Broader Horizons

Time and again I come across the need for people to be able to change the way they perceive problems/the world/themselves/organisations etc if they are to be able to lead change. Covey talks about uncovering your bias, de bono talks about the beautiful mind and then last night I was reading William Isaac's dialogue (again) and his thoughts on why we need to be able to suspend our thoughts and opinions to truly listen to others.

So I have little doubt the management and leadership literature is out there, but do we practice? What do you do that keeps you from closing down your world view? Do you spend enough time with others away from the familiar thoughts and ideas of your industry?

Take a look at this video and see if it gets you thinking? It's part of our new campaign to have everyone do something small on the 10th October to broaden their horizons. Hope you enjoy it.

Open or closed V2

We get a lot of skepticism about our courses being under the Chatham House Rule (as well as a lot of support), yet getting any group of people to trust each other enough to share their mistakes and be open to really listening and not just posturing seems essential to me for any kind of personal development. I've been to too many open conferences where people are so busy telling others their opinions, or keeping up impressions about them, their job title or organisation and not really sharing, listening or learning anything. Is the internet and these kind of discussion changing that. Is there a new kind of openness emerging and better learning and collaboration as a result? If so what role do small groups, closed seminars or discussions have in the future?

Open or closed?

A leaders ability to learn lies in their ability to enter into true dialogue with others. But do you need a closed room (physical or otherwise) to create the environment for real dialogue?

This article from Seth Godin's blog puts a case for how a closed room generated a lot of discussion and energy...

A chance to join the online triiibe Five months ago, I built a social network on Ning. No ads, all free. I briefly opened it to the readers of this blog as a place to talk about leadership and connection. A few thousand people bought my book and signed up. Since then, there have been hundreds of thousands of posts and connections and stories. The plan was to run it as a closed community and then open it once we laid a foundation of connections and content. Well, the group that orginally homesteaded the site has agitated to keep it as a closed community. I can't disagree. In fact, the password-protected, non-anonymous nature of this community makes it work. People hesitate to spam or troll because they know they'll get kicked out and won't be able to return. They talk to one another with respect because it's really them, and they're really there. I've decided to let a few more people join in order to keep things fresh and growing. The only requirements:1. To be fair, you need to have purchased at least one copy of Tribes, just like everyone else there.and2. It's a promotion-free zone. If you attempt to sell things or sites or anything, we'll ask you to leave.

What do you think?

Mandela

I spent 4 weeks in South Africa in 1994 and was blown away by the optimism and this video brings it all back. There's a piece where Mandela stands up with a Springbok cap in front of a crowd of black people. Sometimes leadership needs to be seen, not explained...

COURAGE....is

I've just blatantly copied the title from a discussion on Linkedin led by Kwai Yu, the founder of the Leaders Cafe Foundation. He's generated an amazing discussion on what courage is with his simple statement. My response is..

I think courage is as simple as my next action. Every time I take a step or action even along a trusted and well worn path, I am taking a risk. It may be the risk of doing the same, or the risk of the different. Both of them are unknown. I think courage is to be in the now and take the step that is in front of you in the moment.

When you search through yourself you can find what that action is going to be and then do it. I'm often in leadership discussions about Courage and again and again people are searching for big label items - like setting up a new business, running a marathon. It's when I ask people to recognise that feeling in the gut that we start to get to the bottom of courage.

It gets personal and about small actions. I wasn't sure about writing blogs and taking part in online discussions. I was worried I'm taking my eye of my other work - it's a constant pressue now I've started to embrace different forms of social media, yet it's paying dividends already (in terms of my motivation and connections) and it feels right.

At Common Purpose we insist courage is explored as a theme on all of our leadership programmes and I've just spent this week reviewing what we mean by it, this discussion board has enriched it no end..... :-)

What's it all about?

Since I started this blog I haven't tried to explain it at all, what it's about or why I'm doing it. I think partly because it explains itself in what I'm writing, and partly because I'm finding out what it's about as I write.

Initially I wanted to write and wasn't very interested in other people reading it (I still feel that way quite a bit). But because, due to my job I'm always discussing leadership, listening to people talk about leadership and reading about leadership and so on, my head is full of reflections I want to get more organised. More patterns started to emerge as the idea of Leading Beyond Authority began to emerge for us at work (Common Purpose) and in turn I had the job of trying to design our courses to more purposefully bring this alive and to explain it to our staff.

Verbally I found this not too much of a challenge. I knew what we were getting at, and when people share their stories with me I found it relatively easy to bring the concept alive and differentiate what fits and what doesn't (at least within very amorphous boundaries). Starting to write about it has been a whole different journey. Not least because Common Purpose is quite a young and small organisation and hasn't had the resources or luxury to write about the work we do, we've been too busy doing it.

So now I find myself using this blog more to share reflections on leading beyond authority and trying to link it in to other concepts of leadership, and see how it is described in other words, models and ideas about leadership. I'd love to hear from you, about where you find similarities about what I'm saying with your experiences of leadership, your ideas, and other leadership frameworks or models you've been working with. Happy reading. Ollie

inherent conflict

I love the idea of inherent conflict (positive) in all leadership decisions and styles. The idea there isn’t and can’t be one way. It’s refreshingly different to the proposition that there are a set of learned behaviours that can be applied.

Twenty years ago a friend gave me the Tao Of Leadership. By reading it again and again I got more used to the idea that it’s ok to approach tough issues in apparently contradictory ways. Sometimes being tough and resilient and at other times letting go. Leaders I come across though find this extremely difficult.

They want to reduce things to a solution, to take the behaviours they have just used and apply them to the next scenario. Instead take time to consider the role of being patient, being determined, to see what is happening. The nature of change means it is already happening, it’s something beyond you that you are also part of. You need to see what’s driving it, notice how you are interacting with it and from all these signals then decide on where you act. Do things in this way and you may help things evolve quicker. Act against what is happening and you’ll be tough when you should have been soft and vice versa.