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Greetings!
Even though I've been stockpiling ideas for future newsletters, this time around I'm going to share fresh reflections evoked by a great night of music last weekend.
My reflections came about listening to Greg Greenway on Saturday. (By the way, thanks for coming, and for making my house concert a success on all counts.) But I'm not going to talk here of music.
I'm going to talk about message. Hearing is believing when a deep message is delivered on the wings of powerful music. Music lingers, but what really vibrates for me are the words and what lies behind their message. Greg framed his songs with wonderful introductions and then caused his lyrics to paint entrancing pictures of whole systems.
For example, one of Greg's core messages is about how the fault lines in a society reveal how the weakening of trust between different communities can cause failures in mutual understanding. This leads eventually to unwillingness to even try to understand each other.
This lack of understanding makes the differences bigger than they really are. Distrust cloaks shared qualities. Views flatten into "positions." Then we face off against each other, community against community, belief against belief.
Of course, I'm hopeful at the beginning, during, and, at the end of the day. Greg's message is positive. As my own message will always be. If we're to engage with our differences in an enlightened way, doesn't this begin with the willingness to rebuild trust, respect differences, renew our commonground, and, begin to understand each other and each other's communities anew?
 sand mandala--representing a highly differentiated, complex system; built collaboratively and being the result of a rigorous process of trust.
All sorts of learning moments crop up in my work where I'm trying to support people to move just a little bit out of their favorite position and to then see what the system looks like from a slightly different perspective. What one understands from this new perspective adds information, and causes the system to be more complex. This is why it seems to me a lot of conflict and misunderstanding over-simplifies, and does so from really fixed, inflexible positions.
The key to this is: trust and trusting the process. As it is with process, it's the same with bridging fault lines, and renewing commonground. Trust is a pre-condition for understanding complexity in people and communities and organizations.
And, understanding complexity is the pre-condition for re-invigorating commonground.
We must live within the paradox; life does not allow us to choose sides. Our communities must support our individual freedom as a means to community health and resiliency. And individuals must acknowledge their neighbors and make choices based on the desire to be in relationship with them as a means to their own health and resiliency. (Margaret Wheatley)
Let me know what you think. As always, feel free to pass along, opt in or opt out of my newsletter.
Have great days,
Leslie
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Ins &
Outs of Motivation and much more...
Leslie Yerkes has been teaching courses in the executive education
program at The Weatherhead School of Management's Dively Center for many years.
Her classes represent the intensive version of public speaking about the same
subjects. Several years ago she began teaching two section: Managing For
Motivation, and, Managing the Generations.
Leslie fits her experiential
learning approach to two broad frameworks about motivation. One is to bring in
her long-standing understanding about the whole person at work, the second is to
differentiate what some of the generational differences are with respect to
leading and motivating today's diverse, inter-generational workforce.
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Leslie Yerkes
Leslie is co-author
of the best selling 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work (Berrett-Koehler) and is the
author of Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love to Work
(Berrett-Koehler); Beans: Four Principles for Running a Business in Good Times
or Bad (Jossey-Bass) ; They Just Don't Get It: Changing Resistance Into
Understanding (Berrett-Koehler); and in 2008, Beyond Kicks Carrots: Motivation
for the 21st Century (Norma Sustenere Publishers.) Fun Works, published in a
revised edition in 2007, is considered a cornerstone of the research and work in
the field of the positive, high performance workplace.
As always, these subjects and much more are used as topics for her keynote
speaking. For more info: funworks@catalystconsulting.net - 216.791-7802
Quick Links
Catalyst Consulting Group, Inc. | Amazon author page
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