For each person you refer to us who completes The Leadership Circle Certification*, you’ll receive a credit for one free Leadership Circle Profile (a $300 value). Many members have received 3, 4, or more credits by telling associates about The Leadership Circle. If you’re new to The Leadership Circle and just registering yourself, you also get a credit when you refer a friend. For credits simply ask your associate to write your name in the certification application where it asks, “Were you referred by someone?” The result? Everybody wins.

*Your referral is someone who has not previously contacted or been contacted by The Leadership Circle. Credits are only given to people who attend certification in the US or Canada. Credits are for public certification dates for the US or Canada listed on The Leadership Circle web site. Credits are not available outside of the US or Canada or with any other offer.

Best-in-Class Leadership Development Extended to Spanish Speaking Countries

May 9, 2013 Toledo, OH (U.S.A.)—The Leadership Circle is pleased to announce an expanded presence in Latin America with new offices in Bogota, Colombia to better serve the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America.

“Our world needs leaders dedicated to creating a thriving future for global business and our sustainable collective welfare,” said Bob Anderson, founder and CEO of The Leadership Circle. “We’re pleased to extend our suite of best-in-class leadership assessments and workshops to this part of the world.”

“Business leadership everywhere is setting the agenda for the planet’s future,” said Art Shirk, Director of Learning for The Leadership Circle – América Latina, “When it comes to developing leaders, training to competencies alone does not work very well. Solutions from The Leadership Circle deliver more rapid and lasting results by helping leaders gain deeper insight into their behavior and what is driving it.”

The company’s flagship offering, The Leadership Circle Profile™, is a robust 360-degree personal leadership assessment that is designed to accelerate leadership effectiveness beyond traditional competency-based approaches. The Leadership Circle Profile is the only 360-degree competency assessment that simultaneously provides focused competency feedback while revealing the underlying assumptions that are causing a leader’s pattern of strengths and limitations. The Leadership Circle Profile helps leaders understand the relationship between how they habitually think, how they behave, and, more importantly, how all this impacts their current level of leadership effectiveness.

“The Leadership Circle Profile expands a leader’s awareness. Once greater awareness is established,” said Shirk, “Leadership development can proceed. Without it, change rarely happens.”

The Latin American offices of The Leadership Circle will also support sales, certification, and delivery of the Leadership Culture Assessment, a similar 360-degree view of leadership across teams and organizations. Also offered will be certification workshops for HR/OD practitioners and professionals wishing to use these assessments inside client organizations.

Two Leadership Circle Profile certifications are already scheduled, one July 31-August 2 in Lima, Peru and a second from September 23-25 in Bogota, Colombia (additional details can be found online at http://www.theleadershipcircle.com/services-2/calendar). Each certification is a three day program in which individuals with executive coaching experience can be certified to administer The Leadership Circle assessments, provide debriefing, and support follow-through coaching for managers and leaders.

About The Leadership Circle – América Latina

Based in Bogota, Colombia, The Leadership Circle – América Latina is led by Alberto Ricci Ferré (Director of Business), Arthur Shirk (Director of Learning), Sonia Sinisterra (Director of Business), and Patricia Echeverri (Client Services Representative).

The Leadership Circle - América Latina will serve all Spanish-speaking countries in central and south America, including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

The Leadership Circle - América Latina is based in Bogotá Colombia, and affiliated with Coaching Hall International, a consulting firm founded in 2002 offering comprehensive services in organization and leadership development and professional coach certification.

About The Leadership Circle

The Leadership Circle offers best-in-class 360-degree assessment and development tools for individuals, groups, teams, and entire organizations. What The Leadership Circle ultimately provides is leadership transformation—change that evolves authentically from the inside out.

###

Media Contact:

Katherine Anderson
801.554.8816
Katherine.anderson@fcg-global.com

To enable you in this new type of leadership, read The Leadership Circle’s whitepaper, “Mastering Leadership.” The whitepaper can be downloaded on the White Paper’s page.

Sometimes, there is real danger it alerts us to it. Other times, it is uncertainty and the risk that accompanies new behavior and strategies. The call to Not Be Afraid could also awaken us to another real possibility: many of us spend more time reacting in fear than we realize. Leadership research bears this out, but more on this later.

Organizations Today: Beautiful and Terrible Things Happen Here.

Several years ago I read Jon Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air, a detailed account of a climbing expedition gone horribly wrong on Mount Everest. Several of the world’s elite climbers (and others) died in the same storm on the same night. I remember how strange it was to read about these bright, accomplished professionals who lost awareness of foundational safety procedures. With each successive error in judgment they came closer to what would become their own death. Real danger. But I also remembered something more troubling. The account of this incident seemed to be oddly familiar to me. I had experienced similar conditions myself. Not on mountaintops but in organizations, where uncertainty prevails and where beautiful and terrible things routinely happen.

Conditions Favoring Terrible Things in Organizations

In Krakauer’s book elite climbers made increasingly foolish decisions under dangerous and slowly escalating conditions. The conditions included: Too much time spent at dangerous (life threatening) altitude; diminishing physical stamina; limited oxygen that effected brain functioning and decision making; poor food intake and reduced ability to metabolize food for energy; wounds or injuries that could not heal given the above conditions. Amazingly, none of the decisions these professional climbers made seemed crazy or improper to them at the time. How present are you and I to what drives the small, seemingly rational decisions we make each day?

In organizations the results may not always be as dramatic and fatal, but they often qualify as terrible. It is tempting to think of terrible things in business as primarily including plant closings, layoffs, operational safety incidents, financial pillaging, wrongful termination cases, and unforeseen global financial shifts that impact all of us. These can certainly be catastrophic. Leadership behavior that happens on a daily basis can be just as terrible even though it may be subtler and easier to overlook.

Leaders today face unprecedented daily demands on their energy and resources. The pace of change, escalating complexities and uncertainties, rapidly changing consumer and workforce dynamics, and information overload all make the two-fold business of continuously delivering high quality products and services while continuously innovating in a volatile market an exceedingly high standard to reach.

When we are under duress—and without much awareness—it is as if we put on a pair of glasses that distort reality. Actions that are terrible and threatening look normal and necessary. Behavior that is foolish and destructive looks proactive and wise! If you wonder how you and other wise people can at times act so foolishly it may be because conditions have changed without your knowing it. And, of course, you may think you’re invincible. Or should be.

Too much time spent at (harsh) altitude where life-supporting conditions do not exist…for long.

In many organizations the daily routine looks like this: meeting after meeting after meeting. When surveyed about the relevance of their meetings, most agree that 70% of the time is largely wasted but no one wants to miss out on the splinter of time that is useful. Often, there is a badge of courage for those who deny being unusually worn out by the demands placed upon their important time by important others. Meetings are often one directional, with information flowing from the front of the room while others duck for cover and hope they are not called on, or don’t feel invited to show up by the leader who is the expert in everything.

To either make oneself unavailable or to suggest a more relevant shift in content and agenda are considered heretical acts. Countless time spent in a defensive, alert posture takes a toll. We require time for recovery and replenishment but renewal time is exactly what we don’t have or take. Neither did our climbers.

Diminished physical and emotional stamina.

In many organizations taking lunch, going for business walks, leisurely strolling outside for working breaks are considered signs of weakness. You’re not on board. Your commitment to the team is questionable. Just keep working. But long hours, the expectations you are always on call, that weekends or vacations are just conveniences to assuage outside regulators are the prevailing, albeit unexamined, assumptions. Consider the amount of time needed to relax and you will glimpse how something great—work and performance pressure—have laid siege around your life and spirit.

Survival fear and oxygen deprivation.

When we are under stress or threatened in some way our breathing changes. It becomes shallower; we take in less oxygen. Our brains don’t work as well as they do with ample oxygen. Sadly, the consistent message our brain sends under conditions like this is: “Everything is OK.” But everything is not OK. There is troubling research that suggests upwards of 65-70% of leaders operate from such a stance of fear. More disturbing is the reality that so many deny this is so. Don’t you?

We have already joined our climbing colleagues on a slippery slope when we lose sight of the fact we can no longer believe what our head tells us is true. Perhaps it’s the face of fear that makes it difficult to acknowledge. If it were to show up as knees buckling, hands wringing, sweat pouring from the forehead while a look of panic swept across our eyes it would be reasonably easy to acknowledge. It’s typically much more subtle.

Observing how I allow fear to influence my behavior, here are things to look for in yourself and others.

How to know you’re operating from a stance of fear.

You—

• Delegate tasks to the same people because you know they will deliver. The possibility of an error is unacceptable.
• Keep your handle on other tasks, too, coming in at the end to offer your brilliant critique. It’s up to you alone, after all, to ensure high quality outcomes.
• Over commit yourself and others because you know no one does it better than you and your team.
• Feel on top of the world when you’ve achieved desired outcomes and devastated when you don’t.
• Spend time quietly or not so quietly being bitter, castigating others for their stupidity and foolishness, proud that you are not at all like them.
• Feel best when others know how smart you are, when you speak fast, cover a lot of ground quickly, and leave others lagging behind or confused. “They don’t have what it takes,” you think to yourself.
• Give perfectly logical explanations for why you did or didn’t do things. They make perfect sense and usually end the conversation you are in. Often, however, they are not completely accurate. You unknowingly leave out matters of the heart and emotion, with their concomitant vulnerability and courage.
• Pride yourself on not getting drawn into conversations you deem too dramatic and emotional. Your own arrogance escapes your awareness along with the myriad ways it creates the drama you then pretend to rise above.
• Dismiss, discredit and deny (rationally, of course) points of view and people that upset you. You seek a return to comfort rather than truth.
• See yourself as a student of life, connected to important things and always learning. You overlook the reality that you cannot recall the last time your being was rocked to the core by new learning.
• Find it hard to acknowledge any glimpse of the current circumstances that, to you, reflects anything less than positive about you. You distract yourself and your organization with other things while simultaneously lamenting how hard it is for others to stay focused and drive results.

A close friend asked me once whether I could feel my heartbeat. Secretly, I was embarrassed to find I could not. I didn’t confess to my embarrassment; rather, I said sarcastically, “What does that have to do with anything?”

He said, “It’s very close to you. If you can miss something that close, what else might you be missing?” I hated the question and the truth it revealed. Over the course of 18 months I found my heartbeat and, with it, began to pay attention to the more subtle aspects of behavior—my own and others’.

Leaders often have no awareness of their fear, denying it altogether. Our elite climbers on Everest ignored or didn’t recognize many instances where they violated their own code of climbing behavior and safety protocols.

The secret to building greater awareness, and with it wiser, more responsive strategies, is to look closely at the moment you are in. Now. It’s the last place we think to look, especially when it upsets us to do so.

Conditions Favoring Beautiful Things

Why change? This is a valid question posed to me by virtually all of my executive clients at some point. All of them are successful by any standard you might use. All are smart, savvy, and highly skilled. And all are people who secretly long for something more intrinsically satisfying that would bring not just more achievement and reward but greater fulfillment and meaning. Many miss or are embarrassed by this deeper yearning.

Mary Oliver (in her poem, Raven with Crows) invites us to live from this essential place of yearning or presence, calling it an advertisement for the “…More than ordinary life, for the remembrance of the gorgeous, the powerful and the improbable.” In the quiet moments of the day you might learn to track a similar remembrance in yourself. I found it on the other side of fear, next to my heartbeat, and knew immediately I had been hungry for its company for a long time.

Three ways to lead in a more than ordinary way

The great German poet, Rainier Maria Rilke, compares this essential presence to an enemy lying outside the walls of our fortified lives:

All of you undisturbed cities, haven’t you ever longed for the enemy? I’d like to see you besieged by him for ten endless and ground shaking years until you were desperate and mad with suffering. Finally, you’d feel his weight.

…He lies outside the walls like the countryside
. He knows very well how to endure
 longer than those he comes to visit.

Climb up on your roofs and look out:
 his camp is there. His morale will not falter


His number will not decrease, he will not weaken
.

He sends no one into the city to threaten
 or promise and no one to negotiate.

He is the one who breaks down the walls
 and when he works, he works in silence.

                  (Rainier Maria Rilke, 1919)

This quiet and solemn poem, written in the ruins of WW1, asks a penetrating question: Haven’t you ever longed for the enemy?

I have lived through times when I felt that my work, my business and all the effort I put in to building and sustaining it had consumed my life. There simply was nothing left to give. Empty, exhausted, and unfulfilled, I would have argued that my work had laid siege to my life and spirit. Rilke reverses this! He speaks to the ruins of a civilization and seems to imply there is a superior force still out there laying siege. It is not here to destroy what is already in ruins. It is here to restore.

1. Cultivate Presence—It is your original anchor and brand

There is an underlying spiritual presence beneath and around us that Rilke calls us to consider. It is the truest part of you and me. Perhaps standing in the ruins of our life helps prepare us to be ready to see it. It need not be God or something others have identified. It is best understood to be the essential aspect of yourself. That part of you that is larger than, and holds, all other aspects.

The more than ordinary life is what the most effective leaders learn presence and embody. It captures how I want most to live. Find it by quieting yourself, little by little each day, and tracking your heart beat. Essential presence is your original anchor and brand—the consistent and unmistakable impact you leave. It is a calm interior place in the midst of an endless storm. Find it on the other side of your fear.

2. Release the giftedness in others.

One of the consistent themes I’ve seen in organizations is weak or non-existent bench strength. People are not developed or mentored. In place of conscious development, a sink-or-swim, Darwinian approach serves as the default way to build the next generation of leaders. The best leaders I have known have an eye for talent. In fact, they are always on the lookout for top talent, those special players who combine intellectual prowess with a skill set and drive that speaks to the current and future needs of the business. It lies latent in many of those closest to us, not far from our own heartbeat. Seeing and releasing talent requires that we apprehend the invisible.

Things are seldom as they appear. Our best talent for the future often comes dressed up in hard to recognize costumes. It looks different than we do. An 800-year-old Sufi poem (Stop Calling Me A Pregnant Woman) tells a story of a young man, Hafiz, who would one day become a world-renowned Muslim mystic and scholar. His teacher, Attar, began to challenge him by calling out, “Hafiz, how did you become a pregnant woman?” An odd way for two Muslim men to greet! When, after many months of embarrassment, Hafiz finally demanded that his teacher stop, Attar simply said, “…The whole world is germinating in your belly. One day beautiful words will flow from your lips and be cradled against the hearts of thousands of people.” One of these hearts is my own.

Here are sample indicators that can help you spot those nearby whose greatness is currently germinating inside them.

• They demonstrate prolonged periods of frustration, agitation, boredom, or restlessness.
• They seldom fit in and see no reason to do so.
• They may fail to live up to or pass the standards you have set for them; they are very busy doing other things.
• They are quietly attracted to personal mastery and to those who are great masters themselves.
• They show no particular interest in calling attention to themselves; they are quietly or not so quietly caught up in doing what matters to them.
• The lenses through which they view their life, work and impact may strike you as particularly strange, i.e., they may appear to waste too much time on things that seem foolish to you.
• Their impact is unquestionably positive or more pronounced than most others.
• They seem to be easily distracted by small things, as if something within distracts them and guides them somewhere more important.

My son is one of these strange people. He spent countless hours with video games as a teenager, even while struggling through school. He mercilessly defeated me in video war games; my karate chops were no match for his machine guns, shoulder-fired missiles and grenade launchers. He was always a quiet, wise soul, who kept his own counsel. Today, he is a college graduate and an award winning video producer.

A Fortune 100 CEO client said something recently that captures this shift towards seeing the invisible greatness in others. A classic command and control executive, he invited a team to suggest ways of making the leadership culture more engaging and collaborative. They came back with a risky, vulnerable demonstration (no PowerPoints) in which they mapped out a revision of a core business process. The revision would build on the experience of the executives (at the front end, not back end) but engage those closest to the customers in critical decision-making intersections. It was a powerful demonstration, a complete reversal of the current process that implicitly challenged the role of leaders themselves.

The CEO, after a long silence, finally spoke: “All these years I thought my business knowledge and market expertise was my leadership. After seeing this awesome work you’ve done, I realize this wasn’t leadership at all. I need to release others to do the kind of work I’ve just experienced here. That’s leadership.”

You and I are here to be Attar for others, to see and call out the latent gifts in them. Our organizations and the world await our effort!

3. Deepen and expand your conversation with the whole system, not just the parts you know.

Leadership is essentially an ongoing conversation. The most effective leaders make time to reflect on and improve the quality of this conversation. Strategy, execution, accountability, innovation and trust all hinge on the authenticity of it. The best leadership teams learn over time how to refine and deepen this conversation, with its own disciplines of study and practice. Three disciplines, in particular, require courage and vulnerability to learn and gain competence in. Each requires an uncomfortable (at times) new relationship with NOW, the present. These three disciplines are:

• Get clear about purpose and vision: What outcomes do we want to create and why do these matter to us? How clear are we, at any given moment, about these outcomes? Are they important enough to us to cause us to reset any meeting, on any given day, where we seem to drift away towards something else? Are they clear enough that we could use them as a litmus test for decisions we are making now? How much of what we want serves only us, our egos? How much serves something greater than us? Our Everest climbers held visions that were, at best, mixed. Egos at times got in the line of sight of clear, courageous, purpose-driven action.

   The critical difference between mere activity/busyness and real achievement is purposeful action. Action that moves us closer to outcomes that matter.

• Get clear about current reality: Where are we now relative to these desired outcomes. What inner fears, doubts and concerns are we holding that may impede our work together? What’s currently working well or not so well? How much of this are we willing and able to speak about with each other without lapsing into denial, finger pointing and blaming? How much do we keep hidden?

• Speak Up, Clearly: Current reality, in complex, uncertain times, always contains an inner and outer component, the irrational as well as the rational. What we don’t talk about controls us. Out elite climbers left many important things unspoken.

Together, these three conversational practices—a.) Getting clear about what matters, i.e., purpose & vision; b.) Developing the courage and vulnerability to look fully at current reality; and c.) Authentically speaking about these issues with others constitute three disciplines that deepen and expand the system conversation. Fear that goes unexamined will keep you in a stagnant conversation that spins and spins but goes nowhere. Real dialogue requires vulnerability and courage but can transform an organization.

The Fortune 100 CEO (above) learned to poke fun at his own critical and controlling bent, even while he was actively learning about and experimenting with new, more collaborative skills. Because he was willing to publicly learn and practice new behaviors, others also followed suit. He led from his own development rather than allowing fear to limit his—and the organization’s—growth. Even though his fear is difficult for him to see and feel, he is wise enough to track its impact on others. That is enough of a doorway through which he can move towards a greater future.

The Leader’s Role in Beautiful And Terrible Things

Beautiful and terrible things happen in the leadership landscape today. Consider this: The systems we live and work in are living organisms. They pre-date us. They were, in all likelihood, here before us. Perhaps they have chosen you and me explicitly for this time we now face. They remind us of our work: Do Not Be Afraid. Let’s become authors of beautiful things as yet unseen yet longed for. Let’s commit ourselves to finding ways to acknowledge and then minimize the terrible things we are each capable of.

Go “Deeper” With Your Clients

The uniqueness of this tool is that it supports you in having a powerful, transformative conversation at whatever level of depth is required to create breakthroughs in awareness and performance. In short, our breakthrough assessment helps you go “deeper” so your client can achieve superior results.

This training is for anyone who wants to enhance the leadership effectiveness of management and executive leadership clients. Those who should consider attending include:

• Consultants
• Coaches
• HR/OD/OE professionals
• Trainers
• Therapists

Certification Includes Three Tools

When you attend this three day program you get certified in not just one, but in three powerful tools: the Leadership Circle Profile 360, the Leadership Circle Profile – Manager Edition, and the Leadership Culture Survey. These complementary tools allow you to work with individuals, groups, and teams.

Enjoy Ongoing Support

After certification you will have proprietary access to our state-of-the-art online administration system and the expert support of our live customer service representatives. Need help in positioning Leadership Circle tools in your initiatives or strategic plans? A Leadership Circle Senior Consultant will be available to support you.

If you have questions about certification, please Contact Us.

If leadership were just common sense, it would be common. The fact that it is not common, despite all the activity to develop it, suggests that, if short-cuts were possible, we would have all bought the package long ago and would now be enjoying the fruits of success.

Leadership is an uncommon sense because most do not undertake this work as a lifelong discipline. Leadership is connected with the deepest parts of ourselves. It has much more to do with character, courage, and conviction than it does with specific skills or even competencies. Leadership requires wisdom, self-knowledge, and the development of our character at psychological and spiritual levels.

Leadership development is deeply personal. It involves working with the psyche and the soul. True leadership springs from an elevated state of being. It requires a fundamental shift of mind and consciousness. This type of change is threatening for everyone and so it is naturally resisted. The latest five-steps-to-leadership model is a much easier sell than the deep work truly necessary for successful leadership. Leadership development is long-term because systems do not change quickly—especially our systems of thinking. No matter how much we are addicted to the quick fix, all of the available evidence tells us that change is hard and long—whether we are changing our organization or our consciousness.

And finally, leadership development requires a focus on core disciplines. To become masterful at anything, from a sport to the practice of law, a regular discipline of learning and practice is necessary. The same is true of leadership. The payoff comes with long-term attention. Courage, character, compassion and conviction are the stuff of leadership. These are not common attributes and there is no short cut to them. Only through a deep, long-term discipline will the leadership emerge to guide us through the organizational, national, and global problems that we face today.

In The Leadership Circle’s white paper, Leadership: Uncommon Sense, Bob Anderson (CEO & Founder of The Leadership Circle) attempts to accomplish two objectives. First, he builds a case for the necessity of an in-depth approach to leadership development—at all levels of the organization—accompanied by the difficult work of systems change. Second, he describes the terrain of leadership development, that is, the major disciplines that need to be integrated into one’s life for genuine development to take place. Through the white paper, he navigates through common dilemmas of leadership, the importance of changing paradigms, the structure of creative tension, inner and action leadership disciplines, and the importance of spirituality and purpose.

Discover the long-term and inner changes necessary for leadership effectiveness by reading The Leadership Circle’s white paper Leadership: Uncommon Sense. Additional white papers can also be downloaded on The Leadership Circle’s White Papers page.

After a thoughtful response to my internal conflict, she didn’t miss a beat before explicitly noting Joseph Campbell’s timeless counsel to follow your bliss and go where your heart takes you.

As far as I could tell, that meant continuing on the road I was on. I was a newly independent consultant with venerable clients, leading large organizational change initiatives via internal corporate teams. I offered a change process that consistently created desired change through an internal, organic, facilitative leadership approach. The work was aligned with my own sense of purpose and after just a couple of years, the practice was already a hardy container for personal growth and professional exploration. Dr. Wheatley’s advice was like a shot of ‘permission’ that renewed my sense of professional dignity.

Fast-forward a few years and I’m returning home from The Leadership Circle certification determined to integrate these powerful tools into my portfolio of change management services. This was not easy. There was a lot to learn about what all this meant and how to make it useful to leaders and their change initiatives. Since then, I’ve spent my time in the deep end of the pool pursuing all of The Leadership Circle’s offerings, leadership and relationship systems coaching certifications, and practicing. Looking back now, I can’t imagine another path that would have made more sense.

Knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in fruit salad.

~ unknown

While The Leadership Circle framework can be a powerful foundation for transformation, knowing its ins-and-outs—and being able to bring it to life with clients—is as different as knowledge and wisdom. This article will highlight three distinct and subtle shifts I have noticed in my practice that seem to be increasing the impact with the leaders and teams I serve.

Moving From Talking About It to Being About It

The first subtle shift reminds me of how my personal trainer invites me to stop reporting my progress and start lifting weights: “OK Shannon, why don’t you stop talking about it and start being about it.” Getting to know the Leadership Circle framework started, for me, with a gradual deepening and eventual up leveling of my relationship to our beloved and berated ‘Reactive Tendencies.’

Tracking The Movement. One of the first insights about working with The Leadership Circle came from a coach I was supposedly helping to get prepared for his first round of debriefs. After our first day of sessions, he reported at dinner that the day had gone well, and that the only thing he hadn’t been quite ready for was the client’s reactive tendencies actually showing up in the session!

This was both obvious and profound. Of course it shows up, but I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought about it enough to make it explicit. This is core to The Leadership Circle debrief coaching readiness, and it entails much more of me than I had originally expected. In a nutshell that feels like anything but a nutshell, it’s about getting to know how each of the tendencies moves through me, so I ‘know’ them. This has meant getting to know my own physical response, and then identifying the flavor of fear that is driving it. It continues to take incredible ‘noticing’ discipline to link somatic reaction to hidden beliefs and then even more courage to be able to speak from that place. For example, to notice my throat and chest tightening as a client group starts to panic about the next group activity slated for them, and then be able to connect it to the fear beneath being rejected, or ignored.

Being Amused. As time went on, it became clear that there was always another expression of limiting belief waiting for me to discover it. Eventually, this reality of no ending became so prevalent, that amusement became part of the “belief reframing” process. And then, without fireworks or trumpets playing, this amusement morphed into a full-fledged admiration. I began chuckling about my most quirky qualities and considering those formally forbidden aspects that had been kept under lock and key, and smiling about the character I had become (as if it were new). It became my little secret, a burgeoning affinity for this collection of traits that makes life so interesting, dramatic, and maddening.

Building A Circle. Most of us review this and recognize that what I’ve described is simply what we ask of our clients. The advantage our clients have is they have the support of a coach. This mucking around the inner terrain is not for those, clients or coaches, who prefer their drinks neat. This is the land of shaken and stirred. One of the most coveted dimensions of the wisdom emerging from my practice now is the circle of colleagues willing to champion and challenge me. The largest leaps of personal and professional growth have come through these relationships and I believe our ability to impact global leadership in a profound way depends on us cultivating these relationship circles for ourselves.

Moving From ‘Figuring It Out’ to ‘Inviting It Out’

As a longtime consultant, the default tendency to anticipate and find solutions is always present. And it is rarely helpful in coaching conversations. Effective development work has required a major shift from “figuring it out” to “inviting it out,” especially in the realm of exploring beliefs and assumptions. Intellectually I understand how coaching works, and the powerful structure it becomes for co-creating. Additionally, I am personally committed to mastering this elusive partnership dynamic. In practice though, the seasoned organizational change and communications advisor slips out and wants to be seen—to help, to impress, or to expedite.

The reasons this shift is challenging are not surprising:

• The expert-mode it seductive. My desire to help others get out of their own way or to ‘see the light’ through insights that have made themselves clear to me, is often present. There is positional power present in this mode as well, which can feel enlivening, until I realize we are modeling something other than partnership.
• The expert-mode is expected, and very often preferred, by clients. It took me a long time to not be confused by this, and to start expecting it. The Controlling-Complying dynamic is comfortable, familiar, and expected. As I show up as someone who knows a lot about how the The Leadership Circle framework works for change leaders, it is not uncommon for clients to want to be told how to think and what to do—with their results, development plans, or relationships.
• The expert-mode also appeals to my sense of efficiency. ‘Can we finish up this understanding part and move into the what do you want to do with this part?’ I have a bias for action, and a natural urge to just tell someone instead of fostering discovery about it.

A couple of strategies that seem to be working for this:

• Getting clear about roles. This sounds basic, but getting myself re-programmed was anything but basic. Here are the things I remind my Expert-self before a session. My role is to:
  • Join the client as a fellow traveler in the exploration of what this means for her
  • Be present and listen deeply
  • Be less of a pace car, and more of a body surfer, riding the wave of the client’s awareness
  • I needed to build the habit of exploring with, and not for, the client. To do this, I’ve found a few questions that evoke my beginner’s mind curiosity, and they are becoming my new default. When a client describes a situation and drops into the experience of it, these questions are top-of-mind: What are you aware of? What do you notice? What is trying to happen? They generate an exploration into underlying patterns and energies that keep me guessing, with the client, right where I need to be.

Moving From Owning the Results to Sharing the Experience

The last shift toward wisdom for this Leadership Circle Practitioner is as simple to understand, as it is difficult to do. In partnering and co-creating, responsibility is shared. Simple. This becomes problematic when I consider a situation such as a coaching engagement where nothing seems to be happening for the client. At those times, I have a tendency to want to make something happen, or to do more than what is mine to do. If I realize that I care more than the client about the results, or about doing something about the problem, it is time to re-calibrate.

My ability to do this constellates around trust in a creative intelligence greater than the problems, challenges, and complications we are working. When I hold that trust, it is easy for me to operate from the belief that the client is naturally intelligent, creative, resourceful, and whole. I like to think I hold all clients, colleagues, and people this way all the time. The truth is that I don’t, but I do intend to. Here are some of the common occurrences in my practice that signal me that I’m am unconsciously doubting a client’s resourcefulness, and probably taking on more than my share of the responsibility:

• I’m concerned that a client ‘can’t handle’ his feedback
• There doesn’t seem to be enough happening in the debrief and I’m wondering if I am creating enough value for the client
• I notice that the client is having a boring/uncomfortable/tense experience and I want to do something to improve it
• I assume that because I don’t see anything happening with the client, nothing actually is
• The client has selected a focus for development, and I’m telling myself it is not relevant

When you walk to the edge of all the light you have  

and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown,

you must believe that one of two things will happen:

There will be something for you to stand upon,

or you will be taught how to fly.

~ Patrick Overton

Moving toward the wise and vital application of the The Leadership Circle framework in my practice has indeed felt like one step into the dark after another. I have great anticipation for the flying part, and for now I’ve just grown quite proficient at navigating in the mud. Perhaps some of these thoughts and practices will inspire you to join me there.

About the Author

Shannon Schultz holds an M.B.A. in Marketing and Strategic Management from the University of Georgia and a B.A. in Journalism from the University of North Carolina. Her post-graduate education has included exploration and study in mind-body wellness, music therapy and cognitive psychology. Shannon founded Schultz Consulting Group in 2003 after 10 years of marketing roles in advertising, public relations, research and product development, and four years of internal corporate consulting. She is consistently recognized as a guiding presence in transforming the way organizations operate to improve performance. Through a seasoned blend of systems change strategy, group process facilitation, and executive coaching, Shannon guides organizational change and increases people’s capacity to lead it. Her areas of expertise include: Launching enterprise-wide change initiatives, transforming cross-divisional groups into high-performing teams, and increasing individual capacity and organizational capability through leadership development programming.

Watch more videos

However, despite the best of intentions, people in the organization block their own progress.

Moving from patriarchy to partnership requires navigating two journeys simultaneously—the system journey and the personal journey. Historically, we have spent most of our attention on changing the system and relatively little on the profound personal changes required of people at every level. We have tried to change organizational culture as if it is somehow separate from ourselves. We try to change it and not us. However, the deeper work of change is internal. It has to do with the part of us that needs control and the part of us that hangs onto dependency. The deeper work is discovering how we personally contribute to the very culture we are trying to change.

Discover a model for changing beliefs, enabling managers to more fully embody the principles of a new system in their behavior by reading The Leadership Circle’s whitepaper Pathways to Partnership. Understanding this model is essential in accelerating organizational change by helping managers at all levels gain insight into the nature of their character structures. Additional white papers can also be downloaded on our White Papers page.

“What do you think Bob?” I inquired.

“Well, if I had to guess, you’re stressed out, possibly unhappy, and maybe overwhelmed,” he said in a very “matter of fact” manner.

“How do you know that?” I smirked, shocked at his ability to see right through me.

He smiled confidently. “I had a sense of it the moment you walked in the room yesterday. Your chest was fully expanded and you had a pretty intense presence about you. It looked as if you were ready to go into battle with the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

At first I didn’t know if I was offended or grateful. Surprisingly, I laughed. It was not the type of response I had expected from a leadership expert. It was more akin to how my martial arts masters would speak to me.

Bob’s insightful feedback coupled with The Leadership Circle’s Reactive-Creative model provided an elegant and easily understandable framework that animated and aligned with many of the most important principles and practices of traditional martial arts, yoga, and competitive sports. And, my Leadership Circle results clearly indicated I was a white belt in the leadership arena. Though the news was disheartening at first, I quickly became excited. My years of training had taught me how to make changes quickly.

Having taught martial arts, yoga, and contemplative practices for 25 years, I’ve had the honor to help students transcend gripping fears, frayed self-images, and limiting inner narratives and rise to higher levels of confidence, skill, and grace in their practice and more importantly life. It became glaringly apparent that the same perspectives, principles, and practices I taught in the dojang could be applied to helping leaders mitigate their Reactive tendencies and allow their natural Creative competencies to emerge.

The Body Knows

The early years of my martial arts training were focused heavily on skill development such as kicking, punching, and blocking, yet the years spent in refining these skills to masterful levels had no impact when it came to sparring with my master. The speed, precision, and power of my techniques were mostly ineffective. I always ended up on the ground defeated, usually in less than a second. It was as if he could foresee every technique before I did it. When I inquired as to how he did it he smiled and laughed. “Tim, your body tells me everything. The way you stand, how you breathe, the pupils of your eye, they tell me everything. You are so focused on what you are going to do you have little attention and focus for what is taking place right in front of you. Your presence is fragmented which leaves you vulnerable and easy to defeat.”

When I asked him how to improve he said “Learn to breathe.” The simplicity of his answer didn’t make sense. He continued, “There are three types of energy we consume as humans. Food energy, water energy, and breath energy. We can live for weeks without food, days without water, yet only a few minutes without breathing. Your breath is the most vital of all energies in sustaining a healthy, productive, and enjoyable life. Everything you do begins with the breath; the more aware you are of your breath the more conscious you become. The more conscious you become the easier it is to manage, adapt, or change yourself and your situations.

 “If you can see it you can manage it. If you can’t see it you’ll be managed by it.”
-Bob Anderson

One of the first practices I teach leaders on their journey towards greater effectiveness is to become more aware of their physical body. It’s a simple practice I call Gamefilming. Gamefilming (taken from the practice of sports teams watching films of their performance) is a practice of becoming objective to subjective states. Gamefilming is a practice of learning to see ourselves as others see us leading.

Gamefilming is a simple practice of noticing and naming our current state (tense, agitated, excited) often referred to as our outer game and then changing our inner game (focus, intention, approach, and ideal outcome). Leaders that actively Gamefilm develop the ability to free themselves from unconscious and arresting Reactive tendencies. This freedom from self-preserving reactivity yields a subtle, confident, and extraordinary skillset demonstrated by the masters of yoga, martial arts, and other sports.

I once coached a talented leader serving as chief operating officer in a logistics company. A former NFL quarterback for the Chicago Bears, Brent Snyder brought a unique level of experience as a high-performance team player and leader. “A game film perspective,” he said, “allows you to see dimensions of your performance that would otherwise be overlooked, which helps you to learn things about yourself and more quickly adapt. It is interesting how relevant this is to leadership. To be effective as a leader, I must have an objective, accurate evaluation of my capabilities and performance on an ongoing basis.”

He suggested the following questions for further reflection: As a leader, how do others perceive you? How do they perform when teamed with you? What strengths can be leveraged and what weaknesses can be exploited if you don’t correct them?

Given the accelerated pace of change, increasing complexity of business, and information overwhelm, it is easy for leaders to grasp the value of Gamefilming. In short they realize that cognitive horsepower, strategic prowess, and technical competency earn you the right to play the leadership game; however, they are not enough to be sustainably successful. Awareness, agility, and adaptability are what separate highly effective leaders from the pack. It’s not just about what you do it’s about how you do it that makes you an effective leader.

How to Gamefilm

Most leaders don’t have the luxury of time to invest in contemplative reflection, meditation, or other valuable practices that expand awareness; however, there is a way to reap the benefits of these practices in real time, everyday business.

Our physical bodies are the gateway to higher levels of awareness, insight, and transformation. Notice and name your physical state. What are you physically aware of? Perhaps you notice your voice becoming louder. You may notice yourself getting physically tense or sighing desperately. You may notice and name hurt feelings. The practice of objectively noticing and naming your subjective state unlocks you from the limiting behaviors, offering you a window of freedom to do and become something new.

Once you’ve consciously noticed and named your current state the next thing you must do is take a deep breath. A conscious intentional deep breath relaxes our muscles, increases the release of endorphins, and improves the overall functionality of every system in our body. By teaching leaders how to take a deep breath they create a somatic shift in their bodies allowing them new possibilities beyond dropping below the line into Controlling, Protecting, or Complying tendencies. With the somatic shift we create a window into a new reality, a reality where we see more, think more clearly, and lead more effectively.

Once you’ve made the subjective to objective shift in perspective and centered yourself with deep breathing you have the opportunity to make new choices. I teach leaders to ask themselves three simple questions I learned in my daughter’s kindergarten class.

• What are you doing? By asking this question a leader begins being responsible and accountable for their actions. Nothing new can be created until they take complete ownership for what they are currently doing.
• What do you want to be doing? This question establishes a vision for something new. Without a vision a leader has no energy to create anything new leaving themselves destined to repeat what is.
• What do you want to do about it? This question moves them above the line into their full creative potential. This self-authoring perspective ignites new action. New experiences are created, experiences that support a leader in creating results that matter versus reacting to situations that don’t.

About four years ago I was debriefing an executive leadership team on their Leadership Circle group report. The results were highly reactive. Upon receiving their results the CEO stood up, pounded his fist on the table and proceeded to unleash a healthy dose of colorful expletives at me. For a moment I froze in fear. I noticed it, took ownership for my feelings, and reaffirmed my intention for the work we were doing. Admittedly, this was not easy, especially for an old fighter like me. However, playing above the line prevailed. The meeting and the CEO shifted into a healthy conversation about how to create his vision of the future. The company has grown as much in the past five years as it did in the previous 25.

Leaders often face moments of truth on a daily basis. Gamefilming provides them with the opportunity to discover what that truth is and lead in a more resourceful, sustainable and effective manner.

A student observed his Master, O Sensei, the founder of Aikido spar with a seasoned fighter. The novice said to the Master, “You never lose your balance. What is the secret?”

“You are wrong,” replied O Sensei. “I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it.”

About The Author

Tim JohnPress began his career while still in college teaching martial arts in the mid 1980’s. It was in the dojo that he discovered the joy of watching students self-actualize and do things they had only dreamed of.  In 1987, he began working as a Field Engineer for Astronautics Corporation where he was responsible for overseeing top secret communication systems for the U.S. military, ensuring staff and systems worked seamlessly. In 1997, he pursued his dream of working in the human potential field and founded Ascendte Advisors and today, Tim continues to coach and consult individuals, businesses, and higher education institutions, specializing in leadership development, strategic change, accelerating performance, and sustainable growth.

This program engages managers at every level from start to finish by remaining interactive, provocative, and fun. In the process, participants will be able to study, under the microscope, the inner “operating system” that links automatic thinking with leadership behavior. As a result, participants gain significant insight into the underpinnings of their leadership. This awareness increases leverage for change and enables them to lead with greater passion, compas

sion, courage, and effectiveness. At the end of the experience, each leader will walk away with a plan for improving their performance and that of their team.

Outcomes

• Stimulates deep and lasting leadership behavioral change
• Provides feedback using The Leadership Circle Profile on the organizational impact of leaders’ behavior
• Increases awareness about leaders’ specific competencies, strengths, and weaknesses, and about the inner “operating system” that is running leaders’ behavior patterns
• Deepens understanding of where and how to identify high leverage points for change
• Enhances ability to identify one’s own contribution to the problems and relationships that hinder goal achievement
• Helps individuals and teams come to terms with the reality that we are the cause of the future we want (not the effect of what others want)
• Creates quality action plans for improvement
• Builds alignment and support for sustained follow-through

This program is approved by ICF for 22.2 CCE Units.

→Learn More About Authentic Leader Workshop

We will be holding our next workshop in Washington D.C—Gaithersburg, MD from June 5-7. Learn more and register before spaces are filled or visit our calendar page for a full list of certifications worldwide. In addition, in-house Authentic Leader Workshops can be delivered to your organization—for teams, groups, and individuals—at a location and on dates of your choice. We look forward to seeing you soon!

The Leadership Circle offers well-written, researched white papers to help deepen your understanding and support your actions around leadership development. This month’s white paper, “The Leadership Circle and Organizational Performance,” outlines a study performed in 2005 and 2006, measuring how The Leadership Circle Profile (an 360-degree assessment tool) relates to business performance. The study shows that The Leadership Circle Profile is highly correlated to a measure of Leadership Effectiveness. Additionally, it shows strong and significant correlations to a measure of Business Performance. Furthermore, it dramatically shows how The Leadership Circle Profile graphically displays the aggregate results for those leaders whose business performance was rated best and worst. In short, this paper presents powerful evidence that changes in leadership behavior, as measured by The Leadership Circle Profile, are very likely to translate into increased leadership effectiveness and, thereby, bottom-line business performance.

To read “The Leadership Circle and Organizational Performance,” written by Bob Anderson, Founder and CEO of The Leadership Circle, visit http://www.theleadershipcircle.com/resources/position-papers.

Eight hundred years ago Hafiz compared our journey to a desert caravan where the challenge was to discern what was real from what was mirage. Sitting here in my office, this seems straightforward. Apparently, trying to stay alive in a barren desert is an altogether different story. Trying to find what is true and essential in organizational life is daunting as well. Hafiz’ perspective:

It has not rained light for many days,
The wells in most eyes look
Drought-stricken.
Thus friends are not easy to find
In this barren
Place.
Where most everyone has become ill
From guarding
Nothing.
On this primal caravan
Careers and cities can appear real in this
Intense
Desert heat,
But I say to my close ones,
Don’t get lost in them,
It has not rained light there for days.
Look, most everyone is diseased
From ‘making love’ to
Nothing.

(The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master. Daniel Ladinski, editor.)

Let’s begin by coming to terms with how marvelously easy it is to lose our way. We begin with humility. “…It has not rained light for many days…” I re-learned something the hard way last year: when I am weary and exhausted, stressed from an overwhelming set of priorities or secretly concerned that I may not measure up to the demands placed on me, my brain doesn’t work well. I see things that are not there; I make up stories and treat as real something that is completely imaginary. I worry about things I cannot control and battle enemies that appear to be “out there” but are really “in here.” I lose the ability to clearly tell the difference. The heat of my energy-demanding life, the torrid landscape of uncertainty, complexity, and endless demands on my time and calendar all take an invisible and cumulative toll. I feel thirsty for light.

• Action: Become strategically unavailable. I have purposed to build in time to breathe deeply and cool down. I suggest you find room to breathe, and travel more lightly, as well. Drought-stricken eyes are caused by an endless diet of problems and things gone wrong. Problems we take personally. I will find and pursue possibilities that awaken others and me so that we each have a more enjoyable and meaningful trip. I will learn how to rain light, a vital leadership competency not often listed in leadership journals.

In an illusionary world, where a mirage can make real what is not, we may need resiliency and resolve to reach our destination. In the interim, we live primarily with uncertainty and with what David Whyte calls “…The bitter unwanted passion of our sure defeat.” Under this kind of pressure we can lapse into categorizing others around us friend or foe, ally, or enemy. These are not useful categories except on the wartime field of battle. Yet I have seen several instances where colleagues and I fell into this mindset: If you see the world differently than we do you are not one of us. You are with “them.” Friends are hard to find in this barren place.

When complexity, pace of change, and scarcity of resources simultaneously escalate, the organizational world can become spiritually and emotionally barren. Sound bites pass as dialogue and heaving opinions back and forth passes for learning from one another. We want to be right more than effective. It is easy to see where we could feel justified in excluding those who seem different. We have simply adjusted to the norm of separation. We have adjusted to the mirage of separate and competing interests. We have fallen into the bleak, un-awakened landscape of believing that in order to get what I want you must lose something. Each time I am successful taking from you I become more vulnerable myself. I know you could do the same to me. My defenses must therefore be made stronger. On it goes. I personally have done these things even while righteously proclaiming I want to be creatively maladjusted. Welcome to the citadel of my life!

• Action: Cultivate friendships and new partnerships with others who may appear to see their world differently than you do but who are undoubtedly cut from the same cloth as you and me. “…Thus friends are hard to find in this barren place…” I have purposed to find ways to connect with others I see as different. I have spent too many days and years as a lone sentinel standing over my organization, my field of study, my professional discipline, and other things I mistook for me. I have begun to see that when I mistake my business strategies, my politics, my ideology, my religion, my nation, my organization for myself, I then lose the ability to live with compassion in the world. I then become just one more man, defending one more mirage and fighting one more senseless battle. It is enough.

When I spend time and energy defending my position, my opinion, my career, my technical expertise, my functional area—virtually anything that has the word “my” in front of it—I am very likely guarding nothing. “…Most everyone has become ill from guarding nothing…”

Guarding is essentially a reactive action, i.e. I must be vigilant from a threat that always emerges “out there” and be ready to defend. Even when my action appears strong and tough, it is motivated by a desire to guard or defend (myself and what I have mistaken to be real). Then my action is compensatory at best. I am playing to not lose. It is impossible to move into elite level work from such a defensive stance.

• Action: Watch closely what you defend and guard and get curious when and why you defend it. Curiosity is often much better than judgment. I have purposed to defend much less this year than in any other year. I desire that my action be purpose-driven—moving others and me towards outcomes that matter to us all—and no longer in protecting and guarding my illusory and false sense of self. I will watch closely how often I reference “me” and “my,” seeing these indicators as a relevant set of (creatively maladjusted) metrics in a world that claims to like metrics.

Consider the real possibility that core systems and structures in our lives may be mirages. “…Careers and cities can appear real in this intense desert heat…” When you are under considerable heat pay careful attention to what you think you see. Mirages abound! The small footnote in the torn page of my life is worth remembering here. Careers, cities, businesses appear and appear real when you’re in them! There are, after all, traffic lights, buildings, and noise. There are customers, incentive plans, and performance evaluations, pay grades, promotions, and turnover. I hope the last item does not include me! It is only in perspective, gained by stepping back and breathing, that I can begin to entertain the possibility that much of what I have invested my life energy in is temporary, impermanent, and likely to be gone soon. If it was ever there at all! But this is a perspective gained from being outside the mirage looking at it, not from within it.

• Action: Remember: things are not as they appear. I purpose to act as if all things are malleable. I see what I am prepared to see. Problems or opportunities? My call and yours. Nothing is as fixed, dense and “given” as I think it is. Neither my customers’ behavior and circumstances nor my own behavior and circumstances are as dense as I once thought. There is hope. Then again, I might be a mirage myself, but that’s another article.

From his desert experiences Hafiz implies there is an abiding spiritual reality behind things, an un-changing truth behind the shimmering mirage. “…I say to my close ones, ‘Don’t get lost in them’…” No prayer beads, wailing, or sacrifice are required, just curiosity. The underlying Essence is not always easy to find and doesn’t announce itself with lights and flags waving. Yet, asking, “What’s really going on here” seems to invite its response. Learn to bring this “meaning making” power we have into your direct conversation with others. When done right, this will at times feel uncomfortable and awkward, and require vulnerability and courage on your part. Particularly in misunderstandings where tensions get triggered, don’t get lost in meaningless positions and exaggerated arguments. Why defend gravity?

• Action: Find your own way of pursuing and describing the essence of the issues with which you are faced. Use your intuition or your gut to discern the small voice or gentle hand on the small of your back saying, “Don’t get lost in them.” I have purposed to listen for the open secret hidden in plain sight, there in the midst of conversations with those I live and work with. I have tasted a different kind of connection with others and have grown weary of settling for something less. Plus, drought stricken eyes don’t look cool.

The complexity, pace, and pressure of the workplace today require an unprecedented level of emotional and behavioral resiliency. We have to hang in with each other for the long haul caravan. For leaders, this means we have to speak into the heart of others in ways we may never have before. We appeal to drought-stricken eyes with our own vulnerability and openness to new learning, our courage to share our struggles, uncertainties, and concerns even as we pursue outcomes that are important but seem impossible. As we take others aside and share what we know with them (instead of using them as order takers) we are implicitly calling out and speaking to the inherent brilliance of others as we see it. What could be more important?

• Action: Expand your skill set by learning how to appeal to the mind, hands, and heart of those you work alongside. Most of us appeal only to the mind: we want to be seen as relevant, rational, and right. A new slant on the Three R’s. We speak in declarative statements that reveal our thinking and position on things. If we are with each other long enough, we can easily predict one another’s viewpoints before we open our mouths. Put down the spreadsheet or your cash flow analysis and look out. I have laid mine aside too. I’ll meet you in a different conversation.

The short story here is this: leadership is not only or even primarily a rational discipline. When done well, it awakens passions and emotions. When done at a high level, leadership combines elements of inward and outward strength, power, authority, touch, vulnerability, sensitivity, imagination, connection, intuitive knowing, and risky conversation. Leadership is, at times, very sensual. It can involve lovemaking of a highest order—devotion not just to good work and purposeful achievement but also to inevitable work, that which we came into life to do and to that Essential part of us that calls us to it. It is only in this larger context that we can see more clearly how easy it is to “…Become diseased from making love with nothing.” A look at the headlines in any newspaper confirms how easily we can be duped into settling for something, or someone, less.

• Final Action: Love what is real. “Look, almost everyone is diseased from making love with nothing.” Imagine the CNN headlines: American health care costs skyrocket—Defending and making love with nothing reach epidemic levels in the workplace! If you’re considering a creatively maladjusted life you’ve got to appreciate the desert mystics of another time and era. Their love of the Divine was sensual; their ecstasy in union whole-body! Their connection with The Essential, Body-Consuming.

Mine is something less than this.

I have purposed to follow the thread of the Essential as it seeks expression in my life and work this year. I do not want to fall prey to fighting small battles over nothing and finding when I win I actually become smaller. I want to be decisively defeated by what is Essential. I will do my best to ask: What matters most here? What seems to want to happen here? What truth lies behind and fuels the frustration I see in others and myself?

May you see the inherent beauty in and come to trust your own maladjustment. Remember, we are not supposed to adjust to inequity, injustice, mediocrity, and deception. What are the additional things you know you are not supposed to adjust to this year? Join the creatively maladjusted community of leaders and those who work with them. We are a small but deceptively powerful group caravanning through a world in dire need of magic!

The Project Center, which was only accessed previously by visiting https://admin.theleadershipcircle.com directly, can now be accessed from the global Leadership Circle website through a link in the site’s header.

The Project Center is available to all certified Leadership Circle members and allows them to manage their client’s Leadership Circle projects from start to finish, download PDF client reports, view report samples, view order details, and more.

“With the changes to the Project Center, it is now easier for our certified members to manage all aspects of Leadership Circle Profile management and administration themselves,” stated Laura Rerucha, Vice President of Operations at The Leadership Circle. “Profile and Culture Survey administration is now readily at their fingertips, allowing community members to focus more on coaching and helping their clients.”

In addition to managing client Profiles, recent additions to the Project Center provide certified members with access to a variety of helpful resources. The Resources section houses position papers, how-tos, demographic data, webinars, and marketing materials. Non-certified members without access to the Project Center can still access a smaller selection of materials, including white papers, past Leadership Quarterly articles, videos, and case studies, in the Resources section of the global website.

About The Leadership Circle

The Leadership Circle offers best-in-class 360-degree assessment and development tools for individuals, groups, teams, and entire organizations. What The Leadership Circle ultimately provides is support for leadership transformation—change that evolves authentically from the inside out.

As this program teaches you how to use The Leadership Circle assessments, it will also provide a new lens through which you will learn about leadership development. Certification provides you with an in-depth education about the theoretical models and stage of development frameworks that are built into the Leadership Circle Profile. Learn More About Certification

Upcoming Certification: Atlanta, GA – April 10-12, 2013

We will be holding a certification in Atlanta, GA from April 10-12. Learn more and register before spaces are filled or visit our calendar page for a full list of certifications worldwide. We look forward to seeing you soon!

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce myself – to give you a sense for who I am and how I will be involved with you. My name is Katherine Anderson. I’m a single, active, young woman living in Windy City, U.S.A, known as Chicago, IL. I work for Full Circle Group, a partner to The Leadership Circle, as a Project Administrator and have recently taken on the exciting challenge of becoming the Manager of Practitioner Care for both Full Circle Group and The Leadership Circle. In the Practitioner Care role I will be, hopefully with your help, figuring out how we can better reach and engage you, find out what you’d like to hear and learn about, read about in this newsletter, what kind of events you would like to attend, and how we did as it relates to our Certifications, Authentic Leader program, and our customer service. All the while I will still gladly be supporting the highly skilled consultants at Full Circle Group.

My journey thus far:

Shaped by the 90’s internet-explosion (oh, dial-up, how I [don’t] miss thee) and the Facebook revolution, I’m trying to find my own way; carve out my own path in this digitized age. It’s proving to be a difficult task. Connection is expansive and limited, touching everything and no one all at once; Knowledge is wide-spread, readily available at our fingertips making us all experts at all things, for better or worse; And the growing complexity of this world demands of us to be bigger, better, faster, smarter, more creative, innovative, and above all, a leader. A daunting task! I used to have this dream, often, and repetitively, where the steepest hill ever imagined lay before me. It was a hill so steep that you were scared of peeling off and falling backwards to your demise, but it was the only path to your destination. If and when you made it to the top, the road disappeared, curled beneath your toes, and you just had to jump.

I have had the blessing of bearing witness to the power of The Leadership Circle at a young age and the privilege to have the influence and support of some amazing role models throughout the course of my life – some of which were your Certification or Authentic Leader instructors. My first real exposure to The Leadership Circle was at the ripe old age of 16 when I took over printing, shipping and tracking all orders that came through The Leadership Circle. My understanding was basic: a mushroom-shaped profile = good, an up-side-down one…well, room for improvement. Additionally, I was in an AP Statistics class in my high school and this, the Profile, was a very tangible example of a real-life application, which seemed to make it more significant, more real. It connected me to the work in a very rudimentary way.

I gained a deeper understanding along with great appreciation and awe for the Leadership Circle Profile when I had the opportunity to sit in on a Certification. I was 19 and mid-way through college. Knowing little about Organizational Development, the industry, the tools available, I was intuitively aware of how integrative this tool was. I was struck by how violently people reacted to the profile: some embraced it; others utterly rejected it. How was it that a person could be reacting with such passion to a bunch of data? In the end, though, everyone came around, and they, too, were enchanted. Awe only scratches the surface of its impression on me as I saw the impact it had in the lives of individuals – and the resulting domino effect it can have.

Post college graduation wasn’t quite a breeze either – or at least not the breeze I was hoping for. I graduated in the pits of the recession and jobs were hard to come by. I lived at home, waited tables, saved up my money and searched for jobs. Roughly a year into this routine, as I was beginning to plan a move to Chicago, I was introduced to Full Circle Group where I have been for the last 2.5 years. My role has grown from part time, to full time, to now a dual-role in The Leadership Circle and Full Circle Group. I forget sometimes what an advantage I have being a part of this work and network, and the amount of dormant knowledge I possess about what good leadership is and is not, about personal transformation, about cultural change. Concepts, that to me have been apart of my life since I was 16, are new and foreign to some. Yet there is still so much to learn.

Recently I had my own profile and debrief done. It wasn’t quite unexpected as it has been a very introspective year, a year of navigation, but the extent to which my data pointed one way or another was a little staggering.

If you haven’t figured the connection out, Bob Anderson is my dad. Needless to say, The Leadership Circle has been a thread in my life.

Now I’m trying to find my own voice as an individual, as leader. A voice that feels it has little ground to stand on, or experience to speak from. And yet, here I am, standing not-quite-tall, working on creating a path – and I begin my journey in a Leadership Development company. Coincidence? You tell me. I have been working with Full Circle Group for over 2 years as an admin and project manager. It has been a great, and challenging experience. I am just fine at organizing and details, but I knew, and as my The Leadership Circle Profile screamed, I am very relationship-oriented. I am here to grow, strengthen, and leverage that.

I’d like to start with you. I’m taking control of this wonderful newsletter and I’d like to hear from you. What do you want to read more of? Hear more of? Do more of? What topics are of interest to you? What have you read in Leadership Quarterly and really enjoyed, or not enjoyed? I want to know it all! Please email me: Katherine.anderson@fcg-global.com, I would love to hear what you have to say.

Lastly, I want to say thank you for being apart of our journey to extend our reach and to spread the practice of conscious leadership globally. This is not a solo journey and together we will leave a footprint – maybe even a path.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Refer Associates and Receive Free Profiles

You may know an experienced coach who has an interest in attending a Leadership Circle Profile certification. If you refer that person, and they have not been in contact with The Leadership Circle, you will receive a credit for a free  Leadership Circle Profile for your referral. This is valued at $300 USD retail. To receive this referral credit, ask you associate to write your name in the box on the registration form that asks “who referred you?” This offer is valid only for public certifications listed in North America on The Leadership Circle website for 2013. Offer is not valid in conjunction with other offers, promotions, or discounts. If you or someone you refer has any questions, please contact Jonathan Hulsh through our online form.

Certification Refresher

Many Leadership Circle members have seen the value in repeating their certification experience to deepen their learning and to network with like-minded individuals. Most report that the refresher is an even more powerful educational experience than their initial certification. The discounted refresher rate for previously certified Leadership Circle members is $495 USD (for public programs in the US and Canada). If you would like a new profile, there is an additional fee of $150 USD.

Upgraded Certification Design

We have recently upgraded the program design, providing more time for the actual debriefing of profile reports. You will also be introduced to the new Leadership Circle Profile Managers Edition, as well as the traditional Leadership Circle Profile.

Refresher Registration is Easy

Registering for a refresher is easy. Register here, and write in the comment box “I request a refresher”.

While my own questioning has been exacerbated by the election, these issues are the kinds of matters leaders I work with face every day. I write this while on a temporary break from a singularly exhausting period of work and travel. I’m unsure how I contributed to a calendar that clearly violates all of my most cherished values around work-life balance, reflection and spiritual renewal, family time and the importance of remaining close to the natural world, one foot on the next hiking trail or ocean beach. The pace, volume, intensity and impact of change in my life and work have made this period unlike any other I have faced. I am like those I coach.

‘There are no easy answers’, we are told, yet there are practices that have stood the test of time. William Stafford (1914-1993) one of the great poets of the last century and former Poet Laureate of the nation, reminds us of three of these practices. Here is what he says to us all.

A Ritual to Read to Each other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear:
the darkness around us is deep.

From The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems © Graywolf Press.

Practice One: Know Yourself

You know you’re already in trouble if you are tempted to skip over this section. The greatest barrier to self-knowledge is, after all, the belief we already possess it. That what we know about ourselves is not just true but is all there is to know about us. Today, as an example, it is possible to pass through most MBA programs with no coursework required to assess and improve your own self-awareness as a leader! It is possible to sponsor or lead many large-scale organizational change models––on collaboration, innovation, facilitative leadership, teamwork, customer service, quality improvement, and patient satisfaction–and not be expected to look closely at your own level of self awareness and assess its likely impact on the change effort you will take part in. And, if you’re a senior leader, you will only get (and apparently only need) the two-hour overview; it’s assumed you already know the rest! Self-awareness is seriously underrated.

William Stafford warns us if we don’t know who we are “…a pattern others made may prevail in the world and, following the wrong god home, we may miss our star.” We can easily be led astray when we don’t know who we are and miss what is truly important. For leaders who pride ourselves on self-reliance, autonomy and resilience, the ease with which we can be led astray may feel exaggerated. Here is how simply it can happen.

Recently, I got stranded in an airport unable to get to an important meeting the next day. I am not happy. I board a hotel van along with other stranded ones. I know I feel impatient, frustrated and tired. I am unaware of my own arrogance and selfishness as I make sure to sit in the front seat of the van so I can be first in the hotel check-in line. I don’t care about anyone else on the van. I’m tired, after all, and a very important person! As we are about to pull away I notice an older man using a walker and dragging a suitcase while making his way slowly towards our van. He won’t make it. We all know it, on the van, and none of us move. A pattern of watching out for our own self-interests prevails with nobody needing to say anything.

Something in me stirs. I’ve seen this man before, in the terminal. He wears a hat that I recognize as a Marine Recon veteran, Viet Nam era. I yell to the van driver to open his doors. I grab the man and his luggage and help him into the van, quietly fuming the process has been slowed down by this man. I help him through the hotel check in process, resigned now to having lost my first place in line.

The next morning I arrive in the lobby early, hoping again to get the first seat in the first van heading back to the airport. The entire stranded group is there before me! So is my Marine. I help him onto the van; someone else grabs his luggage while another offers him his seat in front. At the airport, we assist him through security. The others say goodbye and head for the gate. I buy him breakfast and eat with him before helping him board, where we say our goodbye. “I won’t forget you,” he says. “It’s been an honor to be with you,” I say. We don’t see each other again.

I have turned away in my own self-preservation more often than I care to admit. This story, regrettably, is the exception not the norm with me. I tell it here because it illustrates the impact of what our poet says to us. If we don’t know who we are a pattern others made may prevail in the world. We all will be made the lesser for it.

As an executive coach to business leaders there are several action items built around self-awareness and understanding others. Among these are the following:

1. Know your strengths as well as your default tactics where you go when under stress or duress.

Strength	Default
Achieving results; pushing hard for improvement	Excessive control, abusive power
Strong relationships & team effectiveness	Acquiescence and silence; refusing to stand up when things get tough. Violence expressed (behind closed doors) as demeaning career and character assessments of those not present.
Intellectual brilliance, conceptual adroitness. Seeing through complexity	Belittling others for their stupidity and foolishness; endless criticizing “lesser beings” whose opinions differ from your own. Aloofness.
Courageous authenticity & candidness	Self-righteousness and arrogance; strident ridicule of others who hold a different perspective.
Systems awareness and political savvy	Cowardice and secrecy dressed up “living to fight another day.”
Openness to learning and personal change	Arrogance and resistance to those in other camps; “my way or the highway” mindset.

2. Know what drives your actions. This is life long work made easier when we accept as true two plausible realities:
1. We never react for reasons we think we do. We think we are reacting to external events, circumstances and people. Yet unless we have a measure of self-understanding we invariably react to an inner story we have made up about these external conditions.
2. We make up a world in our mind and then react to it all the while treating it as reality we had no part in creating. I feel impatient and frustrated on the hotel van because I made up a story that… I was late…others were holding me up…my performance with my client would be impacted…and I would lose credibility if I were not on my game. Find your story and you’ll find your leverage and power to change. You won’t be the one elephant that leads the others astray.

3. Know the impact of your actions on others; this is more important than knowing your good intentions. Few if any of us act out of intentions that are not warranted, in our perspective. Even the most outrageous action usually makes sense to the one authoring it. Getting clear about intentions is monologic action: I know my reasons and may have no need or imperative to engage anyone is conversation about them. To assess the behavioral impact of my behavior, however, requires a dialogic response from me. I must engage other humans to find out what my behavior did to them. No further explaining or re-explaining my intentions is needed; no yes-but rebuttals, no justifying and no lectures on the virtues of my behavior are required here. Just be curious and open. That’s all. As if it is easy.

Practice 2: Do Your Part

Even if others don’t. Up to this point our leadership conversation has been personal–we must know one another and ourselves. Now, the story shifts.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.



And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.



Forces that are very old drive us at times. We are then betrayed by forgotten or un-examined patterns–sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. We know this happens and yet don’t acknowledge the fact that we play a role. The impact is that we wander and take others with us; we collectively miss the park. My silence and desire to fly under the radar–a childhood pattern–made it easier for everyone else on the hotel van to remain in their silence as well. My speaking up made it easier for others to step up.

The next day I am working with an executive team. We begin to create a plan to build a new culture in their organization, beginning with this team. Start where you are. We carefully spell out what each person needs from the others in order to thrive. We detail our commitments, what others can count on us for, when the going gets tough, when there are disagreements and conflict. Resources are scarce, pressure from the board for better results is strong and getting stronger. The heat has been turned up and everyone feels it.

We finish our work and begin working on the first strategic item on the agenda. Within minutes the CEO abruptly cuts off one of the junior women. In the next several moments we collectively manage to violate all of the agreements we had made only a short while ago! I am again sitting on my hands, as I was the night before on the hotel van. I know this moment is a big deal to the junior member and to the new culture trying to be born. I decide to call a “Stop action” (one of their agreements). I point out what just happened. The CEO advises me we need to move on. I disagree. “The new culture gets built right here, in this moment,” I say, “Or the old culture gets further entrenched. You must choose now.”

The CEO, to his credit, acknowledges that he has been triggered by something he thought was said. He briefly shares his reactive default, asks what the impact was on her and apologizes to the offended person. The two leaders reconcile. But we are not yet done. I turn to the other members of the senior team and ask, “How many of you knew something went off, in that moment earlier?” Every hand went up. “Let’s talk about your silence.” A courageous conversation ensued. We each humbly acknowledged how easy it is to get caught up in the moment; how in our earnest desire to get tasks completed we easily forget the trail we leave behind us. The remainder of the day was ‘one of the most productive talks this team had ever had with each other’, they would say. And it was.

True confession: I am older now. I have lost my desire to change the world. I no longer think about my legacy or the lasting impact my words and work will have in the world. Who can know whether this intervention will even change the senior team? I do my part because it is what I know to do. That’s all. Nobody will ever notice or even care; that’s fine with me. I have lost two family members over the past three years, a mother who lived a long and full life and a sister, who died young and too soon. Their memories fade more in me each day. I once thought they would remain with me forever; now, I doubt it. This is simply the way of life, or the way of my life. The memory of my life will also fade quickly, like a figure in a dream, in those I leave.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

I try and do my part because it’s what I know to do. I don’t concern myself with what others do or don’t do. Every time I look to others to join me I create my own powerlessness. Just a look in their direction is enough to lull me back to sleep. Why waste time trying to fool one another? I decided it makes more sense to be a tipping point wherever I am. The shadowy voice within me, that remote important region that prompted me to get off my butt and make the way smoother for the Marine at the airport, or prod the senior team, is what I want to appeal to in others and myself. When I am able to do this I feel alive. I feel awake.

Practice 3: Wake Up

This article draws attention to two moments in my recent life: sitting on a hotel van and participating in a business team session twelve hours later. These are not unusual or extraordinary moments. I have drifted mindlessly through many moments like this in the past with whatever professional skill set I could muster. There is a lot going on in the present moment, however, if we are awake to it and learn to follow its leading.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear:
the darkness around us is deep.

Waking Up doesn’t appear on the list of leadership competencies of any organization I know of. Yet, it underlies all real movement in the direction of genuine, sustainable change. “Wake up!” is the shortest most powerful action plan for leaders today. In any meeting, board session, project review, strategic planning session, talk with your kids, or conversation with your spouse or partner, waking up can revitalize that particular moment. I have to admit that even though I work at remaining awake, what I fail to see or that which I overlook altogether could, if somehow assembled end-to-end, fill up the distance between here and Jupiter.

The angel disguised as a Marine vet at the airport reminded me that the darkness around us is deep. He silently called out to me, “What will you do today?” I answered without words. Today, I will make my yes, no and maybe clear. And you? What will you do?

About The Author

Dan Holden has worked in executive and team development for over 30 years. Dan is a Senior Consultant and Facilitator for The Leadership Circle.He serves on the Executive MBA staff at the University of Notre Dame, where in 2006 he was awarded the school’s Inspiring Educator of the Year Award. Dan has worked with the Center for Creative Leadership, and continues his work with Elsie Y. Cross Associates, Inc., on issues of diversity and culture change. He is the author of Lost Between Lives-Finding Your Light When the World Goes Dark (2004). He has authored several articles, including Diversity Unraveled and The Forgotten Self–Executive Development in the 21st Century, which appear in the Industrial Management Journal, 2006. His most recent articles are entitled The Missing Ingredient in Organizational Change-Leadership Transformation and Does Your Team Need an MRI.

I have worked in executive leadership development for over twenty-five years and currently serve as an executive coach for the University of Notre Dame’s Executive MBA program. Our old ways of growing leaders are not enough to prepare us for the complexity, terror, uncertainty and excitement of the days we are in. In our rush to drive results we easily forget that it is the inner life of leaders where meaning is made and strategies formed to innovate and compete in the marketplace. While many of these strategies are conscious and open to discussion, many are not. It is these unconscious strategies that thwart executive development and, in the end, organizational performance. This article discusses four traps, or errors in our thinking about executive development, and suggests straightforward antidotes that immediately improve the way we develop new leaders.

High potential leaders are typically culled from the ranks of those with a level of technical mastery in their respective disciplines. We take our best engineers and financial managers, our best sales and marketing people, our best corporate lawyers and throw them into the leadership soup. We may send them away for training in new technical areas or pass them through a rotation of brief assignments in key areas to quickly expand the breadth and scope of their knowledge. The content of most graduate programs carries a heavy academic bias. We develop minds to comprehend what’s “out there” and frequently overlook the heart and soul.

Performance assessments focus on short-term measurable results. Those who continue to deliver are promoted while those who struggle can fall out of favor very quickly. A success oriented culture demands immediate achievement and doesn’t know what to do with hardship and struggle, doubt and fear. It is these deeper issues of the heart and soul of the leader that often go unrecognized even though real transformation (i.e., a change in thinking) often lies just on the other side of what we fear. When successful executives are asked about their most significant learning events along the way, they often speak of hardship and the lessons learned by grappling with disappointment and loss. We lose sight of this in our development efforts.

We are trained to keep our fears and inner struggles to ourselves and to compensate for them. “Never let them see you sweat.” It is these ragged, emotional and spiritual issues that deepen both our leadership and our humanity, impacting followers long after our tenure as leaders is over. They yield leaders who speak from a full, authentic self. When these interior dynamics are unexamined or kept silent people, performance and organizational culture suffers. A small, reactive self takes its place.

Consider the following story from 12th century Japan.

The New Flute

A new flute was invented in China. A Japanese master musician discovered the subtle beauties of its tone and brought it back home, where he gave concerts all around the country. One evening he played with a community of musicians and music lovers who lived in a certain town. At the end of the concert, his name was called. He took out the new flute and played one piece. When he was finished, there was silence in the room for a long moment. Then, the voice of the oldest man was heard from the back of the room: “Like a god!”

The next day, as this master was packing to leave, the musicians approached him and asked how long it would take a skilled player to learn the new flute. “Years,” he said. They asked if he would take a pupil, and he agreed. After he left, they decided among themselves to send a young man, a brilliantly talented flautist, sensitive to beauty, diligent and trustworthy. They gave him money for his living expenses and for the master’s tuition and sent him on his way to the capital, where the master lived.

Trap 1: Seizing shortcuts to real mastery, underestimating the real costs

This journey begins with our young musician attending a concert where he is touched by the music and sees his own calling as he listens to and experiences the master. But there is a trap: How long will it take . . . The early warning signs of flawed desire: an urgency to cut short the real work of mastery. I have been asked this question a thousand times. How long will the coaching take? How many days for the training? Can we do it in less time? The honest answer is that it will take longer than we think because real development is not technical but a much deeper process. A subterranean current runs through our lives and slowly carves our contributions and talents out of us. We control only a small aspect of it. We learn to develop our strengths as well as cultivate a relationship with our vulnerabilities, the latter work we quite naturally resist. Our primary work, often overlooked, is understanding and moving through our resistance.

A parallel exists with many senior leaders who see their role as only sponsoring the change initiatives before their organizations. They seldom choose to embody the change themselves. Strategies to build greater customer awareness and innovation while streamlining product delivery are just part of the landscape in many organizations today. Culture change, interdepartmental partnerships and involvement, workflow re-design and cost reduction efforts, diversity, managing change, and transition all will test a leader’s capacity to wade through confusion and resistance in order to learn, internalize and execute new models and frameworks. This takes time!

The student arrived and was accepted by his teacher, who assigned him a single, simple tune. At first, he received systematic instruction, but he easily mastered all the technical problems. Now he arrived for his daily lesson, sat down and played his tune–and all the master could say was, “Something lacking.” The student exerted himself in every possible way; he practiced for endless hours; yet, day after day, week after week, all the master said was, “Something lacking.”

Trap 2: Overemphasizing technical competence

The young musicians assess whom to send and choose a man with the right technical talent and sensitivity to beauty. Early in the journey of leadership development we have to learn to embrace the undercurrent of fear of falling short. Fear often shows up when our technical competence fails us; it simply is not enough to take us beyond a certain point in the mastery path. Clinging only to what we know how to do adds to our suffering. Real vision requires us to do things we’ve never done before. We don’t know if what we want is possible. Our senior leaders question us. Our boards demand timetables and guarantees. We can derail under the real or imagined threat that important people will look at our work and wag their heads in disappointment, ‘Something lacking.’

Real vision can evoke real excitement as well as real fear. When fear goes unrecognized, as it often does, it can freeze us into over using technical competence to force results that will not happen. We stick to our financial skills, project management abilities, engineering models, and IT processes while failing to sharpen the new leadership stance that would serve the organization. We lose our nimbleness and responsiveness and become fixed and solidified. We play to ‘not lose’ rather than playing full out to win. Our young flautist doesn’t see this dynamic.

He begged the master to change the tune, but the master said no. The daily playing, the daily, ‘Something lacking’ continued for months on end. The student’s hope of success and fear of failure became ever magnified, and he swung from agitation to despondency.

Trap 3: Ignoring inner mindsets and assumptions

The story deepens. Technical mastery quickly ends and gives way to approval seeking and pleasing others; even a simple tune is beyond his reach. The need for perfection begins to strangle our young musician. The student’s need for success becomes stronger. This is a telltale sign that the unexamined fear and the assumptions that drive it have grown stronger, not weaker. The small, reactive self is now treated as if it were the part in charge. A great mistake many, many emerging leaders make without knowing it. An urgent, overwhelming “must have or else” desire for something, is now coupled with the fear of falling short. It is not a pleasant spot!

Most organizations have a set of leadership competencies and test against these with various 360 instruments, peer reviews and customer feedback. We seldom look more deeply at the assumptions that drive our behavior, the mental operating system that supports our behavior. We ask leaders to change aspects of their behavior, i.e., ‘delegate more effectively,’ without looking at the assumptions that drive the old behavior, i.e., ‘If I want this job done perfectly I must do it myself or else the whole project comes undone.’ No wonder we revert to the old way so quickly!

There are three mindsets that consistently limit leaders with whom I work. I recognize them in part because I struggle with them myself and also because they are each well researched and documented. They drive the small, reactive self.

Excessive control. This strategy for reacting to unrecognized fear or anxiety can manifest as a need for perfection, an exaggerated driven stance or heightened ambition. The tendency to adopt an autocratic style when greater involvement is actually called for is a lead indicator. We’re trying to prove something to someone and the only barometer of success is a perfect score or a pile of achievements or acquisitions that continues to grow. There is a secret inner assumption that we don’t measure up, and excessive control is the compensatory strategy the small self uses to keep us feeling worthwhile, valuable and secure. It seldom does for long. Our flautist, without awareness or skill in his interior wilderness, has gotten lost.

Excessive aloofness & criticalness. With this strategy we attempt to stay on top by knowing more than others and using our perception of being smarter and more intelligent to critique and diminish the contributions of others so as to secure firm footing ourselves. This is largely a cerebral kingdom and the distance that needs to be kept from “lesser” others is a core part of the strategy. We don’t see ourselves as part of the culture or operations we criticize. To admit to ‘not knowing’ is to invite catastrophe. The small self assumes that greater interpersonal involvement could prove overwhelming, suffocating or worse; better to stay away and critique from a distance. In extreme cases, people actually cannot be found. They bury themselves in laboratories, behind closed doors, and lob their decisions and critiques from afar. We will see some of this in our frustrated musician.

Excessive approval seeking. If we hold an inner assumption that our true value and worth lies in the hands of others, then it stands that we will do what we can to manage how others see us. We avoid conflict and have trouble telling the truth if important others may be upset by it. We manage ourselves so as to remain in the club and avoid behaviors that could get us thrown out. We say “Yes” when we mean “No” and then quietly sabotage the work we said “Yes” to! The mere act of coming to work can be an endless game of walking on eggshells and “playing nice.” We don’t learn to contend for what matters to us. The candor required on elite level teams is missing. You might be surprised to find that even the toughest sounding leaders can struggle with approval seeking.

Each of the strategies above is an example of our small, reactive self playing to not lose. Those of us who get stuck in this game mistake what we do for who we are. ‘I am my work…I am my next achievement…I am and must be invulnerable and perfect, needing nothing…I am what others think of me.’ The moment we associate our sense of self, our worth, our security with external conditions, we sentence ourselves to a roller coaster experience in which we never quite catch up because the operating assumptions lie outside of our awareness. The organizations we lead stop learning to adapt because of the prevailing fear or caution that exists. We may well achieve a level of excellence in our leadership results for a period of time, sometimes years. Until light shines on the inner assumptions, we miss higher, more elegant levels of mastery where we could achieve even more, with much less effort and strain. Transformation happens when leaders see their own mental software and begin to replace the small self with a full authentic self.

Trap 4: Rewarding only external achievements while overlooking hardship and inward struggle

The intensity of the student’s journey has grown much stronger and he seemingly breaks down. There are acceptable feelings in the leadership development path, ones that are deemed appropriate to experience and act on. These include anger, frustration, impatience, pride, and confidence. Men can show these more easily than women and whites are allowed greater latitude than men and women of color. Our student, however, experiences feelings that are at the heart of real mastery but seldom allowed voice in our leadership programs, let alone in our organizations, i.e., confusion, shame, and fear. He wants to disappear from his original calling.

Finally, the frustration became too much for him. One night, he packed his bag and slinked out. He continued to live in the capital city for some time longer until his money ran dry. He began drinking. Finally, impoverished, he drifted back to his own part of the country. Ashamed to show his face to his former colleagues, he found a hut far out in the countryside. He still possessed his flutes, still played, but found no new inspiration in music. Passing farmers heard him play and sent their children to him for beginner’s lessons. He lived this way for years.

In our own journey, there may well be a place where our original vision is lost, or becomes too heavy a burden for us to carry. Plant closings, mergers, and acquisitions come to mind. Demotions or jobs lost altogether. I think of a recent conversation with a former president of an acquired company who spoke of being afraid to return to a city and walk through the building that housed thousands of people he led for years. ‘It would be too much to bear,’ he tells me. We turn away from pain hoping to escape. We dream of taking new positions in other organizations where the way is easier. We begin living fully outside of the organization and mistake this for work-life balance! We lose our heart. Our great gifts and original song are still hidden within, dormant, simmering until another time. Our young flautist continues to play but finds no inspiration; when we only play for someone else, or do what others would do, we, too, become dead inside. How do your emerging leaders wrestle with these issues? Or, do you encourage them to play it too safe, too close to the chest to know these issues at all?

One of the most significant transitions leaders must attempt is losing the desire to please and be respected by those around and above us. We may develop many competencies, and a solid track record of success along the way but to the extent we assign final approval of ourselves to others we’re essentially playing to not lose their respect. Not many will conceptually disagree with these words; in the heat of organizational life, however, choosing to fully engage with no fear of winning or losing anything (including the 401K and this year’s incentive bonus) is an emotionally demanding journey few undertake. Interiority, that intangible presence we know in few leaders, is the fruit of this inner grappling. There is also a level of genuinely inspired performance on the other side of this threshold that awaits those who venture into the inner water of change. The executive development conversation needs to include these experiences.

One morning, there was a knock on his door. It was the oldest past master from his town, along with the youngest student. They told him that tonight they were going to have a concert and they had all decided it would not take place without him. With some effort, they overcame his feelings of fear and shame and, almost in a trance, he picked up a flute and went with them.

I periodically ask leaders to reflect on difficult transitions they have successfully navigated. I invite them to focus on the toughest part of these times. Then, I ask what it was that finally helped them turn the corner. Although the answers vary, the common themes have to do with God, faith, and fortuitous circumstances falling into place. We can believe all we want that we run our lives but tough times teach us that there is another, deeper current that operates outside of our daily decision-making. There are other forces at play. Hardship gets our attention.

Even though years have gone by and his talent is seemingly wasted, the synchronicity here suggests the presence of the Sacred. There is no escaping his true life anymore than we can escape own life. Our young master agrees to go, almost in a trance. Sometimes the invisible world has to virtually stop us in our tracks and put us to sleep in order to wake us up!

The concert began. As he waited behind the stage, no one intruded on his inner silence. Finally, at the end of the concert, his name was called. He stepped out onto his stage in his rags. He looked down at his hands and realized he had chosen the new flute. Now he realized that he had nothing to gain and nothing to lose. He sat down and played the same tune he had played so many times for his teacher in the past. When he finished, there was silence for a long moment. Then the voice of the oldest man was heard, speaking softly from the back of the room: “Like a god!”

An extraordinary moment that he could not see from his vantage point unfolds. A dream he no longer grasped–yet still held loosely–opens before his eyes. What was offered once in grief and desperation is received back. All of the anguish, the long nights howling to an empty sky, the lost friends, the desperate prayers, the self-doubt that crept into him are suddenly lifted. Stripped now of his need for approval and instant perfection, “with nothing to win or lose” he is able to play his simple, single tune ‘like a God.’ In organizational cultures (as well as our larger national context) where winning and losing are held as core values, we have much to learn about the deeper work of cultivating the mindset of self mastery required of leaders.

This aspect of the leader’s path to mastery is not pretty or wrapped in nice paper and ribbons. If our leadership candidates made public these experiences we’d conclude they did not have what it takes to advance. ‘Not tough enough,’ not enough of an ‘edge’! This is the work of mastery! Do we have the courage and skill to wade into this conversation with ourselves, first, and with others? For those who develop executive talent, our answer must be a loud, clear ‘Yes.’

Implications

The path to executive development passes directly through the self, which we often forget. Coursework, academic credentials, rotational job experiences in many functional areas are all good and perhaps necessary, but if no work is done on the inner self and mindset of leaders, all of the additional experiences amount to nothing. Heightened levels of achievement are only a byproduct of this inward change in perspective. Mastery has to do with learning how to fully and authentically offer our “simple, single tune” to the world. This simple task can cost us everything! Yet, when we ignore or fight with our shortcomings we get in our own way and undercut our own development as leaders and creators. We either choose to shine the light of awareness on our inner world or our life will! Leaders and those responsible for developing leaders would do well to consider the lessons from our young flautist:

1) Make executive development a business imperative. Real development is more than just a sequence of jobs accomplished. It is more than a step approach in assignments that require people to work harder and longer. It unfolds over an extended period of time and requires substantive dialogue about the self of leaders. Don’t persist in looking for short cuts because each one you find will cost you down the road.

2) Focus on the inner operating assumptions as well as external results. Explore leaders’ emotional depth. Find out what role hardship has played in their leadership and life. Inquire about how they engage others who struggle. We unconsciously reduce our doubts and fears by not taking risks. In what ways do your leaders attempt to compensate for fear they refuse to acknowledge? Virtually every executive I have worked with over my career struggles with fear; what awareness do your young leaders have with their own inner strategies for reacting to discomfort? Breakthrough levels of performance lay just the other side of fear. Keep this idea in your line of sight.

3) Emphasize team relationship skills and achievement. Both are better predictors of leadership performance than technical mastery. Real achievement is more than just activity. It is purposeful action in service of shared vision; this level of alignment demands substantive dialogue. This is not the squishy psychobabble you fear but the candid, courageous ability to raise difficult performance issues and see them through to resolution in ways that strengthen both outcomes and relationships. Some organizations practically deify technical knowledge as the ticket into mid to senior leadership roles. There is no research to support this and my own experience as a consultant and executive coach suggests these organizations pay a long-term price for this strategy. There is a better way.

4) Model openness to the emotional component of leadership. Leadership is far more emotional than we let on. We will be brought to the end of the rope many times and not immediately know what to do. Let both the joy of achievement and the embarrassment of error and confusion–and all the ground in between–be part of your leadership conversation. No more positive spins, no more posturing to look brilliant. No more thinking of those who struggle as “weak.”

5) Bring spirituality into the leadership conversation. You don’t need to have a Bible quiz or roll out a prayer mat at noontime and bow towards the East. We hunger to know who and what we are. We hope for the resilience and strength to hang in during tough transitions. Within each of us is a grounded place of rest, a sacred center where the answers to our challenges reside. How do your young leaders make meaning out of their experience? Ask about their experience and strategies when at their wits’ end. To what extent do they acknowledge their own accountability as well as the need to look beyond themselves to a larger power? How do they understand the role of suffering and hardship? These are spiritual matters. All development is hastened when spirituality is included in the conversation.

Teach people how to fearlessly look at their lives, work and leadership so as to tease out the “simple, single tune” that is theirs alone to embody. Our organizations and world need this kind of development work to take place. Who better to do it than you?

About The Author

Dan Holden has worked in executive and team development for over 30 years. Dan is a Senior Consultant and Facilitator for The Leadership Circle. He serves on the Executive MBA staff at the University of Notre Dame, where in 2006 he was awarded the school’s Inspiring Educator of the Year Award. Dan has worked with the Center for Creative Leadership, and continues his work with Elsie Y. Cross Associates, Inc., on issues of diversity and culture change. He is the author of Lost Between Lives-Finding Your Light When the World Goes Dark (2004). He has authored several articles, including Diversity Unraveled and The Forgotten Self–Executive Development in the 21st Century, which appear in the Industrial Management Journal, 2006. His most recent articles are entitled The Missing Ingredient in Organizational Change-Leadership Transformation and Does Your Team Need an MRI.

I was an eighteen-year-old college student when, two months into my first semester, I received word that a boyhood friend had been killed in a highway accident. My family told me to stay at school; there was no need to join the many people who would no doubt be at the funeral. I sat two days with this advice. I knew I needed to be there, although I could not have known why. I arranged to take my first airplane flight home. The boy who had died, Peter, was from a family that had been the gathering for all the kids in my neighborhood. When I arrived home, I walked down to their house where the driveway and front yard were full of cars, motorcycles, and still more people filing in from the neighborhood. I felt scared, overwhelmed by emotion and yet, certain that my decision was right.

When I put my hand on the front door everything I knew about myself fell away. My identity, my way of being with friends and with adults dropped off like an old jacket I had outgrown. I walked into the throng and took the grieving parents by the hands, looked them in the eyes and spoke directly into the deepest and loneliest place in their being. I did the same with my buddies. We laughed and cried together. We carved out a circle in the living room and spent the entire night in this space together. Strangely enough, I watched all of this flow through me as though watching a performance of the highest order. It was.

Look around. Old ways of operating are crumbling. The financial markets certainly reflect this but daily life in many organizations also reveals the same hard reality: reacting to problems with yesterday’s strategies will not work anymore. Learning from the past yields only small, incremental improvements over the status quo. In my leadership consulting work it is increasingly obvious that there are doors before us that we are invited to walk through. On the other side are new ways of working and creating with our teams. The breakthrough this article points to has to do with discovering a different kind of dialogue that portends a new and vital future.  The question is: do we recognize the doors in front of us now?

Old Ways Are Not Enough Anymore

The Eastern wisdom traditions have a saying: How we do anything is how we do everything. If we could observe ourselves closely in one situation we would have insight about ourselves in many. This kind of self-observation seems reserved for the best sports teams, which make a science out of watching game films. Not for business teams. Many leaders pride themselves on their problem solving ability. When problems come up we analyze their components, weigh which actions in the past can best serve the current challenge and then assemble the right resources and execute. If you ask managers what their primary role is, they answer “Solving problems”. It is not that this approach is wrong but rather that it is not always enough.

Vic is an executive with a large public service company. A recent employee survey revealed that employees and mid-level mangers felt unrecognized and devalued on the job. Additionally, there had been a high profile case where customers had complained to the state’s attorney general about poor quality service from Vic’s area. Finally, in another part of the organization, there was an episode with customers who had either been billed incorrectly or not at all for services provided them. Investigations into the problem revealed employees had initially made attempts to bring the problem to the attention of those above them, including those in senior level positions. Gradually, over the course of many months, the concern itself died away. This negligence had resulted in a multi- million-dollar price problem that, as the media and regulators got hold of the story, meant something had to be done.

Each executive was charged with developing action plans to address the survey results. At the same time, two directors in the billing areas were placed on performance improvement plans (i.e., disciplinary action) and re-assigned to other, lesser positions in the company. In Vic’s area, it seemed the real purpose of these action meetings was to mock the survey results, ridicule those who thought the results reflected serious dynamics, and dismiss as irrelevant others who saw connections between how employees were treated and how customers in the other complaints had been treated. The resulting action plans were little more than attempts to escape the discomfort of the survey and media attention and return to “normal”.

In the short term these strategies proved effective. Critical doorways into a different future, however, were ignored or not seen at all.

Four Doorways to Expanded Leadership

This is not an exaggerated story of organizational life. What is frequently missing is an examination of the problem solving process itself and the assumptions that run it. Ken Wilber, co-founder of the Integral Institute in the US, suggests that leaders are called to operate in four different arenas simultaneously, but typically function well in only one or two. In a simpler world, this was enough. In today’s complex world leaders are needed who commit themselves and their organizations to learning how to hold complexity and competently perform in all four arenas. Research indicates that 85% of strategic change efforts today fail. If wewant to shift this reality at all, we will need to walk through vital doorways that challenge even the best leaders and teams.

As Figure 1 shows, Wilbur’s integral leadership world is actually four distinct but connected worlds. There is an Inner and Outer world that is further refined into the world of Self and the larger Collective. When we fail to develop competencies in any of these areas our performance in building teams, managing change, handling conflict, and innovating new products and processes suffers.

The Outer System Doorway— The Value & Limitations of Key Performance Indicators.

Most successful organizations survive because they execute well on the right side of Wilbur’s integral framework. Our executive, Vic, had a well-earned reputation for his work in the Outer Collective arena: organizational performance. His monthly operations meetings were legendary: Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) were established and managers were expected to give account for their performance. No excuses, no explanations, and no dialogue. The good news is that with a focus on measureable performance the numbers do in fact move. An exclusive emphasis on this area, however, can drive deeper concerns about performance and potential opportunities underground since the drive is for performance that moves the numbers. The real costs of relying only on performance measures in the Outer Collective arena continue:

1. The deeper passions and desires of the workforce are seldom uncovered and mobilized because they’re not considered relevant to the business conversation.

2. Concerns and fears are only reluctantly brought to the surface and then only when all else has failed. The fear of ridicule or vulnerability out weighs all other concerns.

3. Innovative alternatives seldom have all the kinks worked out of them in their raw form. Absent innovation, leaders are reduced to individual, tactical performers who closely watch and guard their own silos. The status quo is vigorously maintained.

4. A future that is different than the past cannot be birthed because the organizational energies are devoted exclusively to solving problems. This approach at best yields incremental improvements in performance but virtually excludes breakthrough shifts in performance from happening.

The Outer Self Doorway— Where High Performance & Accountability Begin.

This arena of leadership and organizational life is familiar and one we often take for granted. This arena contains all that we can see, hear, touch and measure regarding surface and external individual performance. A visit to your doctor’s office typically begins and ends here: blood pressure, heart rate, perhaps an EKG, temperature, x-ray and so forth. In organizations, individual accountabilities, leadership competencies, written job duties, organizational charts that we can download if we get lost in the hierarchy occupy this box. Teamwork, collaboration, respect, trust building skills, high performance, diversity, innovation, excellent quality, and continuous improvement are some of my favorite individual expectations. Who among us would argue with any of these?

Leadership communication skills typically involve providing one-way feedback on performance. Meetings tend to be one-way as well with an emphasis on presentations, updates, and status reports. The best leaders, however, learn a discipline that focuses on the language of behavior and use this to break through to their employees and teams. This discipline involves three key components that become the focus of two-way, not one –way conversation:

Critical performance incidents: Here is what I see and hear you doing.

Performance impact: The personal consequences of someone’s behavior, either positive or negative are offered here. This kind of information can affect a shift in performance.

Consequences on the team, customers and others: The larger consequences of a person’s behaviors, when offered here, can remove feedback from “being personal” to clearly connecting individual behavior to business performance.

The harsh reality of this Outer-Self arena, however, is that vision wall charts don’t describe what actually happens in the organization! The fact that we easily sign off on collaboration and teamwork doesn’t mean we actually behave this way. Real behavioral change requires a level of self-insight, courage and vulnerability to practice new behaviors that is daunting. Rational analysis of obstacles a team faces does not typically get at the deeper, irrational, causes of poor performance, by far the more impactful. To move into this kind of critical review requires that we stand before another doorway.

Mike is an engineering director in a mid-sized manufacturing plant. A former football player, he has built a reputation as a pragmatic, action-oriented leader. Two sister plants have recently been closed in response to drastic financial downturns. Mike knows if he could spend less time in grievance meetings and more time getting real work done his life would be much easier and the plant more successful. His plant is pushing for greater teamwork and involvement among supervisors and the largely union workforce. Tensions run high. Everyone is waiting for the next anvil to drop; the other shoe fell long ago. No one wants this to happen again but the crisis seems to have people reverting to their default—and least effective—mode of interacting. 

Defaulting to lesser behavioral strategies is what happens when we lock up in reaction to tough times. We lose the ability to see things as they now are, only as they always have been in the past. I may appear to be listening to you but all I see is our past interactions and our history. You do the same with me. During tough times that call for extraordinary breakthroughs in our thinking, decision-making and performance, the unexamined magnet pull to the past can be a deadly medicine. It requires courage and an open mind to look at things as they are. We frequently fail.  We know what people will say before they speak but seldom look at what we’re doing ourselves that drives the conversation. Worse, we deny we have any role at all. It’s them.

For leaders who are stuck in the assumption they must always be right, the answer person who knows everything, real dialogue will prove virtually impossible. Why is it even needed?

Mike announces a three-day offsite meeting of the combined plant management and union leadership team. It is to take place in two weeks. Preliminary meetings that Mike holds reveal a pattern he has not looked at before. When others question Mike he becomes defensive, argumentative and appears to dig his heels in and “drive the agenda.” Mike’s leadership consultant points this out and asks Mike if he would like to have insight into why he reacts this way; presumably, if he had more awareness it might open up other options. He agreed to give it a try.

Like the 18 year old at the beginning of our story, the entranceway to this next arena begins when we allow what we thought we knew about ourselves to fall away. We enter with an open mind, one of “I don’t know” rather than “I already know”, the prevailing assumption that makes tough times even more difficult. For leaders stuck on the assumption they are the answer persons, real dialogue will prove virtually impossible.

The Inner Self Doorway— Where Sustainable Breakthrough Begins.

Mike was asked to “speak from the heart” with the first response that came to him. Here are the highlights of the three-minute conversation:

Coach: You’re holding a meeting when people begin questioning you. When someone questions you, why is this a problem for you?

Mike: He’s challenging my credibility.

Coach: Assuming this is true and he’s questioning your credibility, why is this a problem for you?

Mike: My reputation is on the line. Others will doubt my ability as a leader.

Coach: Let’s say this happens, your reputation is shot. Why would this be a problem for you?

Mike: My board expects results. As soon as they have doubts about my leadership, I’m gone. History.

Coach: So there would be drastic repercussions—you’re out the door with no job.

Mike: And no easy options. My wife won’t move, my kids are in school here in town for the next three years. They’re already disgusted with me for the time I put into this job. They have had it up to here. 

Coach: Let’s say it plays out just like this. You’re stuck; your family is disgusted and basically turns their backs on you. If this happened, what would it mean about you?

Mike: (Silence). I’m just a waste. A complete fool. I don’t deserve to be here. Irresponsible. At this point the consultant went to the white board and wrote the following:            

 “Faulty Assumptions”

• When others question me = my credibility is questioned
• If I don’t know all the answers now my reputation is ruined
• Others’ evaluation of me= me
• My worth & value depend on others’ assessments of me
• I am my work; I am my performance (in this meeting)
• I am not enough 

“Choose your own poison”, the coach said, “Is it any wonder that you get defensive in meetings?” Mike looked at the board and was silent. He acknowledged these fears had followed him for years, eroding his self-confidence and impacting his relationships. He saw clearly that these unexamined assumptions did not stand up to scrutiny. They allowed no room for people to ask questions to better understand the topic. They assigned irrational weight to the behavior of others who were likely unaware that any of this was happening. The discussion that followed was transformational. Mike saw that what was genuinely true about himself could not be taken by anyone; it could not be attacked. It therefore never needed defending. His meeting behavior began to change immediately.

The Inner-Self Door is where each of us secretly lives. We make meaning of our lives and our work here. Our motivation and passion for contributing originates here. Our vision and hopes and our doubts and fears, are born here. Issues of trust, confidentiality, the holding of bitterness against others, resistance to change—the underpinnings of all teamwork, strategic change and organizational excellence–all originate here. Sadly, much of this rich inner landscape goes unexamined. We then try to move through mergers, drive change and build more innovation into our processes when caution and fear are the prevailing passions. It simply doesn’t work this way.

What is true of elite sports teams is true of any team that wants to pursue extraordinary results: you must have the heart and commitment of people behind you. Heart and commitment lie here, just behind our limiting assumptions.

The concern in standing before this door is that we will get lost in endless psychobabble. Few of us wander through this doorway unless the world gives us a reason to. Take a look around. The world has given us all the reason we need. The discipline is one of honest self-assessment coupled with authentic dialogue. When this inner work of leadership is connected to a larger organizational imperative the resulting mix can be wondrously potent. Real vision requires us to learn and do things we’ve never done before. Leaders who understand this act as architects who learn to design venues where this kind of learning can happen. The cost of not doing so is tragic.

The entranceway to this arena begins when we allow what we thought we knew about ourselves to fall away. We enter with an open mind, one of “I don’t know” rather than “I already know”, the prevailing assumption that makes tough times even more difficult.

The Inner System Doorway— Your Culture Contains Your Desired Future.

Every organization has its scapegoats. When things go wrong these groups become the necessary targets for our frustration and confusion. “Things would be better if only they would change.” Senior leaders frequently become necessary targets; the union, front line supervisors, field operations or headquarters, the regulators, our competitors, the insurance companies all take a turn in distracting us from finding real solutions to the challenges we face. If we don’t recognize the real problems our solutions will miss the mark. The real problem always involves us! Until we see our own contribution to the current circumstances we will be unable to see our potential as creators of a new and more viable future.

The time had come for Mike to take the combined union-plant leadership team offsite for a three-day strategy session. Tension and mistrust ran high. The design called for consultants to facilitate a review of the current (external-system) challenges on Day 1, followed by a “creating vision” session on Day 2, and a tactical action segment to close out the retreat. Each side began the retreat blaming the other for the slide in plant performance. This was the familiar win-lose paradigm, the most popular of distractions and the source of much resistance to change. Mike decided to speak to what he was experiencing in the room. He shared that he knew if the plant continued to perform as they currently were, the plant would likely be sold and gutted for parts. He was suddenly touched with the emotional weight of what he had just said. “We’ve lost many of our best people and their families already. I don’t want to lose anyone more. I want all of us to come through this together and right now I just don’t know how to do that. And this old conversation won’t get us there.”

There was a long silence in the room. From the back of the room a union leader broke the silence, “We treat customers like we treat each other–with disgust. We get irritated with their requests, we ignore them as long as we can and then we fight them.” Another long silence was followed by the voice of a supervisor sitting at the same table. “He’s right. Stuff that could easily be solved with a simple conversation becomes a battle over nothing at all. We’re too busy blaming others to save our own butt. I wouldn’t want my own kid to work here right now. That’s the hard news. I am embarrassed by all of us. I’m embarrassed by myself.”

Nobody in that room knew what to do with this new information yet everyone knew something real had just happened. There was an energy, an aliveness present that no one could deny. Another union leader spoke, “The problems we’re having begin in this room. The solutions begin in this room, too. We go forward together or we go down together. From here on out, we don’t talk about anyone or anything outside this room.” 

A different, openhearted dialogue then spontaneously took shape for this team. They begin to honestly look at their business as a dynamic whole where one person’s behavior impacted everything and everyone else. Dinner that night was filled with stories of the early days of the plant, of tough transitions in the past, of friends who were no longer around the table. The plant was not out of trouble but there was a sense of optimism and hope that had not been present for years.

The doorway into this arena is marked by vulnerability and the authenticity to say the “unspeakable”. For the very first person, the terror can be immense. It is the presence of something greater than our fear–in this case saving the plant and the town where it’s located–that calls forth this dialogue. Rainier Maria Rilke, the great German poet, wrote–

“What we fight with is so tiny, what fights with us is so great. When we win it’s with small things and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary does not want to be bent by us.”
-Rainier Rilke

The trouble in many organizations is we define challenges as problems in ways that are too small to care about and not large enough to inspire. This is the case with Vic, the Operations Executive who defined the employee survey problem in the smallest possible language he could. The response he got matched his definition: small and forgettable. Do your definitions of challenges leave people feeling small or do they inspire something greater and larger than we ever dreamed? Do you demand nothing more than an upgraded status quo or do you look people in the eye, as I did as an eighteen year old on that autumn evening, as Mike did with his combined team, and confess “We must go on in a different way now.”

Day 2 of the offsite built on the gains made the first day. A different way of organizing the work took shape spontaneously. Roles were altered; work assignments shifted with ease, silos came down. Conversations long overdue happened over coffee, in the hallways and around the lunch bar. During a late afternoon plenary session, an old machinist stood up and looked right at Mike and said, in his gruff, cigar voice: “I have hated you for 25 years. Now I find out we want the same thing and have probably wanted the same thing all along. I was thinking of retiring. I’m not done here.”

Mike whispered loud enough so everyone could hear, “I thought you were the enemy for 25 years. Now I can’t imagine going forward without you.”

This kind of talk highlighted the tone for the vision work. Tough decisions were made and action plans formulated. There were occasional misunderstandings that were quickly named, bound and moved through. A deep, plant wide alignment evolved over the course of the retreat that carried over into the ensuing weeks and months ahead. A communications plan included talks with those who had not been at the retreat, beginning with family members and then customers. This plant found a way through challenging times by deepening and expanding the conversation between leaders. This same doorway stands before each of us.

Leadership implications

1. Difficult times require moving through doorways with a kind of fearlessness beyond the superficial. Rather than pretending to be stoic and doing what has always been done, each doorway involves authentic inquiry and dialogue. PowerPoint presentations are not enough.

2. Listening with an open mind and speaking from an open heart can feel vulnerable and awkward. You must model for others the deeper place from which they can then learn to speak and perform.

3. This kind of integral leadership takes time and practice. The status quo, including chasing your own tail in endless emails, meeting presentations and problem solving sessions to make discomfort go away takes much longer, wastes more time and exacts a far greater toll on everyone.

4. Learning how to engage your teams and workforce in left-hand quadrants dialogue is essential if you are to fully tap and utilize the full potential of your organization. Only then will you move forward in an aligned, full-hearted response to the future you collectively desire.

5. The most significant differences in leaders are linked to the amount of complexity they have learned to hold, and the number of doorways they’ve learned to walk through and inhabit.

Unprecedented challenges like those we see today require unprecedented responses from leaders and their teams. The stories told here are not unusual when leaders see their enterprise as organic, dynamic communities requiring learning and competency in four arenas. I have stood before many challenging doors since my 18 year old initiation. Some I turned away from, not ready. Others I began moving through and lost heart. Others transformed my world and me for the better. Forty years removed now, I have seen what’s possible when leaders and their teams move through their fear and dissatisfaction to create a different future. What doorways do you stand before now? How will you respond?

The future happens whether we want it to or not. Why not consciously create it?

About The Author

Dan Holden has worked in executive and team development for over 25 years. He serves on the Executive MBA staff at the University of Notre Dame, where in 2006 he was awarded the school’s Inspiring Educator of the Year Award. Dan has worked with the Center for Creative Leadership, and continues his work with Elsie Y. Cross Associates, Inc., on issues of diversity and culture change. He is the author of Lost Between Lives-Finding Your Light When the World Goes Dark (2004). He has authored several articles, including Diversity Unraveled and The Forgotten Self–Executive Development in the 21st Century, which appear in the Industrial Management Journal, 2006. His most recent articles are entitled The Missing Ingredient in Organizational Change-Leadership Transformation and Does Your Team Need an MRI. Dan is a Senior Consultant and Facilitator for The Leadership Circle.

Portions of this article were first published in Industrial Management, May-June 2009 and in CEO On-line, June 2012.

Firstly, Lourey believes executives need to develop certain capabilities in order to make effective decisions. Among these capabilities are the ability to stand back, to see the big picture, and to develop a capacity for systemic thinking–that is, being able to see the “ripple effects” of decisions rather than just the immediate consequences. Also important is the ability to recognize that issues are bigger than just the organization and to make sense of the wider patterns in the organization’s markets and industry.

Lourey says a telltale sign that leadership is ineffective is when executive teams become problem-focused or risk-focused and react to obstacles. Contrarily, effective executive teams are much more likely to be outcome-focused.

To read the entire article by Lourey – which was originally published in Volume 10 Issue 15 of The Boardroom Report, published by the Australian Institute of Company Directors – click here. Lourey’s article can be found on Page 4.

About Greg Lourey

Lourey serves as a partner and Commercial & Governance Director at The Leadership Circle Asia Pacific.  He has worked with executives and senior teams in the United Kingdom, US, and Australia over a period of 25 years advising businesses in systems effectiveness, operational efficiency, organizational structuring, risk management, business start-ups, and culture transformation.

Lourey’s early career was spent in local government undertaking a Bachelor of Local Government Law before completing his degree in Commerce and moving to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). There, he specialized in assurance services to multinational listed corporations, government instrumentalities, and SME’s before moving into practice in the areas of insolvency, acquisitions, listings, mergers, forensic accounting, and risk management. As a director responsible for organizational risk management, Lourey became office managing partner for PwC for the Hunter Region and oversaw the strategic growth of the practice for seven years, including a firm merger and culture transformation.

The Leadership Circle is proud to have Greg Lourey as a licensee in the Asia Pacific region. The Leadership Circle also has licensees in South Africa and the United Kingdom and is currently looking to expand into other parts of the world. Contact us for more information.

An excerpt from the story…

Leadership is a “developable” skill. It takes effort, and often the help of many others, to go through the journey to become an effective leader. This journey, Anderson says, is a personal one, akin to the spiritual journey that people take in order to create changes within themselves.

Wise leadership, he says, is a “cultivated awareness that consistently produces uncommon insight”. It is the “ability to set a vision for the organization” in the midst of complexity.

To view the entire “Spiritual Boot Camp for Top Executives”, click here.

For years, almost every book on leadership began with some sort of statement about the increasing rate of change. Now we add to that increasing complexity. That is, we live in a world of increasing ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility, and market disruption. In this new business environment, leaders must have the ability to continually reinvent their organizations in response to the accelerating rate of change and escalating complexity. The leadership at Barnes and Noble had somehow developed the capacity to adapt to the changing marketplace, while Borders did not. Like the evolutionary process of species, the species that can adapt to rapid changes in environment survive and evolve, while those that do not go extinct.

Escalating complexity presents leaders today with what we call the Leadership Imperative. Let me pose this imperative to you as a question. Is your leadership developing at the pace of change? Is the leadership system in your organization evolving at the pace of escalating complexity? If not, you are falling behind. Effective leadership is now the primary competitive advantage. Developing the effectiveness of leadership at or beyond the pace of change is a strategic priority. If leadership and its effectiveness is not an imperative in your organization you may be the next Borders.

One of our clients is an iconic global manufacturing brand. For decades, this organization has led the planet in all the important metrics – market share, profitability, quality, loyalty – but is suddenly and rapidly losing ground to competitors. Their phenomenal success has made them complacent. They are no longer leading the industry through innovation. They have come to realize that they must fundamentally change their corporate culture and approach to leading the organization. They have turned to The Leadership Circle Profile to help them make this shift. They are accepting their leadership imperative. The evolutionary demands that they are facing require that they up their game. At The Leadership Circle we are inspired by leaders who take on the leadership imperative and then dive into developing the creative thinking required, individually and collectively, to make the most of the opportunities presented by the challenges.

Here are some questions for you personally, for your organization, and for your clients to help you understand the challenges that make for your Leadership Imperative:

• What factors are fundamentally changing the game in your industry/market?
• How is your industry/market changing, becoming more dynamic, volatile, and unpredictable?  What are the emerging trends?
• What is contributing to the complexity in the scope of your job and leading your organization?
• What strategies are required to meet the changes/complexities?

Once you answer these questions you’re not done. Most organizations answer these questions and then develop their strategic plans. The Leadership Imperative compels us to take the answers to the questions above and go one layer deeper, by asking these questions:

• How do these changes require us to think differently?
• How do we need to adapt, individually and collectively, to these changes?
• Is my leadership/our leadership evolving to meet the emerging challenges?
• What do I/we need to learn to be ready for the future?

It is a strategic priority and competitive advantage to develop leaders capable of navigating an increasingly complex world. Every leader should be asking, “How do I keep pace with the rate of change?” By considering the questions above you can begin to better understand the imperatives that will drive the next evolution of your leadership.

I approached the desk and was discussing the issue the best I could with a chipper young tech guy. I felt initial confidence in him because he spoke with authority and confidence. His questions seemed smart enough and my explanation did not send him running. Then, as time proceeded, he distanced himself. His questions seemed more confusing, and the conversation brought back scary memories of Fortran 4 in college. Soon, I started thinking the conversation was more to impress me with his technical talent, than it was to offer help.

Just like my computer’s operating system, leadership is complex. Some of us have chosen the field as our professional path. We manage to stay current and are conversant with the trends, issues, and opportunities. However, for others, it can be overwhelming and confusing. The theory and jargon used by those in the leadership development industry is like a foreign language to those outside this field. The reference to too many theories or models will seem irrelevant. The professional credentials are now less important than the conversation about their leadership challenges or goals. Just like me at the support desk, clients often know where they need to go, but need help getting there.

While my entire career has been dedicated to leadership development, I have been a member of (and a support to) The Leadership Circle community for just over a year now. I’ve had the benefit of meeting some amazing and extraordinarily talented people. I participate in several conversations each day with clients and practitioners. They often ask me about what other people are doing to successfully introduce The Leadership Circle tools, and influence leaders to work with them.

Things I See When Working With the “Best of the Best”

• Conversations clearly address and articulate the “Leadership Imperative.” The consultant will go way beyond a conversation about a leader or team wanting to improve their skills, or changing a style or behavior that interferes with their success. The conversation will be more about the client as an individual or a team, as well as the organization they are a part of. There is a clear understanding between client and coach about the organization’s strategic goals, the challenges that require greater leadership, and the complexities this puts in front of leaders. This will create the right context for the meaningful work.

• The most successful practitioners will always seek first to understand, and then be understood. This empathetic listening concept was made popular by Stephen R. Covey and speaks to caring, respect, and positive problem solving. Unlike my conversation with the tech-desk guy, the priority is to ask questions; learn about the client and their organization—their needs, interests, goals, and values. They find a common ground through inquiry, not by talking about the tool or process they are presenting. It is about discovery. They assess how much detail is important to the client and follow that with discussing what you have to offer. When in doubt, the typical leader is much more interested in the end result (what will be gained from this). The features and benefits will show themselves through the process.

• The conversation is packaged in a way that connects with the client. We all have a wealth of information, research, theory, and “OD speak.” Among our peers, this is useful to move conversation along, and stimulate thinking and agreement. Most executives, especially the non-HR leaders, care about this as much as I care about the inner workings of my laptop. You will surely make more progress and gain more commitment by talking with the leader about his/her needs, challenges, and willingness to create meaningful change. From there, you can speak with confidence and conviction because you have tools to enable this.

• The most influential are those who represent or model the very thing they deliver. You would never hire an image consultant who sends correspondence with spelling and grammatical errors. Set the example. Present yourself as the leader that you are, be transparent with your challenges and your development journey. Being influential only occurs with a foundation of trust.

• Focus on de-mystifying The Leadership Circle Profile and 360’s in general. I am surprised how many clients I work with who have been subjected to a 360° assessment in the past. I am also disappointed that common perceptions are either ho-hum (I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know) or traumatic (my team really gave it to me!). It is important to reassure clients of the absolute integrity of the The Leadership Circle tools, and assurance of its reliability and impact. Our goal is to provide people with a deeper understanding of themselves, the world, and their relationship to others. In the end, they will have better understanding of what is working, what is not, and why!

The laptop was repaired to my satisfaction. But will I go back there again? Probably not. More painful than the bill or the time without the computer was the disconnected conversation with the technician. This was also a minor decision with limited risk. I would not have been so easy going with a decision about my career development and goals, or a person I was hiring as a trusted advisor.

As a leader myself, I make a daily commitment to my own development; to constantly evaluate where I am making progress and where I am creating my own roadblocks. My heart-felt thanks go out to the generous people world-wide who make up The Leadership Circle Community.

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.” ~Benjamin Disraeli

• Having tools that can be used to assist in leadership development efforts at multiple levels in an organization.
• Offering a set of products and services to facilitate a leadership development process.

The Conference Board truly understands what The Leadership Circle has to offer. Many people view us as an one-assessment company, only knowing about our Leadership Circle Profile, but we are much more than that. Our multiple offerings create a powerful leadership development system on two levels.

1. Thought Leadership: The Leadership Circle has taken the best of what has been learned over the last half century and woven it into the first Unified Theory of Leadership Development to arise in the field. Prior to our integration, the field of leadership development was a fragmented collection of theories and practices.
2. Leadership Development as a Process: In the March issue of our Leadership Quarterly, my colleague Jonathan Hulsh explained the importance of approaching leadership development as a process, not an event. The Leadership Circle has all the tools needed to facilitate that process.

Here’s our portfolio:

Assessments

• Leadership Circle Profile
• Leadership Circle Profile Manager Edition
• Leadership Circle Profile Group Reports
• Leadership Culture Survey

Managing the Development Process

• Follow-Through Tool
• Profile Re-takes

Workshops

• Authentic Leader Workshop
• Authentic Leader Train-the-Trainer Certification

The Leadership Circle’s Leadership Development System in Action

The Leadership Circle Profile and Leadership Circle Profile Manager Edition are often used for one-on-one coaching. This usually involves taking the assessment, debriefing it with a Leadership Circle certified coach, defining a development process and working together over time. One-on-one coaching can be powerful, and incorporating one-on-one coaching into a larger developmental initiative magnifies the impact of coaching exponentially. Here are some examples based on some of the ways people are using our portfolio:

Becoming Innovative

An information technology company, who had become a market leader developing exciting new products between 2003-2008, was losing market share because they had not developed anything new in several years. They created a process to get back to being an innovation leader.

Here’s what they did:

1. Used our Leadership Culture Survey to understand how leadership was perceived in their organization. They found that the organization had become “fat and happy,” resting on the laurels of earlier achievement. Leadership was perceived as having lost its vision and as they had grown the organization had become fragmented. Decisions took a long time to make and when they were made they were not effective at creating meaningful results. The Leadership Culture Survey revealed that their leaders needed to revisit the organization’s deeper purpose, chart a new direction based on that purpose, and engage all levels in a deep conversation about what the new direction meant and what it required.
2. Executive leadership team members took the Leadership Circle Profile, allowing each leader to see how his/her own performance compared to that which the organization said was necessary to be successful, as revealed by the Leadership Culture Survey. Each leader was able to identify what they needed to do to move the organization forward, then they worked individually with coaches to make necessary changes.
3. The executive leadership team used a Leadership Circle Profile Group Report, showing an aggregate of the individual reports so that the team could look at their collective Profile and discuss how they could work better as a team at creating the culture that would get them back to their winning ways.
4. Managers and supervisors used the Leadership Circle Profile Manager Edition to see how their performance compared to what was required to become successful. The Leadership Circle Manager Edition enabled middle management and supervisors to have powerful conversations, based on a common language, with senior leaders. Those conversations led to the development of policies, procedures, and commitments creating new ways to make decisions and take action at all levels.

Senior Leadership Team Development

Two banks merged and combined senior leadership teams. Jockeying for position became the predominant activity as leaders fought for their survival. In the meantime, the merged organization grew confused over goals, roles, and responsibilities. The newly merged board of directors intervened to get leadership on track. One bank had an internal organization development team that was engaged to facilitate a process of senior leadership team development.

Here’s what they did:

1. Internal coaches led a three-day Authentic Leader Workshop where leaders learned what is required to perform at the highest levels.
   1. The difference between reacting to problems and creating compelling outcomes.
   2. Becoming aware of how internal beliefs and assumptions give rise to limiting behavior.
   3. How to clarify organizational purpose and vision so that they generate productive engagement.
   4. How to lead the creation of an organizational culture that will bring the purpose and vision to life.
2. Each leader received 360-degree feedback through the Leadership Circle Profile. The Authentic Leader Workshop gave leaders a strong foundation to understand what their feedback meant. Team members shared their Profiles with each other so they could see each other’s strengths and limitations of each other and the implications for the team. The act of sharing Profiles was a powerful moment of trust building.
3. For six months, leaders worked individually and as a group with internal coaches. During this time, several members of the senior leadership team decided to assume roles one step down in the hierarchy in order to bring the organization together.
4. Authentic Leader workshops were conducted at the vice president and director levels, then at the middle manager and supervisor levels. These sessions included Leadership Circle Profile feedback.
5. Middle managers and supervisors participated in year-long cohort groups, sharing progress and challenges with each other on a monthly basis guided by internal coaches. They used The Leadership Circle’s Follow-Through Tool to manage their development efforts and to help hold each other accountable and share what they were learning.

These are just two examples of the powerful ways The Leadership Circle’s Leadership Development System can be used. Join us on May 17th  at 1 p.m. EST for a free webinar featuring practitioners who have successfully used our portfolio to facilitate development initiatives.

June 6-8, 2012
Washington, D.C.
(Gaithersburg, Maryland)

The Authentic Leader Workshop is a three-day leader development intensive experience. Designed for leaders and managers, and for consultants/coaches who work with leaders and lead their own organizations, this workshop has been utilized for years—in leading organizations—for deep leadership and organization development.

Authentic Leader focuses on acknowledging and letting go of the parts of our self that are complying, protecting, and/or controlling. This program consistently produces significant shifts in the effectiveness and impact of leaders and their teams.

Authentic Leader is offered as a public enrollment program only once a year. The International Coach Federation awards 22.20 CEUs for attendance.

“I know that by applying what I have learned here, I will show up as a much more powerful leader in my organization and a more authentic person in every area of my life.”

-Sunny Krom, Sodexo

“This is the course you have been waiting for that will free you to live your authentic self in service to the highest good. Live large and be the change you seek.”

-Amy Skolen

→Register Now for the Authentic Leader Workshop

Workshop Leader

Dan Holden has worked in executive and team development for over 25 years. He serves on the Executive MBA staff at the University of Notre Dame, where in 2006 he was awarded the school’s Inspiring Educator of the Year Award. Dan has worked with the Center for Creative Leadership, and continues his work with Elsie Y. Cross Associates, Inc. on issues of diversity and culture change. He is the author of Lost Between Lives–Finding Your Light When the World Goes Dark (2004). He has authored several articles, including Diversity Unraveled and The Forgotten Self—Executive Development in the 21st Century, which appear in the Industrial Management Journal, 2006. His most recent articles are entitled The Missing Ingredient in Organizational Change-Leadership Transformation and Does Your Team Need an MRI. Dan is a Senior Consultant and Facilitator for The Leadership Circle.

Authentic Leader Train-the-Trainer Certification

October 15-19, 2012
Perrysburg, Ohio

Authentic Leader Train-the-Trainer Certification is a five-day advanced practitioner development program designed for those who want to add the Authentic Leader Workshop to their consulting/training portfolio. It is also open to those who want to deepen and refine their one-on-one and team coaching practice.

Features

• An opportunity to teach and facilitate a set of core workshop modules built around The Leadership Circle framework
• A potent blend of powerful experiential exercises and skill practice sessions
• A rare opportunity to learn and receive feedback from a master and from colleagues on the same journey as you

Benefits and Outcomes

• Add velocity to your personal development
• Enhance the overall quality of your coaching/consulting services
• Grow your business with new, attractive, profitable offerings
• The Leadership Circle helps create opportunities where you can co-train

Past participants say this experience took their consulting and coaching practice to the next level in ways they never imagined possible.

Pre-requisites for Attending Certification

Before taking entering this certification process, you must first complete Leadership Circle Profile Certification. Past participation in the Authentic Leader workshop is helpful but not required.

Pathway to Certification

The path for this certification begins with this five-day program. It ends when, after co-training with one of our Senior Certified Consultants, you both decide that you are ready to fly solo. The number of co-trainings it takes depends on your experience level and the pace at which you take on new material. We also help create opportunities where you can co-train.

“This workshop certification alone is worth its weight in gold. I now bring in the largest contracts of my career.”

-Paula Butterfield, Consultant and Executive Coach

“This is without question one of the most important and meaningful things I have ever done and ever will do.”

-Abby Straus, Unbridled Performance

Certification Leaders

Dan Holden has worked in executive and team development for over 25 years. He serves on the Executive MBA staff at the University of Notre Dame, where in 2006 he was awarded the school’s Inspiring Educator of the Year Award. Dan has worked with the Center for Creative Leadership, and continues his work with Elsie Y. Cross Associates, Inc., on issues of diversity and culture change. He is the author of Lost Between Lives–Finding Your Light When the World Goes Dark (2004). He has authored several articles, including Diversity Unraveled and The Forgotten Self—Executive Development in the 21st Century, which appear in the Industrial Management Journal, 2006. His most recent articles are entitled The Missing Ingredient in Organizational Change-Leadership Transformation and Does Your Team Need an MRI. Dan is a Senior Consultant and Facilitator for The Leadership Circle.

Shahmeen Sadiq is a Leadership and Team Development Professional, who is a graduate of the coach certification program of the Coaches Training Institute as well as the Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching program of the Center for Right Relationship. She is a Senior Facilitator for The Leadership Circle Workshops and The Leadership Circle Profile Certification. In 2009, Shahmeen was honored by the International Coach Federation with a Prism Award for systems coaching work she did with a Not-for-Profit organization. Shahmeen is passionate about the value and importance of building vibrant, aligned workplaces. She has worked with leaders and teams across Canada and the US, guiding them in developing greater effectiveness. Shahmeen had a 15-year career in the public sector where her experience encompassed coaching individuals/teams, managing projects, strategic planning, applying improvement techniques, streamlining operations, and re-engineering processes.

→Read More Testimonials

→Register Now for the Authentic Leader Train-the-Trainer Certification

The Leadership Circle committed to some big initiatives over the last year. These initiatives stretched all aspects of our resources. For example, we chose to invest heavily in sourcing a marketing consultant and also to improving our brand. Additionally, we launched a new website, hired a new business development person, launched all new software for our survey completion and administration, and also launched a new product.

Some of these initiatives were deep in progress when we were faced with the economic downturn, but we consciously made the decision to push forward with all of our changes. Although these decisions were coupled with the fear of the unknown, we were committed. We made budget cuts in other areas and redistributed roles as needed.

During the launch of the new software, we experienced unanticipated hurdles. This is where my journey of transformation began. I looked square into the eyes of my fear of failure during the launch. It looked back at me and talked to me through the voices of some of our customers. I couldn’t hide, I couldn’t remain silent, and I couldn’t let someone else decide what to do. It had to be me. So, this is what I chose to do–much like The Leadership Circle chose to push on with the expensive, resource-heavy initiatives we had already committed to before the economy went sour, I too had to accept the fear of failure and push on.

My decision to push on and develop a plan for moving us, and myself, forward wasn’t an easy one. I remember first working through the “fight or flight” adrenaline that I’ve heard referenced (and yes, the “flight” part sounded appealing). I became aware of the feelings I was experiencing and the ways in which they were representing me in my interactions. I watched myself slouch, speak softly, and not want to answer the phone. None of this felt good to me and I grew increasingly aware that I was not serving anyone in this manner.

I, therefore, chose to move through the fear that was holding me back and engage more fully. I decided that my failure, if perceived as that, didn’t define me and there was still more work to be done. As I engaged in laying out plans for moving forward, if only with small steps initially, I began to see how all of the other plans and initiatives on which The Leadership Circle placed priority, started to come together. I found excitement in the strategic thinking of how the new puzzle pieces could fit together. I actually found myself in situations saying “Yes. I don’t know how, but we’ll figure it out.” This was very different for the engineering side of me that previously felt as if it needed to have all of the details mapped out and in place in my head before I could begin.

In The Leadership Circle, we chose to move forward in very uncertain times with some high costs involved. We are now seeing the benefits of those choices. Our organization feels more fully integrated, more focused on our goals, and more scalable. Both our new website and our branding changes, have received positive feedback. The Manager Edition launch was successful, and it is now finding its place within management levels of many organizations. Many of you have been introduced to and supported by our Business Development Manager. We are in a very different position with the software we launched a year ago.

Recently, we released a new feature that sends practitioners with an active project an email seven days prior to the completion date. This email notifies them of participant status and even provides shipping address information for confirmation. We continue to make improvements like this, add features, and think creatively about how we can improve and build upon our IT department.

The experience of the software launch forced me to face fears that I didn’t want to face. It also enabled me to appreciate the capacity to which we can change and grow in situations if we continue to push through and be open to the opportunity without allowing fear to get in our way. Thank you to everyone for your continued support over the last year. It has been amazing and it has truly helped The Leadership Circle rise to a new level. We look forward to moving ahead together as The Leadership Circle improves to new heights in the future.

360° Reports Do Not Create Better Leaders

I always ask the event-oriented client the same question: “Do you expect significant results in using a 360° assessment as an one-time event?” Their answer is always the same: “No.” Consider the fact that without professional guidance and time, a blood test report alone can’t possibly help us get healthy. Why then would we assume that an assessment report—a mere piece of paper—has the power to instantly turn you or me into a more effective leader? And yet this illusion persists. While leadership events are common, real change occurs when leadership development initiatives are embedded into a sustainable process.

The Leadership Development Process Requires Support

The Leadership Circle subscribes to the notion that leadership development is a transformation process. It does not happen in a weekend. By raising his/her awareness with the support of a powerful 360° assessment, like The Leadership Circle Profile, managers become more conscious of what they do and why they’re doing it. But for this process to succeed, it needs support and follow through, and there’s research to back this up:

• 8,000 managers from Fortune 100 companies received 360° feedback and leadership training.  Eighteen months later they were evaluated for leadership effectiveness.
• 55% of managers who consistently followed through were rated more effective (+3 on 3 point scale i.e. significant sustained improvement) versus only 6% of those who did no follow-through.
• 34% of those with no follow-through showed no improvement and 20% with no follow-through got worse!

Conclusions

• Real leadership development is a process: Development Goals + Follow-through = Results.
• Almost any follow-up is better than none.
• The biggest challenge for most leaders is practicing their understanding of leadership.
• If managers attend a leadership program and fail to follow-up with their people, they might as well have stayed home.

Goldsmith and Morgan
Best Practices in Organizational Development, 2003

Best Practices that Enable Leadership Development

While every leadership development initiative is unique, there are several practical strategies that are consistent with clients who tell us about how they support transformational change:

• Confidential and objective coaching that is focused on one, maybe two, development priorities that will provide the biggest payoff for the individual and/or their organization. The Leadership Circle Profile was built to enable focused dialogue with leaders about their possibilities, as well as beliefs and assumptions that may be interfering with their success. The coach will facilitate authentic and honest conversations that will go deeper (about the “what” and the “why”) than they might get from their colleagues or peers. The coach is also one to help their client anticipate and prepare for challenges.
• A Leadership Development Plan that clearly documents a clear call to action, with specific goals and action steps. Creating “social accountability” where the participant shares his/her development priorities with others, asks for help from others and creates a forum for regular feedback about progress made (or not made). An emerging best practice we are seeing involves year-long cohorts of peers sharing progress, challenges, and holding one another accountable, meeting on a monthly basis.
• Resources made available—outside speakers, reading, training—or other learning resources that directly align to development priorities. The Leadership Circle’s Authentic Leader Workshop helps provide direction and education to leaders committed to transformation.
• Follow-up with the Leadership Circle Profile re-assessment, after significant efforts have been made, to measure progress.
• Use of a leadership development process tracking system to manage the development effort. The Leadership Circle offers an excellent resource, our Follow-Through Tool.

Leadership development takes practice, and practice requires support and follow-thorough with the help of an executive coach and goal/action plan. If you’re a coach or consultant, the next time your client asks you to help them with a one-off 360° leadership event, it is important to manage expectations. Consider this is a call for your advocacy. It’s your opportunity to educate your client around a more effective process and outcome.

I don’t know about you, but when I orient my life toward bold purpose, I come quickly to understand that this is inherently risky. I have long wished for a safe way to go about this but I haven’t found one. The natural inherent tension in clarifying and focusing on purpose is that it immediately raises the possibility of risk. I’m an entrepreneur with a growing global business, so I understand that pursuing purpose puts me at risk all the time.

How does this tie into the Leadership Circle Profile? When you receive the results of your Leadership Circle Profile, you get data that is actually organized around this core tension. In other words, the extent to which you orient your leadership toward purpose or safety will show up in your Leadership Circle Profile. For example, if you are oriented toward purpose, vision, and contribution, you are likely to see stronger scores in the top half of the circle but, if you are oriented more toward safety, then you’re going to receive stronger scores in the bottom half of the circle.

When we orient our life and our leadership toward creating what matters most, and that is the primary driver, we are in what I call, Creative Structure or Creative Structure of Mind. When our primary focus is oriented toward staying safe, then we are more likely to live and lead out of a Reactive Structure of Mind—running the behavioral strategies that you run when you get threatened.

Although The Leadership Circle Profile can be used as a thorough competency assessment, it also provides an indication of how much of your life energy and orientation is in either the Creative or Reactive Structure. If you are more focused on safety, you will be acting in a way Larry Wilson called, “Playing-Not-To-Lose”, and you will be more likely to operate in a Reactive Structure. These behaviors are the Reactive Tendencies which will show up in the bottom half of the circle in your Leadership Circle Profile.

You can also use the assessment to get a clearer sense of how you’re performing as a leader. Contrarily, the top half of the circle indicates the extent to which your leadership is oriented toward forming your purpose into a vision that is both strategic and lofty–strategic because it sets a direction in which the organization will thrive, and lofty because it captures your imagination and that of others.

To view a video presentation of Bob Anderson presenting the information in this article, click here.

Download the entire White Paper here.

Focus on Achievement

The Leadership Circle’s research suggests that leadership effectiveness is highly correlated with competency in Achievement behaviors—most highly when purpose and vision are clearly understood, articulated, and modeled. Here are some questions to consider:

• Do I have a clear sense of the higher purpose my work serves?
• Can I describe, vividly, what the world around me will look like if I live my purpose to its fullest?
• Do I feel inspired when I speak about my purpose and vision?
• How can I behave, right now and throughout my days, in ways that demonstrate that my purpose and vision are already true?

Create or Modify Structures

At The Leadership Circle, we believe structure determines performance. For example, if we want to improve our fitness, we need to schedule workouts and identify the exercises for those workouts; research also suggests that working out with a buddy enhances the likelihood that we will actually work out regularly. These are just a few examples of structures that enhance your ability to achieve fitness goals. Here are a few questions to consider in relation to achieving your vision and goals:

• What relationship structures do I need to create or modify?
• What daily scheduling structures do I need to create or modify?
• What project management structures do I need to create or modify?

Harvest the Gifts of Your Shadow

It is important to remember that Reactive tendencies are not bad. These are the behaviors we have adopted that have served us—to a point. But ultimately, we face limitations when we rely too heavily on our Reactive strategies. To become better leaders, we can shift to a Creative approach and the seeds for making that shift can be found in our Reactive tendencies. Here are some questions to begin to make the shift from over-reliance on Reactive Strategies:

• What are the strengths and gifts to be found in my Reactive tendencies?
• What are some balancing behaviors that would elevate these strengths to a more Creative level?

In The Leadership Circle’s Authentic Leader Workshop, we have a session that’s all about harvesting the gifts of your Reactive tendencies. I recommend it highly.

We hope you’ll take time as the new year begins to apply to yourself what you help others do all year long. We wish you a healthy, peaceful, and prosperous 2012.

The paper covers four primary topics:

• Why most organizational change efforts fail
• A model that enables truly effective management of change
• The most powerful leverage point for leaders in creating real and sustainable change
• An accessible approach to leadership development that can produce significant, sustainable, breakthrough results

We invite you to download The Spirit of Leadership (alternatively, you can view all of our White Papers by choosing the “Resources” tab at the top right side of the page, then “White Papers”). This document is a foundational summary of our approach. If you’ve read it before we recommend you read it again. If you want to become familiar with our thinking this paper is essential.

In a recent Leadership Quarterly article I stated, “In a world of escalating global complexity, many leaders find themselves ‘in over their heads.’ This phenomenon results when the leader’s ‘Operating System’ is not complex enough to match the complexity of the challenges facing the leader. In this case, the leader needs more than skill development. The leader needs to develop greater complexity of mind.” (See the April 2011 Leadership Quarterly for a more in-depth discussion about why a competency-only based approached to leadership development is inadequate.)

When organizations are struggling with a lack of flexibility, agility, and innovation, more often than not they are trying to lead the way through complexity from a Reactive mindset. The Reactive mind is simply not complex enough to have the flexibility, agility, and creative innovativeness that is required. Furthermore, research strongly suggests that full-blown vision and strategic capability do not emerge until leaders are functioning at the Creative level of mind and Systems Thinking does not emerge until leaders mature into the Creative mind and beyond.

The real answer to the dilemma of escalating complexity and the demand it makes on leaders and organizations to be flexible, agile, and innovative, is not achieved by merely adding a couple of additional competencies to an assessment. The answer lies in expanding the leader’s complexity of mind. That is, creating a fundamental shift of mind from the Reactive “Operating System” to a Creative one. This is a far more complex task than can be accomplished by simply adding a dimension called Agility or Innovation to a competency assessment.

This is the third and final part of a three-part series on how the Leadership Circle can be used to create a more innovative, flexible, and agile leadership culture in an organization. Part One gave an overview into Flexibility, Agility, and Innovation, and explained how these three qualities are essential in a leader, despite not appearing explicitly on The Leadership Circle Profile. Part Two presented a case study example of how The Leadership Culture Survey describes precisely what is needed for a specific organization to be more agile, flexible, and innovative.

About The Leadership Circle

The Leadership Circle represents an advancement in state-of-the-art of leadership development. This advancement springs from a more thorough and integrated approach to leadership—one that encompasses the best of what we know about competency development with the best of what we know about the development of the leader’s complexity of mind. It is a complete system of leadership development that integrates into one approach how Creative Competencies can be developed, Reactive leadership styles reduced, and the complexity of the leader’s mind expanded to be more flexible, agile, innovative, and creative; that is, capable of effectively leading in the midst of complex and fast changing business realities.

A Case Study in Brief

I was recently asked to consult with the senior team of a large global company with revenues in excess of $10 billion. I was introduced to this team by one of the consulting organizations that uses The Leadership Circle assessments. They had just conducted our Leadership Culture Survey with the top three levels of this organization. They asked me to sit in on the survey feedback and interpret the results with the senior management team. I knew very little about the organization and so I confined my comments to what I saw in the numbers outlined in brief below.

The Leadership Culture Survey Organizational Report Graphic for the top 80 managers in this organization is displayed in Figure 1. A complete description of the Leadership Culture Survey is beyond the scope of this article; however, a brief introduction will aid in understanding how the results in this case served to initiate a very powerful discussion about the organization’s ability to agilely and flexibly innovate.

Figure 1: Leadership Culture Survey Organizational Summary Report Graphic

The Leadership Culture survey measures 31 dimensions of an organization’s leadership culture. These 31 dimensions are grouped into eight Summary Dimensions and are displayed in Figure 1. The survey measures both the current culture (the culture you have) and the envisioned culture (the one you want) on each of these dimensions. With a brief look at the results displayed in Figure 1, it becomes obvious that the current depiction of the Leadership Culture (in green) is very different from the desired/optimal Culture (the Red Line).  The current leadership culture is slightly more Reactive than Creative (a 45 percentile culture overall, just below the norm for leadership cultures measured with this assessment), while the optimal culture is described as very Creative (a nearly top 10 percentile, high performing culture). Clearly this senior management team is saying that in order for their business to thrive, they need to make a significant shift in they way they are leading the business—from Reactive to Creative.

To understand the story of how these results relate to innovation, flexibility and agility, we need to look deeper into the data—at highest and lowest sub-dimensions measured in the survey. In the Leadership Culture Survey report, the 31 sub-dimensions are sorted from highest percentile score to lowest. I have selected out the top and bottom of these lists to elucidate the key patterns in the results. A simple look at the data tells a very clear and compelling story that has everything to do with this organization’s flexibility, agility and innovativeness. These results are listed in Table 1 and Table 2.

The strongest influences in the current leadership culture of this organization (top left of Table 1) suggest an overly conservative, cautious, bureaucratic, and even passive culture. The driving energy is to go along to get along (Belonging) and not rock the boat. This cautious culture may be driven by a top-down, aggressive, if not arrogant, influence on this leadership team. What is most missing from the leadership culture of this organization (bottom left of Table 1) is a clear and bold vision of its future, and vision that is being translated into a customer focused strategy. In addition, this organization lacks well-refined systems for executing on those strategies. In short, the senior members of this organization are saying that they are too cautious and conservative to be sustainable.

Table 1: Current and Optimal Leadership Culture

In the column on the right of Table 1 is the envisioned culture. This column describes quite precisely what the senior leaders in this organization know they need to move toward (upper right of column) in order to establish and sustain high performance. They need what is at the bottom of the list on the left. In other words, they know they need to take the weakest elements in their leadership culture and turn them into strengths. They need to become a bold (not conservative) purpose and vision driven organization. They need to get good at working as a team to develop strategy. They need to design or refine their systems for executing on the strategy expeditiously. They need to develop the capability to be courageous, honest, and direct with each other in order to make the tough decisions that will move those strategies forward. In order to do all this, they need to significantly reduce the conservative, bureaucratic thinking that is currently driving the organization. They also need to reduce the arrogant and critical way that they engage one another in order to have the kinds of conversation that will allow them to work together effectively (notice that these elements move from the top of their current culture list on the left to the bottom of the optimal culture list on the right).

Table 2 summarizes the biggest gaps for this organization between their current leadership culture and their optimal leadership culture. If they can close these gaps, they will be well on their way toward being a flexible, agile, and innovative organization.

Table 2: Biggest Gaps Between the Current and Optimal Leadership Culture

The simple, yet powerful views displayed above (which come out a more extensive Leadership Culture Survey report) provided windows into the secret conversation that this leadership team was having with itself—the conversation that had not yet made it to the meeting rooms. As the top management team explored together the implications of these results, they naturally moved into a conversation about their business that they had been wanting to have, but, for one reason or another, could not. They were able to acknowledge that the patterns in the data accurately described the unsustainable way they were leading and that they needed to become much more creative, innovative, bold, strategic, and agile. After the meeting they commented that it was one of the best meetings they had ever had as a senior management team and the CEO took me aside and thanked my saying, “I have been trying to tee this conversation up for some time. Now we are in it.”

This example shows how the rich assortment of well-researched Creative Leadership Competencies and Reactive Leadership Styles combine in the Leadership Circle assessments to establish a very clear picture of how this (or any) leadership team can create a culture that, by any measure, would be characterized as flexible, agile and innovative.

This is the second of a three-part series on how the Leadership Circle can be used to create a more innovative, flexible, and agile leadership culture in an organization. The previous Leadership Quarterly included Part One on this topic – an introduction into Flexibility, Agility, and Innovation, and how these three qualities are essential in a leader, despite not appearing explicitly on The Leadership Circle Profile. The next Leadership Quarterly will contain Part Three, which explores how The Leadership Circle assessments are designed to embed this higher-order capability into the consciousness of the Leadership system of the organization—to enhance the complexity-of-mind of the leader, and the organization’s leadership system, to be well matched to the complexity of business challenges.

Bob Anderson, Founder and CEO of The Leadership Circle, unveiled his Leadership Imperative in May 2011 at a leadership conference in Sydney, Australia. “As the effects of globalization set in, leadership development must keep pace with the rate of change.” According to conference organizers, this call is making demands of us that are unprecedented in history. Bob’s keynote addressed the following question: “Are we evolving our conscious practice of leadership at a pace which meets the escalating complexity of our times?”

A full version of his speech is available here.

Sections of his speech (by topic) can be viewed in our YouTube channel by selecting from the links below:

1. The Leadership Dilemma of Adaptive Challenge
2. The Importance of Developing Leadership Complexity
3. How Leadership Relates to Stages of Development
4. How to Manage Your Sense of Self as a Leader
5. Complexity Requires Creative Leadership
6. Unified Theory and the Complete System for Leadership
7. How Patterns Bring Meaning to Assessment
8. Interpreting the Leadership Circle Profile 360
9. The Optimal Path for Leadership Development
10. New Research on Leadership Effectiveness
11. Evolving Higher Levels of Leadership

Quite the contrary.

The Context

Leadership and organizational flexibility, agility, and innovation are a key focus in organizations today, and with good reason. In the most recent 2010 IBM CEO study, which is based on the interviews of over 1,500 CEO’s worldwide, two primary themes emerged that had not appeared in previous studies. The first theme was managing complexity and the second was developing the creative capacity in the organization to innovate in response to the shifting marketplace demands—in a world of escalating complexity.

Leaders have been talking about the increasing rate of change for years, but escalating complexity is a new and emerging trend. Simply put, not only is the rate of change increasing, but so is complexity. Escalating complexity results from rapidly shifting marketplace dynamics in a global business environment of increasing uncertainty, ambiguity, volatility, and market disruption. The IBM CEO study stated that, “Most CEO’s seriously doubt their ability to cope with rapidly escalating complexity.”

The ability to thrive in an increasingly volatile world depends on the second theme that emerged in the study. CEO’s worldwide are asking the question, “How do we develop the creative capacity in our leadership and throughout the organization to respond to rapidly changing marketplace demands and dynamics?”

These emerging themes and trends place a premium on the very thing some of our customers ask about—flexibility, agility, and innovation. Leaders need to design organizations so that they are flexible and agile in responding to constantly changing markets. Beyond creating new products and services, the organization’s capacity to reinvent itself demands an emphasis today on the kind of flexibility, agility, and innovation that will determine the organization’s success.

The Leadership Circle could not be better positioned to help leaders and organizations develop the kind of leadership called for in the CEO study. The future (we are already in) requires leaders to not only be able to manage complexity, but lead their teams and organizations through it. A future of escalating complexity requires leaders who can innovate on behalf of the organization, redesign the organization so that it is fit for its purpose in this new global landscape, and develop the operational agility to implement change and execute on strategy. The CEO study called this kind of leadership “creative leadership.”

This is precisely what The Leadership Circle assessments are designed to develop.

We need to approach the question around flexibility, agility, and innovation in two ways.

1) Explore how the unique dimensional structure of The Leadership Circle is ready-made for addressing innovation, agility, and flexibility.
2) Demonstrate how The Leadership Circle assessments are designed to enhance the leader’s “Operating System” for the kind of creative leadership for which the CEO study is calling.

Innovation

How do we help leaders create a more innovative organization when there is no dimension on the Leadership Circle Profile circle called innovation? Simply put, many of The Leadership Circle dimensions are foundational elements of innovation.

For example, consider the Summary Dimension in all of our Profile reports called Achieving. The heart of this dimension includes all the research and theory on high achieving leaders going back to McClelland’s research on Achievement Motive in high achievers. It includes research that has been done in the area of Success Literature. It also includes Robert Fritz’s seminal work on the Creative Orientation. In short, the Achieving Dimension is the heart of the innovative or creative process as described by Fritz and others. It starts with an abiding and purposeful focus on a vision. That vision is distilled into strategy and results, which drive decisions. This is the Achieving Dimension, and it is all about innovating and creating the future. An organization characterized by high Achieving is naturally innovative.

There are many other dimensions of our assessments that contribute to the innovative capacity of the organization. For example, Teamwork and Cooperation are required if ideas are to come to fruition. Courageous conversations are always required in the midst of significant innovation and change. If there is a breakdown in any of these dimensions, innovation can be quickly undermined. In summary, the top-half of our assessment report comprises a whole set of competencies that support innovation.

Flexibility and Agility

Tasked with more than innovation, these same leaders must develop flexible and agile organizational systems—systems that can adapt quickly to rapidly developing trends and changing market conditions. The agility of an organization is primarily a function of organizational design. Are the processes that translate your organization’s strategy into execution designed for rapid change? If not, then the organization lacks flexibility and agility.

For this very purpose, our assessments include the System Awareness Summary Dimension. The focus in this set of dimensions derives from years of leading-edge research and thinking by Peter Senge, Marv Weisbord, Russ Akoff, Bill Adam, and others who have pioneered the field of system thinking and organizational design. An agile organization is designed very differently than one that is slow to respond to changes in the environment and the System Awareness Summary Dimension helps leaders develop the awareness and capability to reinvent the systems that determine organizational performance.

Again, the dimensions in the top-half of Leadership Circle Profile reports combine to form the foundation for flexibility and agility. For example, the dimensions, mentioned above, that contribute to innovation, also contribute to leadership and organizational agility. If an organization can innovate, and its system is designed for that purpose, the organization will be agile. By the same token, if the system is not designed for agility, an organization is unlikely to be able to innovate at the pace of change and escalating complexity.

Reactivity Interrupts Flexibility, Agility, and Innovation

In the bottom-half of our Profile reports are a set of dimensions called the Reactive Dimensions, each of which, if too strong, interrupt the creative, innovative process and leaves the organization less flexible and less agile. For example, when a leader or an organizational culture is defined by Complying, rapid innovation is simply not possible. Complying results in too much caution, bureaucratic thinking, conservative strategy, and stuck action to allow for innovation. The same can be said for Controlling leaders and cultures. The more over-controlling a culture is, the less open, flexible, agile, and innovative the organization becomes.

To sum up, each of our assessments comprises a complete set of dimensions for developing flexibility, agility, creative, and innovative capability in individual leaders and within the leadership system of the organization.

Recently, I was asked to consult to the top team of a global manufacturing organization. The issue that they needed help with was simply put, “We have reached a ceiling in our sales and have been unable to punch through it.” After a year of working with that team, which included the use of the Leadership Culture Survey, the Leadership Circle Profile, the Authentic Leadership workshop and coaching with each member of the team, the organization increased sales by 20%. Their Leadership Culture Survey results jumped from the 50th percentile (the industry standard) to the 75th percentile. In my last meeting with the CFO, he said, “Let me tell you what is different about this organization from a year ago. We just completed discussions about the acquisition of a business that would have doubled our size. As you know, the CEO (the owner of the company) wanted this to go forward in the worst way. He wants to retire and leave a legacy of having grown a very large and successful company. But, when I looked at the numbers, they just weren’t there. This made for a very delicate and politically sensitive conversation. In the end, we decided not to acquire this business and we all felt good about the decision. A year ago we might have made the same decision, but it would have taken months and it would have been a painful process. We did it in three days and it was fun. That’s what’s different.”

Needless to say this is a much more flexible, agile, and innovative leadership culture than was in place a year earlier.

This is the first of a three-part series on how the Leadership Circle can be used to create a more innovative, flexible, and agile leadership culture in an organization. The next Leadership Quarterly will include Part Two on this topic – a case study example of how The Leadership Culture Survey describes precisely what is needed for a specific organization to be more agile, flexible, and innovative. Part Three will explore how The Leadership Circle assessments are designed to embed this higher-order capability into the consciousness of the Leadership system of the organization—to enhance the complexity-of-mind of the leader, and the organization’s leadership system, to be well matched to the complexity of business challenges.

Custom Certification Programs
This three day certification program can be delivered to your group of coaches/consultants at the location and on the date(s) of your choice.

Training Location
Logistics will be sent to you after you register.

Schedule:
Starts at 8:30 a.m. and ends 5:00 p.m. each day. Last day of each certification ends at 4:30 p.m.

Fee
TLCP Certification includes your personal Leadership Circle Profile. If you have not completed the Profile, we will get that process started when you enroll.

100% Money Back Guarantee
TLC is confident that you will find this program to be a powerful and rewarding learning experience. We back up this claim with a 100% Money Back Guarantee: if for any reason, this program does not meet your expectations, you are entitled to receive a full refund of fees paid. Conditions for refund include: You must be present for entire program each day, participate in all exercises, and request your refund in writing and submit it to program facilitator at the conclusion of the program you attend. This Guarantee is only offered for public enrollment TLC Profile Certification programs scheduled and held in the US and Canada and listed on this website. Individuals receiving refunds will not be certified or authorized to purchase or use TLC assessments.

Cancellation-Refund Policy
A $300 USD processing fee will be withheld for any cancellation. Cancellations made in writing more than 30 days prior to the start date of certification will receive a refund of $2,195 USD. If cancellation is made in writing less than 30 days prior to start date of certification, a credit of $1,000 USD can be applied to a future Profile Certification—listed on this webpage—held within twelve months of cancellation. Cancellations made without written notice, or a second cancellation, will result in no refund. TLC does not apply or transfer fees, refunds or credits towards any program other than those public programs listed by The Leadership Circle (by date and location) on this web page.

Conditions for Being Certified
In order to be certified, attendees must be present for the certification program in its entirety – from beginning to end. TLC reserves the right to deny certification for the following reasons: missing program modules, or behavior that is disruptive or outside the professional standard of conduct.

Meals And Travel Costs
Participants are responsible for all travels costs including transportation, hotel and meals.

Bring a Colleague and Receive Credit
We are building a community of practice of like-minded colleagues. For each person you refer to us who completes The Leadership Circle Profile certification*, you will receive a credit for a free TLCP 360 degree assessment (a $250 USD value) that you can use with your clients after certification. This can help you cover part of your certification fee.

* Your referral is someone who has not previously contacted or been contacted by TLC. This credit is offered only for certification program dates listed on this web page.

Accommodations and Transportation
All of our training locations are designed for easy travel access, comfortable accommodations (and amenities) at a reduced group rate, and proximity to a good selection of restaurants. You will receive details of accommodations and transportation when you register, or you may contact us to get this information in advance.

Dress
Business casual.

Special Needs
Please let us know if you have special needs involving access, or food allergies.

Where there were differences, I could see the value of the competitor’s competencies, and I noticed that some of our important competencies were missing from the posted list. I came to the conclusion that the posted competency model was a strong one. But was it stronger than ours?

The Key to Leadership Development

It was only later (sometime in the middle of the night!) that I realized that the initial question our consultant was asking was the wrong question—not wrong, really, but inadequate. The consultant’s question assumed that simply adding new and better competencies will somehow dramatically improve our ability to develop more effective leaders. Furthermore, as a question, it failed to acknowledge the power of the consciousness-development platform at the heart of The Leadership Circle.

While competencies play a very important part in developing effective leaders, they are not the key to development. Certainly we need to continue to improve our competency models, especially in a world of escalating global complexity. But, in that search, let’s not lose sight of the fact that competency is only part of the equation for developing effective leadership. If we continue to focus exclusively on competency, we will miss how development actually happens.

While the Leadership Circle Profiles contain a very robust set of leadership competencies, a competency-only approach misses the power of The Leadership Circle altogether.

A Developmentally Focused Model

In a world of escalating global complexity, many leaders find themselves “In over their heads.” This phenomenon results when the leader’s “Operating System” is not complex enough to match the complexity of the challenges facing the leader. In this case, the leader needs more than skill development. The leader needs to develop greater complexity of mind.

The Leadership Circle is founded on the principle that competency-only approaches are inadequate to the challenge of developing leaders for the complexity they are now facing. This stand arises from our research into Adult Development. Our research shows a strong relationship between the leader’s measured effectiveness and the Stage Of Development of the leader’s Operating System. This breakthrough research suggests that merely identifying an improved set of competencies, can only marginally enhance our ability to develop effective leaders. It strongly suggests that effectiveness, in more complex leadership roles, requires a more advanced leadership operating system. Therefore, the Leadership Circle’s assessments contain a robust competency assessment that is packed into a much larger framework for developing leaders.

The Leadership Circle is the only developmentally focused competency assessment available on the market. In other words, what distinguishes our assessment tools is the ability measure competency and access deep structure—the leader’s Operating System.

Why “Deep Structure?”

In System Dynamics Theory, structure determines performance. In other words, the primary determinate of the performance of any system is the design of that system. Underneath the design of the system is the thinking and assumptions that formed the design. In other words, thinking creates the design, and design determines the performance. We call this thinking behind the design, deep structure. In human terms, deep structure is the system of the thinking that drives a leader’s pattern of behavior. Deep structure is the Leader’s Operating System.

The Leadership Circle Profiles are designed to surface deep structure. They create a platform that allows us to inquire into the beliefs and assumptions that are the source-code for the pattern of behavior—as measured in the competency data. The benefits of this approach are obvious: accessing the underlying assumptions that drive behavior creates the opportunity to redesign the operating system. This allows the desired leadership effectiveness to develop naturally.

A Point of Differentiation: Competency Plus Deep Structure

The Leadership Circle Assessment tools are powerful because they include a complete competency model and because they provide immediate access to the deep structure conversation. This combination serves-up breakthrough developmental opportunities.

In a Nutshell

Back to my friend’s question: Is any competency model better than ours? Well, the question-before-the-question is more appropriately: Is there a better approach to accelerating leadership development?

Our answer in a nutshell: Only one that combines a well-developed 360-degree competency assessment and delivers access to deep structure.

I am confident that you will find nothing that comes close to the power of The Leadership Circle assessments for accelerating the development of effective leadership.