Strategies for Leadership for the Independent Learner

FOR THE INDEPENDENT LEARNER

If you intend to develop leadership skills independently of your employer the fee for this program is adjusted for those who personally carry the cost. Also, because it's a big step to place trust in stranger, you are invited to schedule a free of charge Preliminary Leadership Conversation to learn if I am the right person to help you.

I create for you a highly customized environment in which you can learn and practice strategies for leadership according to your situation and objectives. In these strategies you can find the power to:

• Increase Leadership Bandwidth - Be more productive in working relationships.

• Collaborate to Innovate - Bring creativity to these relationships.

• Aspire to a Vision - Act with clearer understanding of your motivation.

In and between weekly, 1-hour Leadership Conversations, this process is completed when you're satisfied - it may be a few months or over a year, depending on your motivation and your sense of success. Check out each of the Strategies for Leadership below and consider that Preliminary Leadership Conversation. I look forward to hearing from you.

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because s/he wants to do it." Dwight Eisenhower

Increase Bandwidth - Accomplish more with new relational awareness

Leadership Bandwidth is the capacity to get things done with others and it increases as friction and stress in working relationships are removed. We experience high bandwidth leadership when everything satisfyingly comes together. We are empowered, stress-free and relate much more effectively.

Stress shows up in each of us as unconsciously adopted roles. When we adopt these roles with others and include our unconscious assumptions about their roles, a stress spiral begins! This can be momentary, as a lost opportunity within an existing relationship or it can be habitual, making the establishment of productive relationships quite difficult. After such encounters we might find ourselves blaming the other person for their attitude or kicking ourselves when, after the stress of the encounter has passed, we recognize the missed opportunity.

The challenge is to develop a real time relational awareness, an awareness of our behavior and the ways in which others respond. Only when we have identified the real nature of our working relationships, the roles we and others play under stress, can we see how to change our approach, reduce friction and tension and move more easily through the leadership landscape.

High bandwidth practices are discovered and narrower ones broadened or discarded in Leadership Conversations. You can expect to learn powerful new practices even in the first conversation and only four or five may be needed for you to significantly increase your leadership bandwidth.

"Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Collaboration for Innovation - Tapping the resources hidden in underdeveloped relationships

While technology makes information sharing so much easier, collaboration and innovation still depend upon the intentions of those sharing. Virtual does not necessarily mean virtuous. The new leadership challenge is to bring real collaboration to an increasingly virtual world.

If you grew up among collaborative relationships, where everyone was a winner, chances are you have long experienced the freedom with others that is necessary for innovation. Many of us, however, learned our behaviors in a competitive culture of winners and losers and find collaboration difficult if not impossible. We may have thought that we collaborated when we followed but that was just cooperating, which can be helpful but doesn't lead to innovation.

Leaders struggle between the demand for results from today's implementation and the knowledge that future success also mandates innovation today. Fortunately, it is unnecessary to de-prioritize innovation when we can tap into the resources existing in underdeveloped, collaborative relationships among team-members, whether employees, investors, customers, competitors, providers or partners.

The tactics of Collaboration for Innovation can be learned during a series of Leadership Conversations supporting an enhanced self awareness that guides specific kinds of participation, according to whether the need is for implementation or innovation.

"Visualization and belief in a pattern of reality activates the creative power of Realization." A. L. Lina

Articulate a Vision - Express an actionable understanding of your motives

You can help a person find their motivation or inspiration when your words or actions resonate with their intentions so they can then see a way forward. Imaginative people may perceive something visual but what we all "see" in our "mind's eye" is a perception of a deeply held understanding of what is important - our values. A vision is values made visible. To aspire to a vision is to open up to inspiration that will ground us further in our values. When we articulate a vision we recognize what is valuable in ourselves and in others, and others recognize that in us. When we articulate a shared vision we become united in its values.

Individual and team success lies in accomplishing what you and the team value most, and these values made visible constitute your vision of success. When you or your team aspire to a vision of success you are open to whatever reinforces the values of success that you hold, whatever touches your emotions and stimulates your individual or shared motivations. This vision of success is empowering because it affirms what's relevant, suggests what's possible and informs how it can be realized. It is actionable.

Practically, in Leadership Conversations, an individual or team articulates his/her/their vision using an interpretive structure that can become a physical or virtual desktop object. (You can see an example in A Vision of Leadership for Collaboration and Innovation.) New light is shed on assumptions and opportunities emerge that were not apparent before. This object can be used to reflect upon, focus communication and provide a powerful context for action. Reflection, communication and feedback refine the vision, further focusing individual and collective energies.

"The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another person's observation, not overturning it." Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Leadership Conversations for the Independent Learner

Leadership Conversations are developmental conversations in and between which independent learner's implement their Strategies for Leadership.

Conducted by Chris Newham, either in person or on line, they are designed to support you as you Increase your Leadership Bandwidth, Collaborate to Innovate, and Aspire to a Vision. In each conversation you identify new leadership practices to apply in your workplace and in the next conversation, further refine them and learn more. You will have a framework within which to observe yourself and others in your working relationships, acquire a deeper appreciation for the contexts in which you work, and recognize your alternatives for shaping outcomes.

To learn more about of Strategies for Leadership, you're invited to participate in a preliminary Leadership Conversation without further obligation.