Leadership Quote
- Mission
- Article: Leadership Competence
- A Leadership Coaching Tip
- R & D Invitation
- Summary: David Cooperrider
Ask about A Leadership Opportunity: An Integral Approach
Leadership Quote
Lord Swraj Paul, Chairman of the Board and founder of the Caparo Group and Member of Great Britain's House of Lords:
"It's not a question of management style. Every leader will have and exercise his own management style, but every leader must believe that everyone working with him is part of his success, not just him. The moment a leader starts thinking that he succeeded and not everyone in his organization, then he stops being a leader in my opinion."
Mission
Due to the rapid increase in subscriptions to LeadershipOpportunity I would like to make sure we are in the same field as you read this e-journal. First, I wish to express my gratitude to the many kindnesses, suggestions and offers of support LeadershipOpportunity has received.
The mission of this e-journal is to be a practical guide to the application of an integral perspective to the challenges of leadership in business and life.
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(This is the fourth in a series of articles on elements of integral leadership. For earlier articles go to the archives at www.leadcoach.com.)
Business leaders, individually and collectively, clarify the purpose of leadership in relation to business objectives. This sets the context for commitment by individual leaders. It also establishes how leaders can determine what is important about using leadership resources: time, energy, information, access to influence, special skills and knowledge and credibility to support leadership purpose and achieve business objectives. That is a collective challenge.
Individually, leaders have an opportunity to clarify what is important to them about their leadership competency. This is related to the collective use of resources. Much of the literature about business leadership is focused on this aspect of leadership: what is important and how leadership behaviors can express that.
The whole idea of leadership purpose linked to business objectives is a dynamic, changing dimension of leadership. Here is where leaders ride the white water. As the environment changes, objectives change, leadership purpose adjusts, and the demand for leader commitment and competence varies.
Time is a scarce commodity for most executive leaders in business. That is why so many spend long hours at work and take their work home with them. At least that is our image of executives. And for many, this is no doubt true. Developing leader competence in relation to time has included a variety of strategies: time management, asynchronous systems, delegation, clarifying executive use of group processes and elimination of tolerations.
Energy is as scarce as time. And the two are no doubt linked. Energy is a product of health, fitness, interest, mental models, spirit and balance in one's life. That's a whole bunch of what life is all about. In fact, we could think of the evidence for the existence of life as being energy. Energy in leadership means the capacity to draw on one's skills, competencies, attention and capacity for activating others. Developing leader competence with energy means encouraging the skills and attitudes required for balance and excitement in life and work.
Information is often in oversupply. There is so much of it going around, how do we choose which to pay attention to and which to ignore? What information can the leader trust others to manage and what must they attend to themselves? In the face of information overload there may be a tendency to control the flow. Historically, information has been treated as a source of power in organizations. Hold it close and trade it for what you want. Now, with the rapid pace of change in the environment and within organizations it has become more important to assure that information flows to those who can use it to be more effective in taking action. Technology helps to do this even while facilitating overwhelm. The competence of a leader involves building processes that allow that information to flow. For in this chaotic business context it is often impossible to predict who can use the information in a way to further the interests of the enterprise.
Access to influence has always been about control. The demand for access challenges the use of time, energy and information. But in these conditions of rapid change, allowing those with relevant information the opportunity to influence decisions is critically important. Something may seem like an operations decision, but R&D may know something that has a huge impact. Leader skills in creating a climate where people with information can influence the decisions making process are critical. These may include such things as valuing risk-taking, supporting failures (not punishing) that contribute to organizational and business learning and so on.
Special skills and knowledge are competencies that leaders bring about leadership, relationships and about themselves and how they learn, discover and create. There could be content specialties. These are often about functional specialties, management and/or such things as industry or enterprise history.
Credibility is about relationship competence. And it is about integrity-the relationship between what one says and what one does. If a leaders' credibility is damaged, others cannot trust them readily. Low trust leads to delays. Delays impact time, energy, information flow and the decision-making processes. Furthermore, it takes a lot longer to rebuild credibility than it does to destroy it. Leaders work with others in a spirit of honesty and telling the truth. Leaders also know when to say," I don't know."
The ways that these leader competencies are engaged will vary as business shifts and changes the demands for leadership. Nevertheless, the need to attend to each is ongoing.
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When working with business leaders to enhance their competencies, use time, energy, information, influence and credibility as sources of key questions to make sure that leaders are anticipating what is required and how they will respond. When looking at potential courses of action-scenarios-check out the implications of each for these critical leader competencies. Help the leader identify what is important and what behaviors will demonstrate that by asking solid questions about these leadership resources.
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Thanks to those who have responded to the invitation to join an R&D project for about three months. I hope to get this started by mid-July. More information will follow.
We need to understand more about the relationship between the needs of executives and how coaching can support those needs. The Manchester Group has provided a report about this that is very useful. And I think we can do even better.
More specifically, I want to learn more about how the approach offered inA Leadership Opportunity: An Integral Approachcan strengthen how development takes place with the support of coaches. This will include consideration of coaching in relation to
- business objectives
- purpose and commitment
- resources and competence
- teamwork and innovation
- engagement with stakeholders
You are invited to join with me in a 3-month (approximately) R&D process to explore these questions. Once or twice a week I will send you an email requesting input and/or feedback. In return, I will share all of the results with you.
I will want to explore some of the ideas in my ebook as a part of this process. Each member of my R&D team will receive a free copy ofA Leadership Opportunity: An Integral Approachat some point in the process. The initial questions will be more generic, but you will receive the ebook in plenty of time to review it before we focus more specifically on what it offers.
Who am I looking for? I want individuals who have been or are executives or who have experience coaching executives in business. I would like to get 30 to participate, but I like the open space concept: whoever comes are the right people. I hope you will be one of those people. Just send an email to russ@leadcoach.com and you will be contacted in the next new weeks.
Russ Volckmann
If you are a helping professional ready to be SERIOUS about building the practice of your dreams... THIS IS FOR YOU As a mentor coach I notice that most helping professionals DO NOT have the practice they want, most coaches are NOT coaching full time even though they want to, and I am determined to do something about it! David Steele, MA, LMFT |
David Cooperrider, one of the founders of Appreciative Inquiry theory and methodology at Case Western Reserve University recently wrote:
One of the things we have discovered is the most important route to leadership development is simply doing inquiries--every day. We have recently begun work on "an encyclopedia of positive questions" which has hundreds of AI questions in it. What I'm doing is encouraging leaders to take at least one question a day and to find a meeting, a coaching session, or an ad hoc interview to ask the question. Each day a different question. The response has been exciting; leaders are connecting with people in ways which open them to stories they might never hear, and spontaneously is has shifted, for some, how they open every meeting. Relationships are transformed. One President has gotten into the learning so much that he in fact starts every meeting with a new question, for example, on a topic of "optimizing margins", or great groups, or of positive energy...like this:
Creating and Sustaining Positive Energy Organizations work best when they are vibrant, alive and fun. You know, when the "joint is jumping!" You can sense that the spirit of the organization is vital and healthy and that people feel pride in their work. Everyone builds on each other's successes, a positive can do attitude is infectious and the glow of success is shared. What's more, this positive energy is appreciated and celebrated so it deepens and lasts.
- Tell me about a time when you experienced positive energy that was infectious. What was the situation? What created the positive energy? How did it feel to be a part of it? What did you learn?
- If positive energy were the flame of the organization, how would you spark it? How would you fuel it to keep it burning bright?
I would be happy to share some of our successful interview guides, for example, one on optimizing margins. So much of the fun of this work is the creating of questions. And it is still the best leadership-strengthening tool I know. I was just at an Images and Voices of Hope conference where AI was used throughout. I too did the interview at the very beginning, a lengthy interview guide. I got paired up with someone that I had a strong negative reaction to...I thought. "Shoot, how did I get hooked up with him?" I went into the interview with low energy. But the questions, prepared by Danille Zandee, Marge Schiller, and Judy Rodgers were powerful. Within a half hour I was learning new things that inspired me for weeks. I felt so privileged to have had the chance to enter worlds of experience and wisdom that I never would have touched without those questions. The questions were a tool that drew me into new realities. This man's stories will stay with me forever. As will the relationship. I was humbled. Imagine leadership development where we do this every day. To me this is the essence of leadership and it might well be a way to make Peter Drucker's comment come alive in practical ways when he says: leadership is about creating an alignment of strengths making people's weaknesses irrelevant. This, it seems, would require and appreciative eye-- and there may be no better way of developing it than by trying a powerful unconditional positive question each day.
David Cooperrider <DavidCooperrider@msn.com>
To: <ailist@mail.business.utah.edu>
Leadership, Team-building and Business Coaching |
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Thanks for taking the time to consider this epublication in a world of data overload. For leaders, collaborators, consultants, academics and coaches alike, I welcome you to some ideas and a dialogue that may benefit us all. I hope you will contact me soon with your idea, reference or article. Suggestions on improvement are welcome.
Russ Volckmann, PhD
Coaching Leaders in Business and Life
Email: russ@leadcoach.com
Web: www.leadcoach.com, Tel: 831.333-9200, FAX: 831.656-0110
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