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Tag: postive organizational scholarship

5 stages of leadership – from leading me to leading a massive crowd

Published July 8, 2011 by Jo Jordan

As I searched for well written articles on social system stratification – or to you and me, coordinating our organization with layers, I fell over this cool distinction of leadership tasks from Christo Nel.

#1 Lead our selves – can we sing and sing with others?

  • Do we join in?
  • Do we practice?
  • Do we grow with feedback (or throw a strop)?
  • Do we help others and let them know of our needs to help the choir sing (feedback)?

#2 Influence our friends – can we speak up and take responsibility for group success?

  • Do we practice raising “the issues”?
  • Do we listen to others and value how they make the group richer?
  • Can we get things done without elaborate management structures?
  • Do we celebrate whenever we can?
  • Do our friends value us as a “metronome” that allows helps them sing together?

#3 Organize network of groups – can we set up agreements for sustained activity and induction of noobes?

  • Can we suggest and set up “light weight” schedules and systems that people can stick to?
  • Can we delegate to people who get things done and get things done better?
  • Can we encourage others to learn from the best?
  • Can we monitor what needs changing and flag that up to the network?
  • Do we build future leaders so that the incoming smoothly replace the outgoing?
  • Do we understand the whole choir and what it takes for all of us to succeed together?

#4 Inspire performance that surprises even ourselves  – be a mirror for the organization

  • Do we help us make sense of triumph and disappointment?
  • Do put our long term plans into words and keep us all informed of how we are doing?
  • Do we highlight people who are implementing our values in humdrum and challenging circumstances?
  • Do we encourage smaller assignments to distribute leadership and build our acumen for leadership?
  • Do we know where we have come from and where we are going and when other people listen to us, are they able to tell our story too?

#5 Balance the work of today with our investment in the future – be loyal, to everyone

  • Do we broker sound inter-generational agreements?
  • Do we set out a few key factors for  looking after all of us for now and for ever?
  • Do we keep the organization simple but relevant to today and tomorrow?
  • Do we keep good relationships with our neighbours and nurture sound relationships where we can solve problems together?
  • Are we big enough to absorb frustrations into the group story and to show by our words and deeds that the group is big enough to live life to the full?

These five levels of leadership are as relevant as they have ever been

  • Be happy, skillful and obliging
  • Be a positive influence among our friends and work mates
  • Design simple systems that help large numbers of people coordinate with each other
  • Reflect who we are back to the organization so we are alive to what is ‘good and true and better’ and what we should do more of
  • Be mindful of the world and model for us the joy in the richness and diversity of the world

Stratified social systems uses ‘techie’ language and so does the new age ‘complexity theory’.  Lyrical language is more fun.  Depends whether you are like to be impressed by techie or whether you like to have fun with words!  Your choice!

Hmmm . . . I like big enough to live life to the full.

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Personal leadership: Answer the moral challenge of our age

Published January 2, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Psychology blossomed in the noughties

Positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, and mytho-poetic tradition are well understood and taught in psychology and management classrooms in all corners of the world.

But we need a name

Paradoxically though, the technical names for these fields are relatively unintelligible to lay people. If there is anything we want to achieve in this field, it is to be intelligible to ordinary people.

Would personal leadership do as name?

Eventually, I settled on the term personal leadership.

We are concerned about styles of leadership that are personal.  What I do, for example is not strictly relevant to what you do.  And what I do today, has little bearing on what is relevant tomorrow.

And does the name contribute to our understanding?

Having described the rationale of this new field in these words, is it truly a discipline that belongs in the professions?

How can this definition of leadership generate a theory that is useful in practice? After all, if what is relevant today and is not relevant tomorrow, what use is that theory?

We have an ontological challenge

The difficulty is less in the epistemology, that is in the way we study leadership, than in the ontology, the nature of leadership.

We used to think of leadership as something we do.

Now we look at ourselves in context. Our unit of analysis, as researchers say, is “ourself in context”.

What are the practical implications of defining leadership as ourselves in context?

We don’t exist when we don’t see

David Whyte refers to attention. “When my eyes are tired the world is tired also”. We are our habits of attention. We are what we attend to. We are our capacity to pay attention.  When our way is lost, we find ourselves by paying attention. By becoming mindful and “touching and feeling” what is around us.

The big change in our understanding of leadership

Who we are is not what we do repeatedly and well.

Who we are is our frontier. Who we are is the place where we are curious about the world. Who we are is the frontier we cannot ignore.

Paradoxically, often when we feel tired, it is not because we are at our frontier, it is because we are not. We are not at a place where we are confronting the unknown carried by the energy of compulsive curiosity.

Leadership is not a spectator sport

We feel alive when we are in a place where “we want to know”. We are leaders when our curiosity about a situation leads us to ask questions. We are leaders when our compulsive curiosity asks questions which holds a mirror up to a situation.

We are leaders when our questions allow people to ask their questions.

How can we understand leadership in a way that allows us to share knowledge?

This question has two goals.

#1  What is the knowledge I can share?

There are many ways of sharing knowledge and we know stories are much more effectual than dry statistics answering questions that were unlikely from the outset to produce a practically significant answer.

We also know that knowledge is also more likely to be absorbed when people trust the presenter – when the presenter shares the journey of the students.

#2  What can I charge for my knowledge?

And probably more important is the heretical question of what can we charge for our knowledge. How can we claim and sustain status for our knowledge?

It is this question that personal leadership answers. We share knowledge not because we are right, but because we are willing to share in the gains and losses of a decision.

It is here that the field of personal leadership enters into the spirit of our age. Authority comes from being willing to share the gains and losses of a decision.

Are we so curious about the people we are with that they are willing to be changed by them ~ without notice and without guarantee?

That is knowledge to be passed on. Am I willing to act with you right now?

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