Are you experiencing prolonged harassment? It may be that you may have just encountered a bully, or, when adding gender into the mix, experiencing an adult “mean girl.” As the number of women in the workforce and in leadership increases, stress in leadership roles has naturally affected women, as it does men, and can include gender-nuanced displays of ongoing aggression.
Entre-Slam is an entrepreneurial story telling competition held in Ann Arbor. Storytelling is powerful – and is a key leadership tool. Telling my story was also a great way to illustrate storytelling as important to change and communicating complex ideas, including my history in organization development (OD).
Explaining OD to the uninitiated is like describing “Business Intelligence” or “databases” to optometrists, professional athletes or golf pros. Really, why should they care without a good story?
In my situation, this was a signal to myself to enter the speaking circuit. I also wanted to place in the top three, so I did something rather unusual for a story telling slam – a rap. I had a lot to memorize in a short time, so I prepared for this. The theme was also useful to my professional focus on change; it was Arising from Failure.
Continue reading “Business Entrepreneur Storytelling at Entre-Slam with Deb”
“There isn’t anything so practical as” a good model to help leaders, change agents and advocates explain what is happening in change and transition, paraphrasing Kurt Lewin. An informed change leader can head off the deadly effects of compliance and indifference and increase true, community commitment with a good set of tools, facilitation skills and change research, informed by timely data.
Continue reading “Two Tried & True Change Models – Evergreen for Agile Change”Netflix culture and their lack of need for leadership development is SO attractive, like the siren song of Greek myth. It creates great press for Netflix, yet it is so un-duplicatable without the right staffing & culture values mix.
Once again, culture trumps strategy every time. Helping culture to shift using smart, agile strategy is the big challenge of change work. It’s not work for the amateur.
How many times has the question been asked, “What is management vs. what is leadership?” This question, which is actually about power and influence, seems as if it may never die. A web search on the difference between the two delivers 176 million results.
You’ve probably experienced it, that uncomfortable feeling of letting go of something tried and formerly true without knowing what is coming next. Welcome to the Neutral Zone, coined by change writer William Bridges1 who helped us understand the human element in Change.
In the 21st century, it’s important to “unlearn” what no longer meets the needs of your clients/customers. Creating a “quiet mind” to understand what will meet those needs is one the BEST things you could do to adapt, to become agile and to stay relevant in the business world today. Coaching with iterative practice and using fractals as a model for learning are a two ways to build an adaptive learning approach that also happens to be flexible, most likely far cheaper and is less prone to the scarcity and rigidity traps of conventional certification programs and training. More examples are listed below.
Continue reading “Agile Leader Learning for Sustainable Change: Steps through Sharp Rocks”Successful transition through endings is a necessary skill in the 21st century. A William Bridges classic gives insights into helping endings succeed.
<This post is part one of a two-part series on William Bridge’s Transitions change approach, with related change models and business examples.>
Sometimes an ending is a major, transformative revelation for a business, such as when CEO Darwin Smith exclaimed they needed to shut down the paper mills leading the shift to a new way of doing business.
Continue reading “Change and Endings: Letting Go and Acceptance before New Beginnings”As the technology age moves us along, innovation has been heralded as one of the few growth spaces left, and the power of community, think social media, is the other.
Do they blend?
Does creativity have a place in how this can happen?
Enter change. It is important to keep change leadership and innovation separate, but related and integrated so that both qualities assist in successful realization of an organization’s mission & aspirations through taking advantage of the yearnings of its current and future talent.
Sometimes this is really about:
Oh, you 10+ years employees. You were cool when you were young and energetic, but now we’d really prefer to get more new-thinking, young things in here.
Current talent, are you really talented anymore?
Continue reading “Change, Innovators, Creativity and Community, Will it Blend?”If there is one thing that is buzzing in leadership circles in social media, it is that building an innovative, agile culture is key to remaining viable, surviving disruptive change, and thriving.
Consider Loose – Tight leadership by rightsizing your grip.
Grip the steering wheel too tightly and the result can be crushed creativity, stifled innovation and minimal risk taking. You also ward away the energy from your renegades that bring productive tension to your organization. Grip too loosely, and fragmentation, de-acceleration and multiple leaders heading in different directions can crop up.
If you’re trying to be miserable, it’s important you don’t have any goals.
~ John Bytheway
Continue reading “The Impact of a Challenging Goal, Parasailing in Key West”
