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                                             January 2014                                         3.2

 

 

 

Thank you for opening the January edition of the Unfolding Leadership Newsletter!  This issue focuses on leadership stories and narratives.
  • Reflective Leadership Practice -- "On Leadership and Stories"
  • Leadership Links -- a few related articles and links from across the web
  • Leadership Edge -- links to posts from the Unfolding Leadership weblog
  • Leadership Conversation -- Q & A with Yolanda Christianson, cross-disciplinary leadership coach
  • My Leadership Binder -- More resources to foster reflective learning
If you would like to review earlier issues, you can find them in the archive. As always, I deeply appreciate your feedback, comments and suggestions. Feel free to email me anytime.

 

Wishing you the best for your reflective practice!
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REFLECTIVE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE 
On Leadership Stories

Many leadership articles highlight the value of stories and storytelling. Leaders are encouraged to use stories to communicate values and create an image of the intended culture of their organizations. Stories, after all, can illustrate the challenges and deeper lessons a company may face and arouse a personal, emotional connection among followers. Our memory hangs onto stories much better than the bullets of a PowerPoint. To inspire others the advice is: tell stories.

To me, this is all correct but can also reduce our narratives to simply being tools. The best leaders use their stories a little differently -- to let themselves be known in an immediate and genuine way.  I remember an early client of mine charged with helping the management teams of recent acquisitions find their place in a larger organization. At first, that work was about encouraging managers to take the risk to tell their stories about their work: what was good about it; where the problems lay that needed to be fixed.  As time went by, however, my client learned that the story that seemed to count the most was the one about himself.  As he shared his own successes and failures, told with a generous and vulnerable spirit, he ceased to be a stranger to the group. He gave the seedling of trust a better chance to break through hard earth of imposed change.

Coming even closer, it seems to me there is yet another function of story, which is not about culture or relationships at all, but is really about telling ourselves who we are.  We all hold a thread, a narrative of our own lives and our own work, and we yearn to know it consciously -- and maybe have some fears about that, too. I've learned that if you tell your own story several times out loud, you'll likely find there are variations in the way you do it, and there are also constants that are present, no matter to whom you are telling it. It may well be that the variations are like different versions of a printed photograph or different ways of playing a musical score, and that's fun.  You may also discover that the constants are just constructions of the mind, a way of creating ground for a preferred or habitual identity that doesn't necessarily carry as much truth as we imagine. It may be that we are all destined to find out in one way or another that these constants -- or at least some of them -- are built from illusions about ourselves. Telling our own story helps us find out how much truth is really there.  

Around our campfires, whether it is a literal one high in the mountains or the figurative one at a late after-meeting in a conference room, we tell our stories to ourselves as much as anyone else, chasing the elusive identity we are trying to live. The stories wring self-understanding from what once happened to us, the dangers averted or conquered, the life-lessons and point to the places we might yet be going. All that -- all that -- is the treasure of personal narrative; stories that tie us deeply together in the human enterprise and also connect us to ourselves. In any kind of quiet dark they rise at times as sparks of fleeting genius and also, like embers, endure and remain true to become a kind of soul.

LEADERSHIP LINKS  

Readings & Tools to Help You Lead  
 
* A Journey Into Business Consciousness. Nik Askew's films are often about revealing the soul of a leader and an enterprise. Here is his film, "The Relentless Seeing of People" about Geo, the president of Graphik Dimensions -- an excellent example of leadership storytelling. You can also tap the Linkedin page for Graphik Dimensions for other examples of Nik's extraordinary work with this company's leaders.

* Distilling a Common Strand.  Dorie Clark, Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Duke, offers advice on how to find the personal leadership narrative that best captures your individual brand in "Discover Your Personal Brand" on the HBR blog network.
 
* How to Connect As a New Leader. Executive Coach, Henna Inam, offers five actionable steps in "How Telling Your Story Can Make You a Better Leader."

* Which Story Are You Telling Yourself? Harvard professor of Management Practice, Robert Kaplan, suggests we examine our "success story" and "failure story" for clues to personal development in his brief Inc. article, "What's Your Story? How Personal Narratives Impact Leadership."

* Essential Elements of Good Stories. Steve Denning, frequent Forbes contributor and author of Leader's Guide to Radical Management, explains the practical power of stories in "TEDx: Storytelling -- The Secret Key to Leadership."  The video provides more detail on the points mentioned in the article and provides an example of their use, beginning at about the eight-minute mark of Steve's speech.  For even more detail, you may wish to check out two of Steve Denning's previous books on "narrative intelligence," The Leader's Guide to Story Telling and The Secret Language of Leadership.
 

LEADERSHIP EDGE
Personal Essays from the Unfolding Leadership Weblog

 

On Self-Confrontation One could almost say the heart of reflective leadership is the capacity for self-confrontation.It is not really a skill. It is more a "psychological move," a mental and emotional re-positioning to look very honestly at oneself and one's situation. Without it, we have no way to accurately judge or respond to situations, especially when those situations involve complex, real-world misunderstandings and conflicts and the powerful emotions that go with them.... Read More...

 

Season of Belief  Many have written about the stresses of the holidays, how the time calls up unruly expectations, uncomfortable memories and unresolved losses. All of that is true, and yet as I write this evening, it also seems to hold an acute irony. This is a season of belief and giving, isn't it? But the one person left out of that may well be you. Too often we fail to believe in and offer hope to the one person for whom these qualities are most warranted and meaningful.... Read More...
 
The Loneliness of Children  We all have preferences for the kinds of support that strengthen us and help us remember who we are. It is interesting that people in leadership roles, even as they complain about others and express through their tone how unsupported they feel, will when confronted often deny the need for any support at all. For sure, this is a defensive reaction to the idea that needing support is a weakness and therefore something that cannot be acknowledged....Read More...

  

Leadership Conversation

Yolanda Christianson Helps You Own Your Narrative and Creative Spark

 

Yolanda Christianson is an accomplished leadership coach, consultant, and facilitator.  She describes herself as "a reformed accountant who found her love for working with people more than numbers." Since 2007 she has offered a broad range of organizational and leadership effectiveness services, helping her clients become more conscious of the story they hold about themselves and helping them design their own evolution as leaders. Her clients have included individuals and teams at Microsoft, frog design, DaVita Technologies and Providence Health & Services in Renton and Everett, WA. 

 

You can find out more about Yolanda and her company, The Y Group, on her linkedin page or by contacting her directly via email

 

Yolanda, I've heard you say you are a "cross-disciplinary" leadership coach.  What does that mean to you?

 

The term, cross-disciplinary, refers to a distinct problem in my profession as an organizational consultant.  Just as there are often silos in organizations , so there are silos in the way people sometimes think about the help that's needed - it's either a "coach" or a "therapist" or maybe as a "systems consultant."  But the truth is that what a person or organization needs often crosses all of those boundaries.  This isn't a linear, Newtonian world anymore; it's a more organically and systemically driven one.  As a consequence, my work threads a needle through the perceived separation, and in so doing highlights what is new, instinctive and innovative, not imitative of the past.   The language for change has become terribly outdated.

 

For example, if a client comes to me and asks for assistance with managing a change in her organization, is she talking to me about herself and her leadership attributes? About a process for broad culture change?  Some discrete project?  Or all of the above?  If she is talking to me about herself, does she want to focus on changing only a few of her behaviors or is she actually asking for deeper awareness about how to align what she must do with who she is? My clients understand you can't easily put limits around the work that needs to be done, and frankly I can get annoyed when clients or hiring agents (such as HR staff) arbitrarily say they are looking for x and y but not z.  What they seem to be saying is they want help but not the help that will actually change things from the inside out.  This feels like hiding to me, and there's a certain hypocrisy about it.

 

So the way that help is being asked for actually creates a barrier to meaningful assistance.  Do I have that right?

 

Yes.  Another aspect of cross-disciplinary work is recognizing that things are constantly in a state of evolution.  It's rare, for example, to start down one path with a client and end up on that same path months later.  Recently, I had a client who had been promoted into a high profile leadership role. He approached me about how to make presentations.  How should he speak?  What should he wear?  He was quite sincere about this request and so I asked him why that was so important.  As we explored his narrative about himself and about his promotion another theme began to emerge, a story that if he didn't conform to a certain image of how someone in his position should behave, he wouldn't belong and would not have the influence he needed.  That became the focus of our coaching relationship - understanding the truth of how he was actually seen.  In doing so, he was able to refocus on what was much more important than how he dressed, including the nature of his personal presence with others and especially how he engaged those who worked for him.  It turned out he was perceived to be both tactical and poetic, thoughtful and creative without imposing his creativity on others.  He discovered he could put a leadership stake in the ground and others would naturally want to build around this vision.  His narrative began to change, focusing less on the topical things to which he gave meaning than on the qualities of his being, which in turn unlocked a door into his own true capacities to lead.  If I'd stayed focused as a coach on his presentation skills, we could have easily missed the greater potential of our work together and his growth.  We would have inadvertently colluded in keeping him smaller than he actually is.

 

How do you think about the word, "leadership"?

 

From one standpoint, to talk about our leadership is simply a safe way of talking about ourselves without taking up too much space in doing so. What I mean by that is, once again, we seem to need these words, these silos and culturally acceptable categories that enable us to get to the right stuff, the stuff we really want to work on within ourselves and within our organizations.  And what, really, is that right stuff?  In this deeper sense, I believe, leadership comes down to standing by what is uniquely creative within ourselves against all odds.  And this creative part of us is literally a divine aspect, a deeply spiritual aspect.  That's really what we want to talk about; developing our creative ideas and learning to be brave enough to share them with others. It's about un-conforming, unchecking the box, and letting go of fantasized risk based on what we have watched and believed is what we are supposed to do. Leadership is much more about who you are being than what you doing, yet we still place the majority of the focus on what we are doing.

 

Even as we try to define and work on our "leadership," we find ourselves crossing sensitive, judgment-fraught boundaries.  Typically, I'm careful not to bring up this divine aspect too fast.  People are highly vulnerable and are touched by it.  It's an intimate thing. They want to be seen for it, and their deeper questions are often about how to be in the world and still have access to it and how to let it shine.  Sometimes that leads to making some very tough decisions about what they do and how they do it, so in a sense, the ultimate feel-good outcome may not be the product of an entirely feel-good process.  In this regard, I've been very interested in Edwin H. Friedman's book, Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix It's about having the resilience, agility and stamina to let ourselves play with our instincts instead of constantly going to facts and safe, linear, culturally-bound thinking processes.  Our thinking has yet to catch up with our creativity and our capacity to differentiate ourselves in meaningful ways.  So we keep our truths and true selves under wraps.

 

What helps people in the process of "unwrapping" themselves?

 

I often work with my clients through three stages - Discovery of the narrative-in-action, Design of new narratives, and Delivery, which is about acting on a new story.  At the beginning, it's about helping people become aware of a narrative about themselves and their world that they are carrying within.  They often want to know who they are as leaders and I facilitate awareness by asking defining questions such as "What's yours to own?" "What would your toughest critic say about you?" and "What's one word people use to describe you and why?" 

 

There are many questions, and what I ask is that the client begin in some way to document their story.  This can be done in writing but doesn't have to be.  I had a client who could think of himself most easily by describing something he loved - which was to build the perfect, sustainable cabin in the woods.  He could even visualize the lighting he wanted in each room to create a certain feeling for that space.  So we used that metaphor to explore what this "lighting" said about him, especially in his relationships with others.  Ultimately this translated into a greater consciousness of his story about himself and began answering his curiosity of others' views of what they thought he was capable of, how they felt about him and how he had influenced them - basically how he brought light to them and vice versa. On his behalf, I interviewed a broad range of people in his life to help him understand the landscape of his leadership style.  This, in turn, led to establishing some short and long-term views of what he was becoming and shaping his own intentions around how he will get there. Ultimately, the act of ownership and self-authoring is critical to the leader actually leading.

 

It's important not to short-change the Discovery stage.  It's vital to let the process mature and people appreciate this time.  They recognize that what they thought was happening or going to happen is different from what is really happening.  The very process of documenting one's own story changes our self-perspective, changes our opinions, and beautiful gifts come from that. It's a process of self-reconciliation and the dynamic nature of humans cannot be underestimated. Time, patience and perseverance are needed to get to the real story. That said, I would emphasize that Discovery isn't about concretizing a story either.  The narrative is as dynamic as its owner and serves as a temporary artifact that continues to evolve even as it's being created, and will continue to evolve over time.

 

What gets in the way of doing this kind of work with ourselves?

 

The work can be uncomfortable, even destabilizing.  This work is not about having someone give you answers or offer a simplistic comparison to your peers for your intellectual consideration.  It's about a certain kind of self-confrontation: coming up against what you need to own in yourself - your habits, practices, the values you exemplify in your relationships without blaming what is external to yourself.  The focus is on internal resources; asking yourself in this moment "What do I have?" "Who do I engage?"  "What do I want?" and similar questions.  In this regard, I much admire Bill Torbert's Action Inquiry Leadership model and the work of Susanne Cook-Greuter.  Their work emphasizes the notion of ownership and how ownership is a development process, an ongoing practice of strengthening reflection and action and understanding context in any given scenario.

 

It's vital to live a certain mindset about this work.  What we do begins with the discovery of our own narratives, but it's also about tapping each other to help understand what that narrative can become.  My work gives clients space to explore their questions:  Who do I think I am now? What do I want to learn?   Where have I been and where am I going?  To ask such questions is a natural process, and as the story unfolds, so is testing it; bringing it to colleagues, family and others, asking them to bear witness.  We ask, in one form or another, "What is our shared reality?" How am I understanding me, us, our team, our department, our organization, our community? It is imperative to understand that what we believe gives energy to manifesting and if we can harness a shared narrative - a community contributed story about "what is" - we are offered the chance to be greater than the limitation of our own vision.   For some, such questions and testing will be disruptive and there will be an impulse to hide, especially if there is fear that discovery will lead to finding something fixed and final.  We often live in fear of leadership suicide, when in fact our very own suppression of what we have to offer is killing us at a much greater rate. The mindset we need involves the recognition of ongoing themes, and permission to engage our elasticity, especially when we discover what it is we want to change in ourselves. This is where I love Brene Brown's book, The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection, and Courage. She offers that when we engage with vulnerability, we increase our connection with purpose and meaning which directly impacts our creativity and authenticity.

 

Earlier, you mentioned your work with a client around his cabin imagery. Your work sounds like it makes valuable use of symbols and metaphors.  Is that right?

 

Absolutely. Symbols allow us to get beyond the categories natural to language, to articulate that which words fail to name.  Some ideas are wordless, and some feelings are larger than what any words can express, because the provocation is of the heart, of the soul, not centered in the intellectual mind.  Symbols serve as evolving mirrors and guides, reminders of what we want and how we want to feel.  They are a means of communicating with greater sublimity.  For example, my symbol for myself these days is the ocean.  Waves are constantly coming in and receding, and this reflects something about how I like to see myself, as giving and taking and getting washed anew all the time.  Such symbols remind us in deeper ways who we truly are.

 

And in that same vein, I sense that an appreciation for nature and natural process undergirds your work.

 

I believe what I am doing is a mimicry of nature.  The most gorgeous designs are part of nature and the more we work past the silos of our daily thinking, the more we enable and encounter the best within ourselves and our own blossoming.  There's a profound sense of freedom when we release what is natural in ourselves. The client with the cabin imagery found it in his cabin in the woods.  I find it in my own connections with the outdoors.  Nature provides open space, freedom and also a sense of belonging.  The magic is that you don't have to conform to be part of nature. 

 

I would also say there's a certain soulfulness about this work.  Some ask whether that soulfulness is a product of the brain or whether there's a soul of which the brain is merely a limited reflection. I believe that if the brain is a reflection rather than a source, the brain then has the capacity to learn in even bigger and broader ways than we can currently imagine. 

 

Is there a downside to your work for you?   

 

Only one, and that's a kind of loneliness.  It is sometimes hard, given the state of our organizations and our thinking, to invite people into the deeper conversation. Sometimes I'm only being invited to tinker here and there, rather than deliver everything I can and it's frustrating trying to explain myself about that point. But this also defines a positive challenge for me: perseverance.  My challenge, in fact, is living what my current leadership edge is about: standing by and standing up for what is uniquely creative in me against all odds.  That's my own narrative happening, of course, my own way of coming out of hiding, whether in the moment I can exactly name what my work is or not.

 

 

MY LEADERSHIP BINDER

More Resources to Foster Reflective Learning

 

* On Conscious Capitalism.  Consultant Gina Hayden creates a compelling vision of the future in her article, "Leadership in the New World: The Rise of the Post-Heroic Conscious Leader." This is a well-written, pithy article with key references and links, all worth exploring.  Among the links, I found one to a Center for Creative Leadership white paper on future trends in leadership development and  "vertical learning" to be especially valuable.

* Overcoming Misconceptions about Coaching. Consultant Joan Kofodimos does an excellent job of articulating some common but fundamental errors in her article, "Biggest Coaching Mistakes Managers Make."  Over the years, I've encountered all of the them in my client work and agree with her diagnosis!
 
* More Misconceptions? International change consultant, Aad Boot, identifies three common thinking pitfalls in "Leading Change: 3 Misconceptions about Successful Collaboration."  I think this article could be a very useful and provocative hand-out for leadership development. How much do you agree with Boot's conclusions? What are the implications?

* Counter-Intuitive. Entrepreneur James Clear reminds us one more time why perfectionism is a problem in "Trying to Be Perfect Won't Help You Achieve Your Goals (And What Will)" in a Huffington Post blog article.  The article reminded me of this fine model regarding the distance to perfection.

* One Impact of Mirror Neurons.   Mark Goulston, practicing psychotherapist and researcher, answers a fascinating question on the Heartfelt Leadership site, "12 Years A Slave -- Why Movies Make Us Cry."

* Powerful Affirmations.  Teacher Louise Altman shares enriching aphorisms in "10 Quotes to Inspire Your Work in 2014."  Her presentation of the quotations adds depth and beauty to this cluster of already powerful thoughts.
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