Guest Post: Leadership Tools Are Dramatically Improved By Applying The Leadership Gift
Guest post by Jürgen De Smet
As a passionate practitioner of The Leadership Gift at work, I’m constantly on stage — and I never take enough time to practice!
For that reason we used our Co-Learning Leadership Retreat to extend our understanding of The Responsibility Process as it relates to other leadership techniques and practices.
We emphasized having fun and put no pressure on achieving specific results.
Together with Johan Tré, I designed a workshop in order to discover and practice leadership techniques while role playing a fictional, yet very familiar, situation that guided us through five of The Responsibility Process steps.
The 5 Steps of The Responsibility Process:
- Denial – You must be kidding! I don’t see the problem.
- Blame – Not my fault; it’s them!
- Justify – There’s no time for that! I’m the only one who can do this.
- Shame – I must have been stupid! I’m sorry…
- Obligation – I must do this as it is stated in my contract. I’ll do it because you say so.
Performing a PDCA cycle every hour:
- Plan: define action or strategy to handle the situation
- Do: practice in role play scenario
- Check: reveal results and validate assumptions
- Act: generate insights/adjust strategy
This proved to be really beneficial in this context. Do not assume success at the first try!
We discovered how different leadership techniques like crucial conversations and confrontations, powerful questions, and moving motivators can help but are less effective without thorough understanding of The Responsibility Process linking people’s behavior together with everybody’s upsets.
Understanding The Responsibility Process, and being aware about the language related to it, increased the success factor of a planned strategy/action tremendously.
This workshop supported me in my beliefs about living a responsible life and still helps me to reflect on where I am today. I’m convinced it increased the human potential of each one of us, and I know there is still a lot to learn and reflect on. I’m especially happy this session inspired others to follow and make the world a better place.
Jürgen De Smet is founder of Co-Learning in Belgium and a passionate member of the Leadership Gift Program. More here about what Co-Learning is and offers. Follow Jurgen on Twitter at @JurgenLACoach.
