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August 2011 1.1
Greetings!
Reflective Leadership refers to inside-out awareness and practices that help you make the most of your potentials to lead, emphasizing such qualities as self-knowledge, initiative, collaboration and contribution. It's all about tapping your capacities for inner growth to create positive outer results.
In this inaugural edition of the Unfolding Leadership Newsletter, you'll find:
- Reflective Leadership Practice -- three reminders for personal renewal
- Leadership Links -- stimulating articles, book reviews, and videos from across the web
- Leadership Edge -- links to essays from the Unfolding Leadership weblog
- Leadership Conversations -- Q & A with reflective leaders about their projects and practices
- The Art of Leadership -- links to stimulating artists and art
Thanks for joining me -- your feedback, comments, and suggestions for content are always welcome.
Wishing you the best in your own reflective practice!
REFLECTIVE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE
Three Reminders for Personal Renewal
"What does it take to qualify as a leader? Being human and being here. As long as I am here, doing whatever I am doing I am leading, for better or for worse. And, if I may say so, so are you."
The implication is that we need to be consciously aware of ourselves and our impacts, but in these challenging times daily pressures and stresses can easily push us away from conscious attention and intention, the very things that could be of most help to us and others. Attention means awareness of critical new information, leverage points, undercurrents, and patterns of behavior (our own or others'). Intention means personal clarity about key directions, motivations, and priorities -- and our expression of them.
Here are three approaches we can use to renew our reflective foundations and enhance both of these qualities:
1. Remember Friends. Prevent isolation -- yours and others'. Why? Because isolation can quickly lead to both misjudgments and burn-out. Make it a point to connect with a friend or colleague who values deeper discourse. Talk about what's happening. Listening to your friend and to yourself -- let down your hair and receive each other's support and guidance on the important stuff. It's a simple thing -- the sort that all too easily gets pushed aside as a "luxury" in the face of all the work that should get done.
2. Remember Nature. Nature restores. Notice the season -- if only for a moment, put your face to the wind. If you can manage it, walk in the hills, fields, near a stream. Take a hike or a longer bicycle ride in a way that is less training for a marathon than time out to reclaim the primary joy of physical connection with the world. Re-experience, as poet Mary Oliver would say, "your place in the family of things."
3. Remember Art. Make time, whatever your choice of artistic expression or appreciation -- gardening, photography, music, writing, dance. Life's richer when art is present and even a few moments engaged can be rejuvenating. Get off the net and go see a play. As you engage in your artistic experience, stay open to new levels of meaning and beauty, and let your subconscious mind work on your dilemmas without "you." Then transfer that energy to the art of creating your own life. Haven't got an art? Check out the link to Ellen Weber's survey in the Leadership Links section below for clues where that art might be.
What's the value of these things to your leadership? The more you remember to access your whole self, the more alive you'll feel, and the finer your problem-solving, judgment, relationships and decisions.
LEADERSHIP LINKS
Information & Tools to Help You Lead
· The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff. From Harvard Business School: Working Knowledge, a summary and excerpts from Robert Kaplan's book, What to Ask the Person in the Mirror. Professor of Management Practice at Harvard, Kaplan says:
"Show me a company, nonprofit, or a government leader that is struggling, and almost invariably you'll see someone who isn't sufficiently focused on asking the right questions. Most leaders spend a lot of their time looking for answers. Very often, they may feel isolated and alone. I want to help them refocus their attention on framing and then discussing the key questions that will help them regroup, mobilize their team, formulate a plan of action, and move forward."
· Emotional Well-Being and Excellence. Ed Batista's well-crafted series of articles, "Happiness, Excellence and Boundaries" begins with the link, and follows in two more segments. Ed is an executive coach and leadership coach at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
LEADERSHIP EDGE
Going Deeper via the Unfolding Leadership Weblog
"On Finding Confidence" When it comes to confidence, no one has an answer that works for everyone. For some the issue becomes being more self-compassionate. Others may see it as a deeper access to faith. Some may need to explore the many psychological things that have happened to them that created negative conditioning - aka their voices of self-criticism. And some may need to do all of the above and more. So we all, in our own way have to figure out what works for us, what our vocabulary of self-confidence will be... Read more...
"On Hypocrisy and Self-Protection" A typical injunction is that leaders should always "walk their talk." A cost of leading, perhaps, the price of being in a more exposed and influential place where the scrutiny is that much greater. As a culture, we all seemed tuned to search for hypocrisy in other leaders, always ready to share a disappointment in someone else's discovered feet of clay. Yet, what really is the problem here? And so what? Read more...
LEADERSHIP CONVERSATIONS
Cathy Raymond Reclaims the Soul of Human Resources
 Cathy Raymond is an author, presenter, and mentor to her colleagues. Recently retired from a long time position as HR Director for the City of Olympia WA, her new book, Reclaiming the Soul of Human Resources, will be available this fall. We recently talked about the book and her reflective leadership practices.
Q. What is the "soul of human resources" and why does it need to be "reclaimed?"
A. I believe the soul of HR is its true purpose -- to protect and nurture the human spirit. I decided to write the book because it's evident my profession is off-track. We are trying so hard to prove our business worth that we've lost sight of the reason we exist.
Q. What do you mean "protect" and "nurture"?
A. 'Protect' means protect from decisions, strategies and information gaps that hurt people. Too often 'protect' is heard purely from the standpoint of a business' legal risk reduction, but that is only a small part of it. It's also about ensuring that business needs are balanced with understanding how people are vulnerable and will be affected.
'Nurture' is about helping people build confidence in themselves and their organization, often a lost art. That involves working toward open, collaborative relationships, ones based on trusting and being trustworthy.
Q. What about very tough organizational decisions, such as layoffs?
A. Sometimes the what is inevitable, such as layoffs, if an organization is to survive. The real question is how. At the end of the day there are people who have to live through the changes. Can we do this in a way that's truly compassionate? In ways that build trust rather than kill it? Those are the questions HR professionals should be standing up for.
Q. How does writing this book tie into your own practice of reflective leadership?
A. The book required me to clarify the true nature of my ongoing contribution. It's one thing to say you want to make a difference -- many of us want to do that -- it's quite another to know exactly what that personal difference can be. This was especially important as I make a transition into the next phase of my life and career.
Q. Is there a reflective practice that especially helps you, and that could help others as well?
A. Wouldn't it be great if life came with a set of instructions? At a seminar I was asked to write out what I thought the instructions for my life could be. I brainstormed a page of them and reduced them to ten -- that I could post next to a mirror. My instructions include statements such as: 'I act first from my heart;' 'I value the freedom and individuality of others as much as my own;' 'I sing with my own voice.' When things get tough, I consult the list to see how I've decided to live my life.
Reclaiming the Soul of Human Resources will be published in late October by Outskirts Press, and be sold through major online book retailers and as an ebook. If you'd like to receive a notice when the book is available, please send Cathy a note at cgraymond@aol.com.
THE ART OF LEADERSHIP
Links to art and artists that facilitate learning
· Using Your Gifts to Inspire and Ignite. Click the YouTube image at left to hear Sarah McLachlan's comments and movingly sing two songs as she is awarded an honorary degree from Simon Fraser University.
· "Beauty the Brave..." Poems awaken deeper perspectives and place our lives in scale. Click the link below for a pdf version of a poem that touches the nature of perfection...and impermanence.
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