July Hiatus: Jack Ricchiuto's "Mindful Leadership"

While I'm on my July blogging hiatus, I'd thought I'd share with you a few posts from friends whose thought leadership I admire. Here's Jack Ricchiuto on "Mindful Leadership":

Mindful Leadership: The Key To High Engagement Organizations

It’s interesting that we have two kinds of leaders today. We have those who actively create cultures of engagement and those who actually engender disengagement.

What makes the difference? Is it their pedigrees or salaries, personality types or track records? Is it the obvious or a more subtle chemistry of factors?

We now have compelling evidence that our quality of attention is the key differentiating factor in how we learn, work and live. It is equally true for how people lead.

High engagement leaders are mindful leaders.

Mindful leaders live in the present. They pay attention to the uniqueness and possibilities of each moment. Clear that now is the only time they ever have, they exude a sense of presence that is contagiously engaging, buoyant and realistic.

The practice of presence gives them an agile sense of timing and an inspiring sense of perspective. They are flexible without being distracted and passionate without being myopic. They treat change as inevitable and vital.

Unmindful leaders live in the past and future. Their sense of timing is regularly off. They come across as somewhere between distracted and obsessed. As much inauthentic lip service they deliver otherwise, they treat change as the enemy to their illusion of power.

They stay untrustworthy with unspoken agendas and unrealistic in expectations because they don’t live in the present. Unmindful leaders squander an unproductive amount of time planning and reporting because these excuse them from accountability in the present.

Mindful leaders get measurably more done because they are continuously engaged in the present. Even their sense of planning and reporting has the character of presence.

The world of an unmindful leader is a world of drama and dogma. The world of a mindful leader is a world of discovery and difference.

Mindful leaders treat conversations as opportunity spaces for action. They are always making agreements, generating and testing options, initiating and completing things. Regardless of agenda, duration or location, their meetings have a palpable feel of accomplishment and engagement. They do not allow people to unmindfully postpone the possible in self-fulfilling excuses about the impossible.

Unmindful leaders see vision as the assumptive delegation of action into the future. They think they’re demonstrating leadership by treating conversations as spaces for endless discussing, defending and dictating. Their meetings result in more meetings. Communication around them remains consistently fractured, fictional and frustrating.

Mindful leaders ask great questions that move people from uncertainty to creativity and talk to action. Unmindful leaders see conversations as opportunities to convert others to the narcissism of assumptions.

Mindful leaders engage people’s strengths, passions and connections. Unmindful leaders are consistently uninterested in these because their priority is fixing people’s weaknesses, deficiencies and differences.

Mindful leaders are regularly seen engaging by walking around. Unmindful leaders don’t have to look up from their screens and meeting tables because they remain intrinsically uninterested in the present.

Mindful people have little tolerance for unmindful leaders because their unmindfulness creates a culture of disengagement.

Unmindful people prefer the disengagement of unmindful leaders because it entitles them to a lack of accountability they prefer. Their refusal to share authentic feedback enables their disengaging leaders to conspire in the illusion that their unmindful leadership is responsible for what people achieve in spite of it.

Fortunately, there is an emerging genre of leaders who doubt the value of the unmindful model. They have an intuition that, even though unmindful leadership is normative and incentivised, it doesn’t create an environment that brings out the best in people. They seek to become more mindful in their approach to leadership.

They have a sense that the engagement of mindful leadership has far more benefits and fewer costs than disengagement from unmindful leadership.

The good news is that becoming a more mindful leader is completely possible because everyone already has all requisite skills.

We now have solid evidence that mindful leaders outperform unmindful leaders on every dimension of performance, development and interaction. The key to high engagement organizations is mindful leadership.

Every organization, school and community needs to demand nothing less.

…

Jack Ricchiuto is a writer, engagement artisan and author of “Abundant Possibilities: The Power Of Presence In An Intentional Life” released this month. More: JackRicchiuto.com

The Green Skeptic Speaking at Temple/Fox School of Business

From the shameless self-promotion department:

I'll be speaking today at Temple University's Fox School of Business and Management today.

I was invited by Fox Net Impact and the Office of Leadership Development and will be speaking on social enterprise and the new economy.

My talk, which I hope to post a link to once it is available, is about how entrepreneurs are changing the face of business and how the recent crises can, if we learn from them, drive us to build a better economic mousetrap.

As World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab said in his closing remarks at Davos last week, we now have an opportunity to put values back into capitalism.

I've long argued here that we need a new economy based on renewal, regeneration, and respect, rather than free credit, cheap oil and new housing. We can build a new economy based not on greed, but on innovation and prosperity through sustainability.

I look forward to sharing the talk with you -- and, if you're going to be there, please say hello.

Conservation: A Farewell to TNC's Stephanie Meeks

I've crashed a few parties in my day. But tonight I found my way into an invitation-only special event, thanks to my old TNC-pal David Whitehead.

The occasion? Saying farewell to Stephanie Meeks, the acting president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy, who will step down at the end of the month. I was glad I went.

I've known Stephanie for a long time; we came into the Conservancy around the same time, and we each contributed in our own ways to the organization's tremendous success over the past decade and change.

Over the past eighteen years, Stephanie rose in the ranks from a humble start in the Tennessee chapter to acting CEO. She took over the top spot last October, when Steve McCormick left to run the Moore Foundation.

But in reality, Stephanie was capably running much of the organization by the time she stepped into the acting president and CEO role. Since the late 90s, Stephanie oversaw the fundraising, marketing, and operations functions and later became chief operating officer.

Her able leadership, decisiveness, and laser focus fueled the dizzying growth and, ultimately, navigated the ship through unchartered waters: enabling her team to mobilize billions of dollars in support of conservation outcomes.

A colleague told me that when Stephanie stepped up to the plate last Fall, the organization let out a huge exhale. Such was the confidence the staff and board had in her abilities and leadership.

She was an inspiring and tireless leader; in part because she understood the real value in shared leadership and trusting her team. This was a lesson she -- and all of us -- learned from the late John Sawhill, and from Stephanie's former boss, the late Mike Coda.

The Conservancy ultimately decided to go in a different direction, bringing in Mark Tercek to lead its next chapter. This was not a reflection on Stephanie's promise as a leader; most of us who worked under her believed in her capabilities.

As with any leader, we didn't always agree with particular decisions she made. (In the last few years a wall seemed to be building between the staff and executive team, and staff and board, for instance. That was disconcerting, but it never hampered TNC's growth.)

We all understood, however, that Stephanie always lived the Conservancy's values, and her decisions were driven by an insatiable desire to advance the Conservancy's mission.

Some smart group -- non-profit or for-profit -- will snap her up. They will not be disappointed.

Stephanie Meeks will go on to lead another organization of committed individuals to great growth and new heights. She will also learn a lesson a number of us have learned: there is life after TNC.

Thank you, Stephanie, and good luck in your future endeavors. I won't say goodbye, hoping our paths will cross again down the road.

(Blogging by BlackBerry; updated with links and photo courtesy of TNC on 6/20/08)