The Leadership Challenge

I offer a very effective leadership program that focuses on the following Five Practices:

• Model the Way - Leaders find their voice by clarifying their personal values and expressing them in a style that is authentically their own, and they set the example by aligning actions with shared values.
• Inspire a Shared Vision - Leaders envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities and enlisting others in a common vision by appealing to their shared aspirations.
• Challenge the Process - Leaders search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow, and improve. They also experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from mistakes.
• Enable Others to Act - Leaders foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust. They strengthen others by sharing power and discretion.
• Encourage the Heart - Leaders recognize contributions by showing their appreciation for individual excellence. They also celebrate values and victories by creating a spirit of community.

Most of my workshops begin after Leaders and their Observers have completed the LPI (Leadership Practices Inventory) 360. This instrument has both face validity (results make sense to people) and predictive validity (the results are significantly correlated with various performance measures and can be used to make predictions about leadership effectiveness.)

The workshop is customizable or off-the-shelf, depending on your needs and the acuteness of your situation.

High Reliability Organizations (HROs)

While working with health care organizations, I spend a lot of time exploring their cultures in degrees of high reliability. HROs are organizations "that operate under very trying conditions all the time and yet manage to have fewer than their fair share of accidents. They face an 'excess' of unexpected events because their technologies are complex and their constituencies are varied in their demands - and because the people who run these systems, like all of us, have an incomplete understanding of their own systems and what they face. Part of their success in managing the unexpected stems from their uncommon success in finding ways to stay mindful about what is happening." * HROs are typically air traffic control systems, emergency rooms, nuclear power plants, or aircraft carriers.

Is your organization an HRO? To a degree, of course it is. Whether you are a broadcasting company, a bank, a hospital, a web service, a marketing company, or a temp agency, the stakes are high. If you see your organization in the HRO description above, you will benefit from understanding and practicing the dynamics of "managing the unexpected."

Because errors are inevitable, you should know about Weick and Sutcliffe's characteristics of HROs (upon exploration, we find these match up nicely with Kouzes and Posner's Five Practices):

• Preoccupation with failure
• Reluctance to simplify interpretations
• Sensitivity to operations
• Commitment to resilience
• Deference to expertise

* Weick, E. & Sutcliffe, K, Managing the Unexpected, Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity, Jossey-Bass, 2001, San Francisco