Korva Coleman caught my attention this morning during her NPR newscast when she discussed the overwhelming international reaction to the recent attack on Twitter and Facebook. While listening to Corva, I was not only reminded of the global masses who depend on these technological platforms as part of their everyday workplace functioning, but I was also reminded of how significantly these and other technological platforms have changed the workplace over the past five to seven years. As a leadership development consultant I am regularly asked how leaders in today's organizations should adapt their skill sets to the needs of this new and evolving workplace. My next three blog posts are dedicated to answering this question.
In my next three blog posts I will identify and describe three important competencies that leaders in any type of contemporary organization need to embrace and develop to be taken seriously and, if not, should fear becoming irrelevant and obsolete. These competencies are: facilitative leadership, conflict resolution, and strategic communication.
Facilitative leadership requires a change of mindset for many, as it fundamentally differs from other models, such as traditional leadership, primarily in a political sense. Traditional leadership centers attention on one's ability to amass and maintain power by achieving a repetition of short term individual successes in the forms of status improvement and/or personal accomplishment. This traditional perspective views power in a zero-sum way where we regularly have to replenish an ever-depleting "political status-tank" normally at others expense. Facilitative leadership views this political perspective differently, seeing power as an inexhaustible force for group interdependence that can be accessed by anyone at anytime...and the more this powerbase is relied upon the more powerful it becomes.
The three primary strategies that leaders execute while practicing the facilitative style are practical empathy, shared expectations, and empowering communication. The first, using practical empathy, is the practice of understanding the personality, communication, and situational positions of others in a non-judgmental way. Increasing one's empathetic capacity and awareness is an ongoing process that can be accomplished through the use of validated and reliable self-assessment tools, such as the MBTI and/or DiSC, combined with effective coaching by an experienced and certified business coach. As leaders engage in this developmental process and increase their empathetic understanding of others, they learn the various differences in communication style, motivation, and workplace orientation, and the methods to modify their own behavior appropriately. This practical skill-set, allowing one to gain an understanding and appreciation for the many various perspectives that exist around them, is then leveraged by the leader to increase motivation between themselves and others toward the accomplishment of shared goals...which is the next function, creating shared expectations.
Creating shared expectations, or shared goals, is a natural process where two or more individuals come together and establish their positions on a subject, their needs underlying these positions, and leverage overlapping needs of all involved to establish objectives for mutual gain...aka shared expectations. This validated process, developed formally by Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project, is commonly referred to as "Interest Based Negotiation." This process for developing shared expectations suggests that when people come together with somewhat differing viewpoints they can reach more effective solutions more quickly by digging down through their supportive reasoning to their core needs that support their viewpoint. Once all parties involved gain an understanding of these core needs, they can then look for their overlapping points of shared need which almost always exist, out of which shared solutions and goals can be drawn. This process, heavily focused on the trust-building communication styles that rely on inquiry over advocacy, leads us to our final facilitative function, empowering communication.
Empowering communication is a two-part process that uses both effective listening skills and appropriate conversational practices to create a safe and effectual dialogue. in this sense, effective listening skills are best described as a process where one seeks to understand what a person is saying, why they are saying it, and why their chosen subject is important to them. Listening at this level guides one into further inquiry of the driving depths of ones intention rather than the shallow surface of of their literal words. This type of dialogical behavior, where the conversation places more weight on understanding the other rather than advocating for your point, tends not only to be infectious in most conversations, it tends to build trust between people as they feel more listened to and understood. A current and helpful resource of further study on this topic is the book, "Crucial Conversations" by Patterson et al.
In my next blog post I will discuss the second of our three contemporary leadership competencies, conflict resolution.
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The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Posted by: air max | January 28, 2011 at 01:02 AM