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    You are here Home » leadership

    Leaders: Choose Your Own Reality

    Last updated on Feb 1, 2019 by Dan McCarthy · This post may contain affiliate links

    Guest
    post from Dr. Joan McArthur-Blair and
    Dr. Jeanie Cockell

    Just about every leader has had an employee who was, to say
    it diplomatically, a “handful” to manage. We have. One example was a person
    Joan worked with – let’s call her Jane Doe. Jane saw policies and procedures as
    mere suggestions. She irritated her team with her habit of pushing limits to
    get an idea through. When stressed she let it show though in her interactions
    with others. Yet, she always received amazing reviews from her direct reports
    and colleagues because they saw something important and worthy in her.

    Along with her leadership faults, Jane  was innovative, creative, personable,
    dedicated, and very hard working. In Joan’s time working with her, Joan chose
    to focus on her abilities and how she used those abilities to champion what
    needed to get done. Notice the word choice here—Joan chose. She could have focused entirely on Jane’s weaknesses and
    frustrated all of  her attempts to
    undertake positive work. Yet, she consciously chose not to do this. She
    consciously chose to “reframe” the situation and foster Jane’s leadership
    strengths.

    The
    power of reframing

    Reframing is about intentionally offering up a different
    frame to a leadership situation. The ability to reframe or reinterpret a given
    situation enables leaders to see that positive consequences can be built from
    even the direst circumstances. What leaders focus on and foster influences the
    outcomes both for themselves and for those who work with them.

    Reframing is a powerful practice that leaders committed to
    positive change embrace. It is one of the many practices of “appreciative
    resilience” which we outline in our book, Building
    Resilience with Appreciative Inquiry: A Leadership Journey through Hope,
    Despair, and Forgiveness
    .

    Resilience, or the ability to sustain or persevere in the
    most complex of leadership and life experiences, is a necessary skill for
    leaders to have in today’s fast-paced, volatile world. Appreciative resilience approaches
    resilience from the place of assisting leaders in developing their own
    understanding and personal call to resilience by using appreciative inquiry. (AI is an approach that focuses on what’s working well by engaging
    people in asking generative questions
    .)

    Using
    reframing to build resilience

    Leaders often think of resilience as a response to
    weathering despair, but in appreciative resilience work, resilience is fostered
    from a place of maximizing the use of appreciative exploration as leaders move
    through three constant leadership states: hope, despair, and forgiveness.

    Through our decades of consulting work, we’ve identified
    these three constant states of leadership and have seen the power of reframing
    in hope, despair, and forgiveness as part of  building resilience. For example, in hope,
    reframing can allow leaders to see possibilities in place of challenges. In
    despair, reframing can shed light on the strengths that can sustain a leader.  And, in forgiveness, reframing can empower
    someone to move past resentment, anger, and fear and step towards evolving and
    growing as a leader.

    Living
    in today’s world full of multiple realities

    Reframing as one of the practices of appreciative resilience
    allows leaders to begin to see the other possible worldviews and to be open to
    the idea that other views, ideas and directions could have merit. This is
    especially important in today’s leadership world where there are many different
    worldviews born out of culture, diversity, events, and lived experience.

    When leaders see that their perspectives are not always
    shared truths, they change how they react. They alter the kinds of questions
    they ask, the types of actions they might take, and the openheartedness with
    which they might approach what is before them.

    There are many people like Joan’s former colleague inside
    organizations. The ability to reframe to see these individuals’ strengths, or
    other people’s perspectives, or possibilities hidden within challenges opens
    the door for leaders to enable positive outcomes. P.S. Jane flourished.
    About the authors:
    Dr. Joan
    McArthur-Blair and Dr. Jeanie Cockell are co-presidents of Cockell
    McArthur-Blair Consulting
    and co-authors of Building
    Resilience with Appreciative Inquiry
    , published by
    Berrett-Koehler. Dr. Joan McArthur-Blair
    is an inspirational writer, speaker, and facilitator. Joan specializes in
    the use of Appreciative Inquiry to foster leadership, strategic planning, and
    innovative strategies for organizational development. Dr. Jeanie Cockell is a dynamic facilitator known for her ability
    to get diverse groups to work collaboratively together. For twenty years,
    Jeanie has served as an educational and organizational consultant helping
    people, organizations, and communities build positive futures and respond
    effectively to change.

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