Audio Tidbits

Bordas, Juana. Salsa, Soul, and Spirit: Leadership for a Multicultural Age. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2007.

It may be said that leadership is changing from an individualistic, self-centered orientation to a We or other-centered orientation.

Leadership in this context is not a vehicle for individual advancement, but instead is based on a collective orientation and responsibility.

Leaders … must keep the cultural memory alive--linking past, present, and future so a sense of continuity, wholeness, and hope for the future is nurtured. They must also build a circle of leaders in which everyone has the opportunity to lead and many people are involved. Thus, the community capacity continues evolving and a legacy of leadership is created.

Reconciling the past, having gratitude for what one has today, and being optimistic for the future nourishes continuity and community integration. This supports the circle of leadership in which today's leaders shepherd future generations and honor the foundation laid by those who have come before.

But today, effective leadership requires the ability to acculturate, which allows people to be receptive, skillful, and adaptable to other cultures while staying centered in their own.

The leadership connection is a give and take relationshipage Think of each interaction between the Leadership Team member and a stakeholder as a transaction. The connection is an accumulation of transactions over time. During each transaction, the Team member T and the stakeholder S benefit from the interpersonal contact. This adds a little to the leadership bank account of each. They each have a little credit with the other person. If T notices an opportunity to do something for S and does it, then T's account with S increases a little giving T a positive balance with S. Keeping a positive balance is a desirable situation for T; but it is important not to get the accounts too far out of balance. Either too much positive or too much negative balance causes people to become uncomfortable. This can fairly quickly cause one or both of them to avoid transactions with each other and may jeopardize the connection. Be aware of the relative balances and keep them close.

This is especially important if the stakeholder's balance is the one significantly more positive than the Team member's. The stakeholder keeps giving more than he or she gets and his positive balance keeps increasing. Since leadership connections are what are called a 0 sum game, any shift toward a positive balance for one participant in the connection results in a corresponding shift toward the negative for the other. If S gets a point by doing something for T, not only does S get a point, T also loses a point. For each positive addition to one person's balance, there is a corresponding negative subtraction from the other person's balance. If the stakeholder's positive balance keeps increasing, the Team member's balance keeps getting more negative. It is common for people to say it does not matter since no one is keeping score; but the fact is everyone keeps score, every time. For a Leadership Team member to ever think this is not true within any leadership connection is a critical error in judgment.

Bolman, Lee G. and Terrence E. Deal. Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership. Fourth Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008.

…organizations are filled with people who have their own interpretations of what is and should be happening. Each version contains a glimmer of truth, but each is a product of the prejudices and blind spots of its maker. No single story is comprehensive enough to make an organization truly understandable or manageable.

In deciding what to do next, managers operate largely on the basis of intuition, drawing on firsthand observations, hunches, and judgment derived from experience. Too swamped to spend much time thinking, analyzing, or reading, they get most of their information in meetings, through e-mail, or over the phone.

The image of firm control and crisp precision often attributed to managers has little relevance to the messy world of complexity, conflict, and uncertainty they inhabit. They need multiple frames to survive. They need to understand that any event or process can serve several purposes and that participants are often operating from different views of reality.

The essence of reframing is examining the same situation from multiple vantage points. The effective leader changes lenses when things don't make sense or aren't working. …

…leadership. It is not tangible. It exists only in relationships and in the perception of the engaged parties.

Implicitly, we expect leaders to persuade or inspire rather than to coerce. We also expect leaders to produce cooperative effort and to pursue goals that transcend narrow self-interest.

Leadership is thus a subtle process of mutual influence fusing thought, feeling, and action. It produces cooperative effort in the service of purposes embraced by both leader and led. Single-frame managers are unlikely to understand and attend to the intricacies of this lively process.

Ideally, managers combine multiple frames into a comprehensive approach to leadership. Wise leaders understand their own strengths, work to expand them, and build diverse teams that can offer an organization leadership in all four modes: structural, political, human resource, and symbolic.

The desired target is never easy to reach, and almost everyone wants change as long as they don't have to do anything differently.

Ethics ultimately must be rooted in soul: an organization's commitment to its deeply rooted identity, beliefs, and values. Each frame offers a perspective on the ethical responsibilities of organizations and the moral authority of leaders. Every organization needs to evolve for itself a profound sense of its own ethical and spiritual core. The frames offer spiritual guidelines for the quest.

The most important responsibility of managers is not to answer every question or get every decision right. Though they cannot escape their responsibility to track budgets, motivate people, respond to political pressures, and attend to culture, they serve a deeper, more powerful, and more enduring role if they are models and catalysts for such values as excellence, caring, justice, and faith.

Both managers and leaders require high levels of personal artistry if they are to respond to today's challenges, ambiguities, and paradoxes. They need a sense of choice and personal freedom to find new patterns and possibilities in everyday life at work. They need versatility in thinking that fosters flexibility in action. They need capacity to act inconsistently when uniformity fails, diplomatically when emotions are raw, non-rationally when reason flags, politically in the face of vocal parochial self-interests, and playfully when fixating on task and purpose backfires.

Leading requires walking a fine line between rigidity and spinelessness.

This episode of the Audio Tidbits Podcast has three short notions for you. You can pick and choose or pick all three if you are feeling generous. The music at the end is a little bonus wwhich I am sure will tickle you -- at least it gives me a little tickle when I listen to it.

Blanchard, Ken, John P. Carlos, and Alan Randolph. The 3 Keys to Empowerment: Release the Power Within People for Astonishing Results. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2001.

To create a culture of empowerment, people must behave in different ways than would commonly occur in a hierarchical culture. In many ways, this change of behavior involves a movement from dependence on the leadership of others to independence from, or interdependence with, external leadership. This requires a shift in the traditional leadership paradigm. Rather than seeing leaders as directing, controlling, and supervising the behavior of others or even supporting, encouraging, and facilitating their efforts, the desired situation is one where the necessary direction and support come from individual and team initiatives.

People with information concerns don't want to be sold on the change; they want to be told about it. They don't want to know if the change is good or bad until they understand it.

…morale, which is the team's motivation, confidence, and cohesion.

This first stage of the process of changing to empowerment is filled with excitement combined with anxiety and a lack of knowledge of what empowerment means for the behaviors of everyone involved. According to Situational Leadership® II, this stage is a time for providing clear direction to focus people's natural but naive enthusiasm.

Boundaries that exist within a hierarchy and with which most people are familiar tell people what they cannot do.

Now contrast this with boundaries of empowerment that clarify for people the range of actions and decisions that they can make.

Essentially there are two categories of decisions to focus on at first: strategic decisions and operational decisions. It needs to be made clear that strategic decisions will continue to be made by senior leadership. What team members will decide are operational matters, focusing initially on less complex and involved decisions but gradually moving toward more complex and involved decisions.

What good is accomplished if an individual succeeds and the team fails? By tying team responsibility to organizational performance, the systems of the organization begin to support the empowered efforts of the teams--indeed, to demand empowerment from the teams.

It is natural for people to begin having serious doubts about the veracity of empowerment. Team members doubt the leadership's sincerity, and the leadership doubts the people's ability to ever take responsibility for their actions, with team leaders caught somewhere in the middle.

Especially with regard to a new person, time must be spent providing that person with the direction and clarity of how this team operates and how this person must adapt to the team. But the team must also reorient itself on how to work with this new member instead of the departed member. If the two people are quite different in style and skills, the team will have more trouble with this integration process, but nevertheless, it must occur if the team is to stay empowered.

Why not be the best you can be and help others around you to be magnificent as well?

Bennis, Warren and Burt Nanus. Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge. Second Edition. New York: HarperBusiness Essentials, 2003.

The main stem-winder, in all cases, is the leadership. The new leader … is one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change. We refer to this as "transformative leadership"….

Books on leadership are often as majestically useless as they are pretentious.

…all organizations depend on the existence of shared meanings and interpretations of reality, which facilitate coordinated action. The actions and symbols of leadership frame and mobilize meaning. Leaders articulate and define what has previously remained implicit or unsaid; then they invent images, metaphors, and models that provide a focus for new attention. By so doing, they consolidate or challenge prevailing wisdom.

The distinctive role of leadership is the quest for "know-why" ahead of "know-how." …

Into every step taken by the administration goes a complicated pattern of meetings, disagreements, conversations, personalities, emotions, and missed connections.

In order for an organization to have integrity, it must have an identity-that is, a sense of who it is and what it is to do.

Almost every "false step" was regarded as an opportunity and not as the end of the world. They were convinced that they could learn-and, more important, that their organizations could learn-how to succeed at whatever they undertook as their vision.

For successful leadership to occur there has to be a fusion between positive self-regard and optimism about a desired outcome.

…they paid attention to what was going on, they determined what part of the events at hand would be important for the future of the organization, they set a new direction, and they concentrated the attention of everyone in the organization on it.

…a vision articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive future for the organization, a condition that is better in some important ways than what now exists.

By focusing attention on a vision, the leader operates on the emotional and spiritual resources of the organization, on its values, commitment and aspirations. The manager, by contrast, operates on the physical resources of the organization, on its capital, human skills, raw materials and technology.

This is the last session in the series on blogs, blogging and bloggers. The last post in the series asks if there is any point to blogging. Spoiler! There may not be. Please listen and see how you come down on the question.

Barsh, Joanna and Susie Cranston. How Remarkable Women Lead. New York: Crown Business, 2009.

I learned how they used their strengths, their optimism, their sense of belonging, their power, and their energy to prevail in service of a purpose.

I shifted from focusing only on my deficits to building on strength. I practiced reciprocity--and gained a powerful feeling of belonging. I took charge of my fears by reframing setbacks as opportunities and I went after them.

When the leader--or the parent--pauses, she not only gives herself a chance to really listen, she gives her team permission to go ahead and solve the problem.

Centered Leadership doesn't make adversity go away and it doesn't make life sunnier and more fun than it is in reality. What it does is help each of us become aware of our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions--extending our range of responses that make the difference between seizing the day and hiding from it.

Imagine a world with women and men leaders who are vulnerable and powerful, empathic and self-aware, grounded and connected--leaders equipped to address the enormous challenges of complexity, volatility, and increasing pace of change.

At its core were deep emotional connections: to work, to personal meaning and mission, to achievement, to nurturing instincts, and to a strong feeling of belonging. To joy.

You'll know when your passions are engaged, because you'll feel your heart race. You'll know when you've found activities that engage you and build on your strengths, because you'll look forward to them with anticipation. And you'll know when you've discovered your purpose, because it will just feel right.

Simply deploying your strengths in activities you choose out of interest will get you to a deeper satisfaction. That's engagement and it's good in and of itself.

Purpose is what drives you. It's the source of your inspiration and the compass that guides your way to making a difference, and at the same time, to the deepest level of happiness.

…it's not just about the goal but about the journey toward it. The journey toward your goal provides happiness and meaning--more than actually reaching the goal ever can.

Still, you do have to protect yourself. You have to be sane. You have to be strong and healthy.

But it's not about whether they love you. They just want to achieve.

Most problems can be solved if we ensure that the right people with the right ideas are allowed to solve them.

"If there is one common theme around how we managed it, it's about communicating. By talking with everyone all the time, we were able to find solutions."

Disputation involves re-examining the situation and consciously separating how you experienced the incident emotionally from what actually happened. Start by refuting the emotional distortions the way a good lawyer would break down faulty evidence. Challenge the beliefs and assumptions implicit in your negative interpretation and re-examine the facts. Then try to understand the consequences of those beliefs. Finally, reframe: Take the undistorted facts and look at what you can do with them. How can you move ahead and address the real issues? Reframing and moving to action will energize you.

So, when stuff happens, remember to take time for a healthy distraction. You'll not only feel better, but you may find a creative solution to what seems like an intractable problem. A break often leads to a breakthrough, when relief from stress allows your subconscious mind to relax and mull over the problem. And sometimes, you just need to move on. Displacement gives you the distance you need to be able to make that tough call, too.

You don't have to find the impossible compromise that makes everybody happy.

This is the second part of the Blogging series for bloggers and those of us who simply enjoy hearing about bloggers. Sure, there is a little musical bit at the end to reward you for listening.

Blogs, bloggers and blogging is not quite as normal as a postcard but comes pretty close. This is part one of a little series that focuses on the pitfalls of blogging. Give it a listen. The music at the end is worth listening to the blog entries if you are not into blogging.