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Our
passion is helping executives increase their leadership effectiveness
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December,
2005 Welcome
to Leadership Hand™, a monthly e-newsletter To ensure receipt, please add our e-mail address "Info@" plus our domain name to your e-mail address book. 1. Righting: Balance Amidst Imbalance One frame for describing my coaching comes from fishing--something I grew up doing. In my earliest childhood it was fishing off the dock for croakers with a bamboo cane pole. As I grew older we trailed hand-lines behind the small outboard for Spanish mackeral or jumping mullet. In my twenties and thirties I competed in marlin tournaments, spending long days about seventy miles offshore in the clear, warm blue of the Gulf Stream and the deep blue of the Atlantic. I fished onboard different makes of boats, including several Bertram sportfishers. In heavy weather and depending on the boat's relationship to the waves, the Bertrams tended to roll from side to side--however, they always righted themselves. When everything falls apart or seems to, I hold for the client that place of "righting," available even in the worst possible conditions. The place of righting is a place of spiritual trust--a place where we can acknowledge and be in the full range of motion. It offers balance even amidst imbalance. Once, I coached an executive whose organization was targeted for a merger with a larger one with a different mission and identity. Many meetings and conversations led the executive to believe his position might be in jeopardy or his freedom to make strategic decisions might be radically changed. We began by acknowledging the dreadful situation, the possibility of demotion, the dissolution of the organization, or the chance of a major reallocation of organizational resources. After his initial anger, he immediately wanted to take action and strategize. I invited him to consider the uncertainty of the future, questions it might raise in his different roles as a leader, a colleague, even as a family member and friend. Without insisting, I continued to invite him to be in that emotional mix of not knowing, even if it meant feeling helpless. Our organizations often deny leaders the experience of such feelings and our Western culture insists we make the briefest acknowledgement (if even that) of changed events and move on quickly to the solution. It's the end result that matters, we insist, rarely the process. With that perspective, we lose the richness and inspiration that can arise from fully experiencing not knowing. When my client
deeply acknowledged the many different ways he was challenged, his
tone, his body, and our conversations began to change. He started
to accept this "whole thing," this full range of (e)motion.
Even his strategizing changed as he began to envision new possibilities,
some even more exciting than before. Coaching enabled him to experience
the proposed merger in a way that led him to make different choices
in relating to his employees. Acknowledging uncertainty, he made
no promises that "everything would be okay." To Your Place of "Righting", Beth Hand © Copyright 2007, Beth Hand. Beth Hand, MBA helps leaders increase their effectiveness and satisfaction, now and for the future. She can be reached at (+1) 703.820.8074 or via her website www.leadershiphand.com. Reprinted from Hand, Beth. "Leading is A Courageous Act." In: Belf, Teri-E. Coaching With Spirit: Allowing Success to Emerge. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2002. 2. Reprint Permission This is a copyrighted publication. You are welcome to reprint an issue on a non-exclusive basis provided you:
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He
immediately established "safe" venues for employees to
express concerns. I think what I offered was to hold that place
of trust, helping him embrace the whole while letting the "righting"
occur as naturally as the rolling in heavy seas.|
© Copyright 2005, Hand Associates and Beth Hand • All Rights Reserved Hand
Associates, LLC Leadership
Coaching & Development |
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