Questions for a team start-up

What are your strengths?
How would you like to use your strengths in this experience?
What do you need to do your best?
How can we support you in bringing your best?
What do you want from this experience?
What do you know about yourself in work groups?
How do you best show up?
What concerns do you have about this experience?
What would you like to explore or try?
What are you passionate about?

Recharge with these continuing education opportunities

Several colleagues and clients have asked about places to recharge, regroup and rejuvenate. Here's a list of continuing education opportunities for change agents, leaders, creatives and everyone coping with the complexities of life.

Systems Thinking Conference, Nov 17-19, 2008, Boston
Sponsored by Pegasus -- helping individuals, teams, and organizations thrive in an increasingly complex world.

NTL Institute provides management training programs that enhance listening skills, communication skills, diversity, organization development and group dynamics. In Alexandria, VA and Bethel, ME.

Shambhala Institute is a vibrant meeting-place of people, practices, and ideas engaged at the frontier of organizational and societal change. Upcoming workshop is Organizational Trust: Cultivating authenticity, commitment and collaboration, April 22–23, 2008 in Ottawa, Ontario. Next summer institute is Authentic Leadership in Action, June 22–28, 2008 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Robert Fritz, composer, filmmaker and organizational consultant, helps people and organizations create the results that matter to them. Public workshops in Newfane, VT include Your life as art, Creating for creators, Fundamentals of Structural Thinking.

Cape Cod Institute is a summer-long series of timely/lively week-long courses for mental health and management professionals, offered by master teachers in Greenwich, CT.

Omega Institute is a pioneer in exploring, teaching, and embracing new ideas, focusing on health and wellness, personal spiritual growth, and self-awareness. Summer programs in Rhinebeck, NY. Winter programs in Costa Rica, Northern California and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Sol — Society for Organizational Learning. Founded by Peter Senge, SoL discovers (research), integrates (capacity development) and implements (practice) theories and practices of organizational learning for the interdependent development of people and their institutions and communities. In Boston.

Appreciative Inquiry is a revolutionary approach to strategic change and sustainable growth for organizations. The Commons, an online resource, lists public workshops, conferences and certification programs available world-wide.

Executive Education at Case Western in Cleveland, OH offers programs in Appreciative Inquiry and emotional intelligence.

Action Design helps individuals and groups in organizations develop their capability for inquiry, choice, and action on their most difficult issues. Public workshops in Boston.

Taos Institute is a community of scholars and practitioners concerned with the social processes essential for the construction of reason, knowledge, and human value.

Interaction Associates offers workshops in facilitation, leadership, meeting management, change management, coaching, and trainer excellence. Public workshops are in San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, Washington DC.

OD Network is a professional association of external consultants and professionals working within their organizations to promote healthy change. Next conference is Oct 19-22, 2008 in Austin, TX.

All of our continuing education bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/unison/continuing-education.

Add to the list. Click on "Comments" below and add your favorite workshop, conference, "chill-out" retreat.

Applied leadership at JetBlue

From Lucy Garrick:

Here's an interesting example of applied leadership.
http://www.jetblue.com/about/ourcompany/promise/

This kind of response is rare from a corporation in the face of failure, and an admirable example of action learning in leadership under stressful conditions.

I would be interested in hearing any comments as to how this example enlightens that ever-recurring question:
"What does it mean to lead?"

Are you surprised at this company's response?
How does it compare to other experiences of organizaitonal failure you have had?
What does it teach you about your own leadership?
How might this example be applied your work?

The Beatles principles

No time for reflection, beeping BlackBerrys, and a grind-it-out mechanistic process. Where's the time for fun to build creative, motivated teams?

Client loyalty expert Andrew Sobel writes about a team that learned to deliver the highest-level of performance while having fun at a legendary scale — the Beatles. Four ordinary guys found a way to achieve extraordinary artistic and financial success and have a great time together while they were doing it.

Sobel has distilled 10 principles for improving creativity and innovation based on the Beatles' creativity and team work:

1. Eight Days a Week — Face Time: Invest in and build face time between team members well before they are asked to pitch to a client.

2. Getting Better — Evolving Your Songs: Evolve your “songs” and bring the same level of ideas, new perspectives, excitement, and enthusiasm to your hundredth meeting with a client that you brought to the first.

3. Nowhere Man — Practicing Humility: Cultivate humility and self-effacement in your dealings with others, especially when you’re on the heels of great success.

4. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da — Using Humor to Connect: Use humor, especially self-deprecating humor, to ease tensions, show you are human, and create an emotional connection with colleagues and clients.

5. With a Little Help from My Friends — A Role for Everyone: Help team members become brands-within-a-brand by giving them a song — an idea or proposal — that will help them to shine.

6. Here Comes the Sun — Honing Your Opening Measures: Carefully craft the first 60 seconds of all your communications — the opening measures of your songs — to command your audience to listen.

7. P.S. I Love You — Liking Your Public: Show your public — your clients, in every interaction, that you truly like them.

8. Two of Us — Sharing the Credit: Create a one-for-all, all-for-one culture by fostering a “Lennon/McCartney” equal-credit environment for teams.

9: Revolution — Having Conviction: Make sure your communications resonate with passion, belief, and sincerity — with conviction — if you want to be noticed by busy executives.

10: I Need You — Greatness from Differences: Put exceedingly diverse professionals on the same team, mix specialists with generalists, and foster friendly competition to produce the best ideas.

Andrew Sobel is a leading authority on building client relationships and is the author of business bestsellers Making Rain: The Secrets of Building Lifelong Client Loyalty and Clients for Life: How Great Professionals Develop Breakthrough Relationships. His Beatles Principles article first appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Strategy+Business.

A pdf of the article can be downloaded at Sobel's Web site — andrewsobel.com.

Courage of Iconoclasts

Comedian Dave Chappelle and poet Maya Angelou spend a day together at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where they discuss how poetry and comedy can bridge both genders and generations.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, says Angelou, because without courage you can't practice any other virtues consistently. You see? You can't be consistently kind or fair or humane or generous, not without courage, because if you don't have it, sooner or later you will stop and say, "Eh, the threat is too much. The difficulty is too high. The challenge is too great."

On the Sundance Channel this month.

What are your forbidden questions?

Over at The Authentic Organization blog, Michael Gilbert is compiling a list of forbidden questions — the questions no one asks. I often call it, the elephant sitting in the middle of the table.

Whether it’s to avoid conflict, preserve cultural bulwarks, protect power relations, or prevent disappointment, organizations often end up with a set of forbidden questions.

Some generic examples include:
Why are things done this way?
Who really makes these decisions?
How much is enough?
Who gets rewarded for what?
How is status conferred?
Who controls what information?

I'll add:
What is preventing me from speaking truth to power?
Why do we bother working together?
In what ways am I doing to others the very things I claim they should not do?

Post your forbidden questions at The Authentic Organization.

The destructive potential of overachievers

The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, and it is on the rise.

There's a dark side to the trend, however. By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals, an executive or company can damage performance. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, stifling subordinates.

Psychologist David McClelland identified three drivers of behavior: achievement, meeting a standard of excellence; affiliation, maintaining close relationships; and power, having an impact on others. He said the power motive comes in two forms: personalized, in which the leader draws strength from controlling people, and socialized, where the leader derives strength from empowering people.

Studies show that great charismatic leaders are highly motivated by socialized power. To look at how motives and leadership style affect a group's work climate and performance, the authors studied 21 senior managers at IBM.

The leaders who created high-performing and energizing climates got more lasting results by using a broad range of styles, choosing different ones for different circumstances. Rather than order people around, they provided vision, sought buy-in and commitment, and coached.

Read the article in Harvard Business Review, June 2006.

Tough love

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman B-school, looks at the tension between business-as-usual and business-by-design.

By focusing on the intuitive and experiential, organizations explore new sources of competitive advantage. By looking to the provable and replicable, organizations better exploit the innovations they've brought to market.

To prosper over the long run, a company needs to succeed at both. It must mesh the classical workings of a traditional organization with the prototypical features of a design shop, especially in three key areas: reckoning the future, organizing work, and establishing status and rewards.

Read the FastCompany article.

What do your tunes say about you?

A peek at your iPod can reveal clues about you.

The question "What kind of music do you like?" is so revealing, it is the number one topic of conversation among young adults who are getting to know each other, according to psychologists Jason Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge in the U.K., and Sam Gosling at the University of Texas at Austin. Knowing whether a person prefers John Coltrane to Mariah Carey, or Puccini to Prince allows for remarkably accurate personality predictions, their research has found.

Read the Psychology Today article.

Read more about the study at Gosling's lab.

Take the STOMP test (Short Test of Musical Preferences). (pdf download)

CrazyBusy

“Is it normal that my husband lays his BlackBerry down next to us when we make love?" asked a patient of psychiatrist Edward Hallowell. She thought she was entitled to her husband’s undivided attention.

From an expert in Attention Deficit Disorder, comes a new book for the rest of the world. CrazyBusy: Overstretched, overbooked, and about to snap - Strategies for coping in a world gone ADD by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., is a prescriptive guide that shows us how to survive in an ultra-competitive, ultra-fast, attention deficit society — and remain sane.

Gerald LeVan writes about CrazyBusy on the Friends of Positive Psychology list-serve:

Why do we keep so frantically busy? According to Hallowell, it’s because: we can be, we want to be, we must be, we imagine we must be, busy is fun, we overcommit, others overcommit us, we let technology run us, we work hard but not smart, being busy is a status symbol, we’re afraid of being left out or missing something, we’re afraid of not maintaining our standard of living, we can avoid the pain of life, we can avoid everything difficult we don’t want to do, we don’t have time to feel guilty about doing nothing, the devil finds work for idle hands, everyone else is busy, we have an excuse not to do what we don’t want to do, we aren’t bored when we’re busy, we don’t have to think too much, it’s better than not knowing what to do, it’s the best way to get where we want to go, we’re creating time someday when we won’t have to busy, we don’t know how not to be busy. All of the above.

Go to Hallowell's CrazyBusy web site.

“Please explain the problem to me slowly, as I do not understand things quickly,” pleaded Albert Einstein.