Signal Hill

What do you call it when a leader notices possibilities and not just problems? What name do you give to a leader who sees resources in a bleak situation, notices the seeds of peace amid conflict, or observes movement in a place that appears stuck? What would you call this capacity to frame any situation in a positive way — not a Polly-Annish framing, as if to ignore the problems, the challenges, those harsh realities, but a way that recognizes and acts upon more reality, our individual and collective ability?

My questions are somewhat rhetorical. Today I am not looking for another word. I’m sure we are not lacking in adjectives to stick in front of leader, as in “servant leader,” or “visionary leader,” or “authentic leader.” The bookshelves are full of such titles. What I am puzzling over is why the kind of leadership I contemplate above is so rare as to not be easily understood.

How did leadership become something other than the capacity to call forth what’s already present? Humanity has known for ages that the good teacher, the good parent, the good artist and the good farmer were the ones who could see and summon gifts already present. We have known that the work of leaders is to name, interpret, raise to consciousness, make explicit, cultivate, leverage what already is, what’s waiting in some instances, what’s hidden even, but what already is. Somewhere along the way, however, leadership became a task of producing what’s absent. And it became a technique of getting people to do what they are not inclined to do. Leadership became management: a bag of tricks to make up for what’s missing and to motivate people who’d rather be doing something else.

What would it take to reacquaint ourselves with that older understanding of leadership? Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine an anxious leader scanning the Internet for solutions to the problems she faces. Revenue is down and cuts are looming. Morale is low, backbiting is high. Meetings seem pointless when promises are made yet rarely kept. And to top it off, she keeps losing her Internet connection.

What’s a leader to do amid so many problems? The answer may seem counterintuitive: Pay attention to what’s working.

Appreciative practices are habits, rituals and exercises that help leaders focus on resources near at hand for individual and organizational growth. Appreciative practices reframe challenging situations by inviting questions of a different sort than the standard “How do we fix it?” Read the rest of this entry »

Thinking about practices. Thinking about integration, about being “close to the work.” Need to send off some thoughts to an organization today, and I would like to develop out these ideas for others.

Here, in this paragraph above, are practices. Journaling is a practice. Pausing to reflect is a practice. Thinking about maximizing this effort is a practice, perhaps a practice of multiplying. Considering the community, maybe always a particular community (like the client that’s on my mind), in this moment of solitude is a practice. “Contemplata aliis tradere,” the Dominican calling: the fruits of contemplation for the benefit of community.

How one starts is a practice. That applies to how I have begun this morning: I picked the paper off the lawn, made coffee, started in on a Sudoku puzzle, and warmed up a second cup of coffee. I had to resist jumping to the computer and e-mail. I forgot to mention that I also prayed and carried into my prayer a phrase from other days, from Nan Merrill’s Psalms for Praying: “You in every heart.”

How one starts: That also applies to how I have opened this entry, the sentences I laid down at the outset, the tone I set. Everything that follows flows from this, even the discontinuities, the distractions, the seeming breaks from the original pattern.

Practices frame a day. They are the structure, the “trellis,” as my friend Mahan Siler and his Asheville community call it. We need – I need – this framework. Practices provide hooks from which to hang things; they are the signs and symbols of meaning being made in this day.

I could rush through the day, and on many days I do, but the meaning I will construct is thin on details, more clichéd than anything: “I’ve been busy”; “Life is good, busy but good.” Yet what really happened to me, and what is really happening to others, to my family, to this community, to this place we share, our world?

I need practices to make an impression, to kick up the detail like dust and cover me, get under my fingernails and crowd my nostrils. Otherwise I will not know, at least not at a conscious level. And maybe my unconscious will even “miss the meaning,” as T.S. Eliot says, for all of me needs practices, these habits that make me pay attention.