Category: Reflective Leadership

On Putting Things Together

I often find myself work­ing with teams — or at least I would say, with groups. Smart peo­ple with good inten­tions oper­at­ing col­lec­tive­ly. Peo­ple capa­ble and often far more than just capa­ble, who want the best for their orga­ni­za­tions and work hard every­day to get there. How­ev­er, as a pro­po­nent of reflec­tive lead­er­ship I also… Con­tin­ue read­ing On Putting Things Together

On the Balcony of One’s Own Life: The Personal Side of Adaptive Leadership

One of my favorite Har­vard Busi­ness Review arti­cles is “The Work of Lead­er­ship” by Ronald Heifetz and Don­ald L. Lau­rie. Writ­ten over twen­ty years ago, it crys­tal­ized the dif­fer­ence between adap­tive prob­lems fac­ing orga­ni­za­tions and more rou­tine, tech­ni­cal ones, a dis­tinc­tion that remains emi­nent­ly use­ful. Adap­tive chal­lenges are the ones that don’t have easy or… Con­tin­ue read­ing On the Bal­cony of One’s Own Life: The Per­son­al Side of Adap­tive Leadership

Thinking for Yourself

Think­ing for your­self means think­ing inde­pen­dent­ly — being con­scious of old pat­terns and bias­es and work­ing to over­come them as you make your own judg­ments. This process can be about iden­ti­ty, work, rela­tion­ships — any­thing at all. And it’s impor­tant to con­sid­er because when our past con­di­tion­ing is in charge it does much of our… Con­tin­ue read­ing Think­ing for Yourself

Three Voices: Truth, Kindness and Destiny

Self-Truth: This voice pro­vides ongo­ing assess­ment of the real­i­ties we must face — both the exter­nal and the inter­nal ones. When impaired or not present, this voice can lead to self-decep­­tion and dis­tor­tion. If there is “too much” self-truth we may be immo­bi­lized by its crit­i­cal judg­ments that we mis­in­ter­pret as truth. If “too lit­tle”… Con­tin­ue read­ing Three Voic­es: Truth, Kind­ness and Destiny