Seeing Beauty as a Leadership Technique
by Alan Sobel
Precis: Discovering the beauty in what you and others do creates a compelling platform for leadership. Great leaders learn to recognize how others see beauty in their work and learn to speak in ways that are meaningful for them. For some, beauty rests in the fine details. For others, beauty can be found at the confluence of large trends. Leaders need to understand the how they and others derive personal meaning from their work to:
- perform their duties,
- lead and inspire their followers, s
- influence their peers and superiors.
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Executive Intangibles
Precis: A lot is at stake when the wrong people get hired into executive positions. Having the right competencies is table stakes. Executives need to have certain personal qualities as well, not to ensure they will "fit" into the corporate culture, but to ensure they have vision, courage and a respectful attitude. Without these qualities, others won't follow. This article explores how these qualities need to be present in the executives you hire.
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The Adaptive Reslience Cycle
Precis: Resilience theory offers a way of understanding how individuals and organizations can experience change, yet retain the integrity of their original purpose.
The cycle of adaptive resilience has four stages: release, reorganization, exploitation and conservation. These stages happen continuously and simultaneously. An organization or organism is always, in every moment, present in the release, reorganization, exploitation and conservation stages.
The ideas in this article are taken wholly from Getting to Yes, by Westley, Zimmerman and Patton. This book was my best work- related read of 2007.
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Leaders and Transformative Change
This article describes three things that leaders do to lead change:
- They know what they want and they listen to how to get it.
- They keep the foundations of their corporate culture and allow new dimensions to that culture to emerge.
- They mentor change champions, learn from change cynics, and ensure that the majority are postively engaged in change.
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Why Mentoring Matters
Mentoring is a knowledge-sharing relationship that accelerates the expertise and organizational knowledge of protégés. It offers the mentor an opportunity to share a life time of experience, give back to the organization, and develop a new set of social connections at work. Mentoring couples knowledge to share with knowledge to gain for both mentor and protégé.
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