Want Different Results? Do Something Different

From an article by the Newfield Network on observing and action:

We maintain that whenever individuals and organizations are dissatisfied with the results of their actions, they tend to reflect on the actions and on improving their performance by speeding up the process. We observe that dissatisfaction remains because basically the same kind of action is being performed. We believe that in these cases reflection should focus on the observer that they are, namely, that they should discover the basic assumptions that have been limiting their scope of action. From this perspective an unknown world of possibilities for actions and meaning opens up, a world that was inconceivable under the old paradigm.

What I took away from this paragraph is that revisiting our actions and endlessly refining them won’t necessarily fix problems. When something is less than satisfying, we need not to refine what we’re already doing, but to question the assumptions that led us to those actions in the first place. Reminds me of the saying that the definition of insanity or stupidity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.

I posted on my coaching blog about how coaching coaxes us through this process, moving away from doing the same things over and over and moving towards examining our assumptions and considering other options. Coaching expands our skills as observers and alerts us to new possibilities of action.

Seven Ways of Leading: Which is Yours?

If you saw me anytime in December, I was probably dropping the Harvard Business Review article Seven Transformations of Leadership into my conversation. I read it and couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering what my own leadership “action logic” was, and where I saw leaders with different action logics.

Authors David Rooke and William R. Torbert say that leaders are made, not born; that there are seven leadership “action logics”; and that with intention, coaching, and practice, one can develop one’s leadership skills along the action logic continuum.

Starting at the bottom and working up to the top leadership style, they list:

• The Opportunist
• The Diplomat
• The Expert
• The Achiever
• The Individualist
• The Strategist
• The Alchemist

While the Opportunist, at the bottom of the scale, “wins any way possible” and is self-oriented, the Alchemist – the pinnacle of the leadership scale – “generates social transformations”.

The good news? Rooke and Torbert believe that anyone can move up the scale and progressively develop their leadership abilities, one step at a time.

What type of leader are you now? What type of leader do you aspire to be? What is your next leadership step?

(Thanks to Sandy McMullen and Mary Stacey at Context Consulting for passing along the article.)

The Primacy of Personal Action

It’s an introspective time and I’m an introspective person. I’m kicking off the new year with a reminder of the importance, not just of reflection, but also of action.

Robert Chambers, the grandfather of participatory methodologies in community development, writes about “the primacy of personal action” in his book Rural Development: Putting the Last First. I printed out part of this section to keep me acting, not just thinking, in the year to come:

It is action that matters. Much of the analysis in this book has been about knowing – about how outsiders perceive or do not perceive rural deprivation. But knowing does not guarantee a change of feeling; and a change of feeling does not guarantee a change of behaviour. So we come to the final, paradoxical, reversal: to start by acting. Changes in feeling and perception can come back to front, from changed behaviour and the experiences it generates. The traditions of science, scholarship and management are to begin with data collection, analysis, and planning, often protracted, often delaying action. But there are usually some obvious things that can be done at once. Not everything can or should be foreseen. It is often best to start, to do something, and to learn from doing.

A Cause I Believe In

I’ve been able to apply a lot of my coaching, facilitating, and organizational development learning with an organization close to my heart, Engineers Without Borders Canada.

I’m happy to be contributing to their end-of-year fundraising campaign through a personal donation webpage that explains why I support the organization. If you’re interested in contributing to an organization that is committed to leadership, personal growth, self-awareness, feedback, coaching, and organizational learning, please join me in supporting them:

http://www.giftofopportunity.ca/lauramcgrath

Making Our True Move

Mary Stacey, of Context Consulting, and Arawana Hayashi, a master meditation teacher, dancer, and movement instructor, recently teamed up in Toronto to run the workshop Making Our True Move. I was lucky enough to attend.

Arawana has been running variations of her workshop “The Art of Making a True Move” for decades. Mary brings her coaching training, leadership and consulting expertise, and her strengths as a MasterMIND facilitator.

I took away from the workshop a personal realization: that the people I most believe in and look up to are people who have fully realized themselves. They are a variety of people with a variety of strengths – so it’s not that I look at one of them and think, “She’s really good at x; I need to become really good at x.” They just each have become very good at being who they are. They have fully realized themselves. They have come into a full expression of their being.

So rather than look at people twenty years older than me searching for the answer to “How can I be like that 20 years from now?”, I’m realizing that the question of authentic leadership is more something like, “How can I become more fully myself over the next 20 years?”

Otto Scharmer, who, like Arawana, is a faculty member at the Shambhala Institute, writes about the idea of attentional violence:

Attentional violence is to not to be seen and recognized in terms of who you really are–in terms of your highest future possibility. Instead you are only seen in terms of your journey of the past, that is, in terms of the circumstances of the past, in terms of who you happen to be today. People are blind or ignorant of that aspect of your self, that isn’t (fully) born or manifest as of yet.

Who is the victim of such attentional violence? It’s our highest future possibility, our essential or authentic Self.

Coming out of the workshop, I’m thinking about how to grow into my highest future possibility, and support others to do the same.

Leadership and Signature Strengths

I recently was reading Boyatzis and McKee’s Resonant Leadership, in which they provide four questions to determine whether someone is a “resonant leader” (p.22).

1. Is the leader inspirational?
2. Does the leader create an overall positive emotional tone that is characterized by hope?
3. Is the leader in touch with others? Does the leader know what is on others’ hearts and minds? Does the leader experience and demonstrate compassion?
4. Is the leader mindful – authentic and in tune with self, others, and the environment?

Around the same time as I read this, I completed the VIA Signature Strengths questionnaire at the UPenn Authentic Happiness website. The questionnaire consists of 240 statements to express agreement/disagreement with, and then the site tabulates the order to which you embody 24 strengths. (There is no quantitative measurement provided, so you walk away knowing your top four or five “signature strengths”, but not the degree to which these are your strengths).

Given my reluctance to use traditional definitions of leadership (authoritarian, powerful, loud) to define how I operate, I was surprised to see leadership show up in my top four strengths. However, working with Boyatzis and McKee’s resonant leadership characteristics, I’m happy to admit my leadership tendencies.

Resonant Leadership makes a strong case for taking personal time for recharging, and connecting with the things that bring you energy. After a week in the Ontario wilderness, followed by a weekend spent facilitating the Board of Directors / Staff meeting for an environmental non-profit group, I’m feeling recharged and reenergized for the next round of work to come.

Silence

Working with organizations in training and facilitating, I direct a lot of energy outward. Figuring out how to balance outward-directed energy with internal time, where I can replenish, is an ongoing challenge.

This past weekend I went on a silent retreat at the Nonpareil retreat centre, where they do juice fasting, yoga, and healing therapies. After three days of silence, none of us on the retreat particularly wanted to start talking again. In sharing our experience, we heard powerful stories of the discoveries and events that had happened to each of us internally over the three days.

Now back in the city, I’m noticing that I’m talking a lot more slowly and that talking a lot wears me out. I feel more still and calm inside, and so far am having fewer stress responses. It’s been good preparation for the next three days, in which I’m facilitating a conference and will be directing energy outward towards a group of 120 delegates.

The 30 Day Challenge

I talk to and read about organizational consultants, coaches, and thinkers. More and more of them seem to be incorporating elements of Buddhism, meditation, and/or yoga into their own personal development, and then, by extension, into the practice of how they work with organizations.

I’m a member at Moksha Yoga Downtown, and do that insane hot yoga in a room heated to around 40 degrees. Yesterday I finished my first official 30 Day Challenge – 30 days in a row of heated yoga.

The mix of physical effort, sweat, and mind-calm and mind-stillness that comes with a 30 day commitment to a regular practice can, I think, be summed up by “deepening”. My physical strength has gone to a deeper level, but so has my ability to be with the present moment, and to let go of it when it passes. Loving my yoga practice, and then starting to hate it midway through the 30 days, and then starting to love it again as the rewards went deeper and richer – it was a metaphor for a relationship with life. Somewhere in there is a metaphor for working with, existing in, and co-creating organizations.