The Power of Accessible Leadership

[Update for June 3, 2010: Based on feed­back, I have sig­nif­i­cant­ly revised this paper. The mate­r­i­al is large­ly the same, but it has been re-ordered to an extent, cut in some places, ampli­fied in oth­ers. It is now titled: “Fol­low­ing Self: How Lead­ers Can Stop Defend­ing and Start Liv­ing Their Own High­er Cause.” The link below now fetch­es the new paper. It’s vir­tu­al­ly in the land of “mini-books” at 50 pages, double-spaced.

I want to thank all those who pro­vid­ed feed­back (you know who you are), but espe­cial­ly Dick Richards, whose advice as a writer was par­tic­u­lar­ly detailed and insight­ful. And I cer­tain­ly con­tin­ue to invite your feed­back. I absolute­ly want any and all addi­tion­al thoughts and obser­va­tions about how this paper can be made most use­ful to you.]

Orig­i­nal Post

As a way to sum­ma­rize some of my thoughts and learn­ing over the last fif­teen years about the top­ic of defen­sive­ness, I have writ­ten a short paper called, The Pow­er of Acces­si­ble Lead­er­ship “Fol­low­ing Self: How Lead­ers Can Stop Defend­ing and Start Liv­ing Their Own High­er Cause”. Feel free to down­load the pdf ver­sion by click­ing on the link. 

A cou­ple of things:

1) I have built in an exer­cise at the front end of the paper — one I’ve been using for years in var­i­ous forms — to help you deter­mine your own “defen­sive strat­e­gy.” This is not meant to be all-inclu­sive, but sim­ply a good start in eval­u­at­ing your own behav­ior. If you get stuck try­ing to fig­ure it out from my direc­tions, please shoot me an email and I’ll do my best to be of help.

2) The way I am cur­rent­ly using this exer­cise is slight­ly dif­fer­ent from the way I’ve used it in the past, so if you have seen it before, know that it has been inten­tion­al­ly altered to direct­ly link to defen­sive behavior.

3) Some of the sto­ries and exam­ples have been used on this blog before.

4) If you like this stuff, please feel free to share it.

5) I’m deeply inter­est­ed in your feed­back in order to improve the mod­el and the paper. What works for you? What does not? Where would you like to see clar­i­fi­ca­tion or more detail.

Thanks for tak­ing the time to take a look. I hope you find this mate­r­i­al of val­ue to you per­son­al­ly in your own lead­er­ship journey.

Technorati Tags: Reflective Leadership, Self-Knowledge, and Shadow. Link to blog posting. Link to Oestreich Associates website.