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Category: Business & Communities

Agenda for the 21st century: management & leadership

Published January 24, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Is it leadership and management ~ or ~ leadership or management?

So many people believe that management and leadership are separate, even antagonistic, activities. But I still believe that the two go hand-in-hand.  Leadership requires good management.  It is important to understand how work is organized and to shape institutions so we can make work easier, more fun and more productive.

The strategic plan for positive psychology

I’ve just tracked back to Martin Seligman’s original plans to develop critical mass for positive psychology.  It is an excellent case study of organizational leadership.  This paper was published at the outset.  It describes the inputs, outputs and processes needed to create a successful institution.  We can see the results for ourselves.

Competent positive leadership is being called for on many fronts

I couldn’t help thinking of the parallels in the Executive Summary and Barack Obama’s speeches.

“Entering a new millennium, we face a historical choice. Left alone on the pinnacle of economic and political leadership, the United States can continue to increase its material wealth while ignoring the human needs of its people and that of the rest of the planet. Such a course is likely to lead to increasing selfishness, alienation between the more and the less fortunate, and eventually to chaos and despair.

At this juncture the social and behavioral sciences can play an enormously important role. They can articulate a vision of the good life that is empirically sound while being understandable and attractive. They can show what actions lead to well being, to positive individuals, and to flourishing community. Psychology should be able to help document what kind of families result in the healthiest children, what work environments support the greatest satisfaction among workers, what policies result in the strongest civic commitment.

Yet we have scant knowledge of what makes life worth living. Psychology has come to understand quite a bit about how people survive and endure under conditions of adversity. But we know very little about how normal people flourish under more benign conditions.  .  .”

We won’t get a positive world without positive competent management too

Positive psychology is our zeitgeist.  We want a more positive world.  That doesn’t mean a “happy clappy” world. It means a competent world where we address our differences vigorously, yet with thought and compassion.

Positive psychology is an example of positive competent management

The positive psychology movement is been a masterful piece of strategic management.  Study it to see the merging of leadership and management!

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29% using Appreciative Inquiry

Published January 22, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Thanks to Jon Ingham, I had a look at a Melcrum report on employee engagement. 29% of employers who use a formal scheme to engage employees use appreciative inquiry. Well 29% of 25% is 8% – that is a lot of employers. That is the most welcome news of 2008.

Anyone else interested in this, particularly if you are in the UK, please do contact me.

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Coaches for the creative industries

Published January 19, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Mark McGuiness has interviewed coaches for the creative industries in the UK for his Master’s thesis.

UPDATE:  How is Mark McGuiness doing?  I see him on LinkedIn sometimes.

The creative industries in UK account for about 8% of the GDP, I believe.

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How do you know you understand your client during coaching?

Published January 18, 2008 by Jo Jordan

What do coaches do?

Some coaches tell you what do.

Hey, who is living this life?

Some coaches say hmmm,  haw, what do you think?

What are they contributing here that the cat couldn’t do just as well?

A good coach encourages wisdom

We are all wise, at least a little.  But in our impatience to make a decision, sometimes we rush to conclusions.

A good coach helps us do our thinking.

Dialogic thinking:  how would other people see this problem?

We could talk to lots of other people, and our coach might ask us to.  They will check that we have done so.

They’ll also suggest reading novels and watching movies. They’ll get you to take a “cloud journey” and fly around the world looking down on different cultures and imagine what they are doing right now.  It frees up the mind and welcomes in what you know but have pushed aside.

And a good coach will suggest techniques described by Paolo Coelho in The Warrior of Light.  Imagine fighting against yourself!  That helps you flesh out what you are doing and what you are taking for granted!

Dialectical thinking: how our questions and answers change over time

The difficulty with being a noobe, is that we have no idea how we will see an issue when we’ve had a little more experience!

A coach has seen many people go through the same process of noobe to expert and they know how you will change.

Importantly, they know you will change.  They’ll help you approach an issue in an experimental way.   Test, redefine, test, redefine!

A good coach shares your journey

A good coach is not only there for you when times are hard.  A good coach understands that their wisdom grows from their relationship with you.  They too used dialogic and dialectical thinking.

They need to understand your point-of-view about your predicament and your point-of-view about their relationship with you.  They too need to see their questions and answers change as as result of working with you.

A good coach is not expert who gives answers or pretends to know behind a hmm, haw, and what do you think?

A good coach is challenged by your views and changes their own mind as they learn about yours.


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After a trying week at work, try this . . .

Published January 11, 2008 by Jo Jordan

soothing, relaxing, protective,  safe, thank you!  NEAVE

Weeks later, I had forgotten about this.  Fantastic.  You could draw.  I just scribble like a frustrated three year old.

UPDATE:  Interactive art from London.  Fantastically refreshing.

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Can we manage without managers?

Published December 28, 2007 by Jo Jordan

Quotations from Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management.

“My guess is that the most bruising skirmishes in the new millennium won’t be fought
along the battle lines that separate one competitor, ecosystem or economic bloc from
another. Rather, they will be fought along the lines that separate those who seek to
defend the prerogatives, power and prestige of their bureaucratic caste from those who
hope to build less structured, less tightly managed organizations that elicit and merit
the very best that human beings have to give.”

“Not surprisingly, most managers believe you can’t manage without managers. This is
the mother of all management orthodoxies”

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Priorities and goals

Published December 14, 2007 by Jo Jordan

Middle management sucks

I’ve always thought that one of the best kept secrets of management theory is that middle management sucks.  Have you every noticed that there are very few movies about middle management? And whenever there is a story about middle management, it is about a submarine or boat where the “business unit manager” is far enough away from the “strategic leaders” to do some leadership? Or we see the middle manager bailing out and rediscovering life as in Jerry Maguire.

Middle management sucks because it is all urgent and important

Middle management sucks because it is all management.  It is all about “to do” lists.  Being a housewife is similar.  “To do lists” take up too much of our attention.  It is a percentage thing.  While everything on the the list is important, we should never allow our lives to be overtaken by what is urgent and important.  Urgent and important should be allowed, how much do you think?  1%?  If you have a day of urgent and important tasks, don’t you think you really have another 99 days of tasks that you are not doing?

Can you live without a day of urgent and important tasks?

If we could live without urgent and important tasks, I wonder whether we would?

Isn’t it true, as David Whyte says, that we make another “to do list” because we are scared that we are nothing and nobody without one.

It becomes very interesting when our “to do” lists vanish.  If we are suddenly ill,  or when we change jobs and nobody knows who we are.  When we don’t get email and our phone doesn’t ring.  It is quite disconcerting.  We much prefer to be dominated by urgent and important tasks even if they are dreary. Don’t we prefer to have “to do” lists that are larger than ourselves and our dreams?

To do lists make us miserable

For the last 10 years, as a displaced person/migrant, I’ve oscillated between frenetic completion of lists of commercial tasks like residence permits, bank accounts, etc. etc. – things I hate to do at the best of times – and silence.  I think this is why migration is so miserable.  Not dealing with bankers and government officials – they are people too.  Not taking boring jobs.  The jobs are important in their own right.  Migration is miserable because we make the mistake of allowing the “to do list” and the silences that surround them be all that it is.

We have to allow the “to do” work and accompanying silences fit into space around our dreams, not be our only space.

We really have to resolve to re-engineer our lives around a dream, to live around what we love to do and to relax into doing what others love us to do because we do it so well.  We have to allow the “to do” work and silences fit in to that space, not be our only space. We are letting priorities become goals and constrict our spaces until we cannot breathe anymore – rather literally for some.

A hack to start the dreaming

Take a a piece of paper (or junk mail envelope).  Draw a little circle for our little life as a migrant, or as a housewife, or as a middle manager (those scare me more than being a migrant).  Around that little circle, draw a giant circle representing our horizons and dreams.  And stare at the empty space between the two.  Pretty scary.

I feel my chest constrict.  I want to walk away.  I mustn’t.   I must start defining the points on the horizon.  The points I love and I am drawn to.  And then start filling in any points between me and there, any point at all, useful or not.   I need to take the first step and to put down the first point.

Can we leave the tight center of tedium?

It is hard when immediate pressures are upon us.  We won’t start dreaming instantly.  We keep looking nervously at that tight center of tedium. How can we take our eye off all these pressures?

Crisscross over.  Promise yourself you will be back to watch that tight center like you watch a pot on the stove or a sick child.  But branch out in each direction to see how far you can see.  It is only a piece of paper after all. Just add a point.  See if you can.

See if you dare to live a full life even on the back of an envelope

See if you dare lie a life when priorities take up 1% of your existence and are priorities, not limits and constraints.

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