Creative Leadership Coaching

Carman writes: Hi Lisa,  I’ll try to paraphrase your questions:
1. Is emergent (bottom-up) organization compatible with goals and direction (top-down)?
2. When is the imposition of limits appropriate?
Morgan explains that “the intelligence of the human brain is not predetermined, predesigned, or  preplanned. Indeed, it is not centrally driven in any way. It is a decentralized emergent [...]

If you are interested in how Partnership approaches to leadership can unleash collaborative power in the workplace, I encourage you to check out Cynthia King’s Creating Partnerships: Unleashing Collaborative Power in the Workplace (2005).   
See more at: http://www.creating-partnerships.com/

In my last post, I succumbed to using the dance analogy for describing how we negotiate what is taking place in any interaction or relationship. We could use the term “negotiation” or “game” but the first suggests conscious “strategy” and even manipulation, and for me, the second invokes transactional analysis, which describes some common [...]

We are all hardwired to respond to subtle social cues. Smiles, laughter, yawning — are all contagious. Studies have shown that when we are in tune with others we unconsciously adapt our body/language to be compatible with theirs.
This unconscious mimicry of physical expression tends to invoke a similar emotional or psychological effect: Someone smiles [...]

In my last post we backed our way into a discussion of an emerging way of thinking about leadership and organization: the metaphor of the organization as an organsim. 
 http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/01/the-brain-as-a-metaphor-for-organization/
As we talked about earlier, metaphors are maps of the terrain that can yield some useful insights, so we don’t need to hold on to them too tightly (as [...]

My colleagues seated in the rows behind us seemed to be much slower on the uptake than I had given them credit for. Could it be that we leaders in the front row were, in fact, smarter?
To begin at the beginning, my colleagues and I were attending a workshop that I had organized for a [...]

In a recent article, Chris Rice, CEO of BlessingWhite reminds us that the quality of leadership becomes especially important in challenging times. Keeping your employees energized and enthused, and retaining your best employees best positions our organizations to adapt and respond to changing conditions.  Yet, if surveys of employee satisfaction and commitment are any indication, more of [...]

I just found this excellent post that fits in wonderfully with our conversation on Partnership culture and how it can enable more flexible, collaborative and innovative organizations…  Two points that I think are especially helpful are:

Values predict behavior (obviously very important to the discussion of culture and organizational change)
Organizational values function as attractors, giving rise to [...]