Becoming the Leader of Your Dreams!

Nancy Ogilvie

www.Inspiring-Results.com

Do you want this to be the year you lead your business or organization to truly inspiring results? The year that you engage your staff in creating the organization of your dreams together? You can achieve these goals more quickly and easily by developing yourself as an appreciative leader.

So what’s different about an appreciative leader? Here’s a provocative distinction: appreciative leaders deliberately stop solving problems and focus instead on ways to build on successes. When traditional leaders focus on solving problems, they’re necessarily focusing on what people are doing wrong – a potentially demoralizing approach. Appreciative leaders focus their primary attention on what people are doing right and finding ways to do that more – an empowering approach.

For example, suppose you want better customer service in your organization. Traditional leaders might analyze customer complaints to determine what’s going wrong and find ways to fix the problem. An appreciative leader engages employees in identifying best practices – examples of exceptional customer service – and finding ways to share them so everyone begins using them.

When leaders focus on strengths and what’s working well, people feel energized and inspired. They commit to looking for new ways to do things even better. They become more resilient and adaptable, ready to take on any challenge. As a result, you lead your organization to capitalize quickly on opportunity and achieve greater success and impact in the community. And everyone finds greater personal reward and meaning in their work to boot!

Beginning the Shift to Appreciative Leadership

Even if an appreciative approach makes great intuitive sense to you, making the shift can be surprisingly challenging. One good place to begin is to clearly identify your individual and organizational strengths – your positive core.

Your positive core is the skills, characteristics and values that make you uniquely who you are. Individuals, teams and organizations all have a unique positive core. When you’re working from your positive core, you naturally have tremendous energy and creativity for your work. It is innately joyful and rewarding, even though it may be extremely challenging.

Understanding your positive core at the individual, team and organizational levels is the foundation of appreciative leadership. By engaging people in conversations about their positive core, you connect as people and build quality relationships that will hold you together through thick and thin. You learn from each other, increasing your individual and collective capability. You leverage your collective strengths to achieve truly inspiring results more quickly and easily.

Focusing and Building on Your Positive Core

So how might you begin these conversations about your positive core as individuals, a team, an organization? Here are some specific tips that can be applied at any level:

1. Engage in exploration of your core values, individually and collectively. Talk about times in your work when you knew you made a difference or times when your work felt particularly meaningful or rewarding. Reflect together on what these stories reveal about the values that are important to you.

2. Share “high point” stories. When have you been at your very best as an individual? When has your team been at its very best? Your organization as a whole? When have people accomplished more than they thought they could? Look for patterns and themes that reveal the core values, skills, and gifts of your individual and collective positive cores.

3. Share best practices. When an individual has a success, invite him/her to share what worked with others so everyone has an opportunity to learn from the experience. When the team has a success, spend some time reflecting together on what contributed to your accomplishment so you can repeat it (and share it with others as appropriate).

4. Ask positive questions. Invite people to explore positive possibilities for the future instead of dwelling on problems in the past. For example, if you find yourselves complaining about a team not cooperating with you, ask a positive question about times when you’ve experienced exceptional cooperation. Reflect on the positive possibilities you want to create with the other team, and then communicate them.

5. Value rather than evaluate. Whenever you need to evaluate (people or projects), start with identifying the things that worked well. Identify new ways to use those identified strengths. And finally, generate a list of wishes or hopes for the next time – what you learned, what you would do differently.

Trying one or more of these tips will get you started in the adventure of becoming an appreciative leader. Be patient with yourself – it’s a journey rather than an overnight change. And like the proverbial pebble dropped in the pond, taking small steps will send ripples through your workplace. The rewards for your effort will be extraordinary – you can make this the year of leading your organization to truly inspiring results!