My favorite warm up for a leadership session is to ask participants to think of all the words they can that begin with the letter, ‘L’ that have anything to do with leadership. The usual response is a collective groan, suggesting this is a ‘dumb’ idea. However, within 10 minutes participants are surprised to discover how these words provide the perfect landscape to launch a leadership discussion. Here are a few special ‘L’ words. Listen, laughter, language, liberate, legacy, lesson, liaison, labor, limit, lonely and luck. The leaders we admire and aspire to be like are those that listen with presence, are able to laugh at themselves, use ‘we’ language as opposed to ‘I’, liberate those around them to experiment and grow, create a legacy beyond their own term of office, absorb and apply lessons learned, adapt to their role as liaison to a wide range of stakeholders, labor hard and with others, know their limits and seek out resources, can deal with the frequent lonely moments and burdens and bump into luck frequently. These are just a handful of ‘L’ words that capture the social, emotional and cognitive dimensions of leadership. There are more such as limbo, lucrative, logical, and love. What ‘L’ words define leadership for you?
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Recent Comments | 8 Total
May 19, 2008 at 10:27am by Damian D. "Skipper" Pitts
Rochelle, As a professor of leadership and organizational behavior, I've used your exercise in my business class and I must say, IT WAS A HIT! This exercise was only planned for a one hour discussion, but quickly developed into a two three hour conversation with students wanting more.
Kudos to you and thanks for the insightful exercise.
Damian D. "Skipper" Pitts
Temple University
May 23, 2008 at 10:32am by Rochelle Mucha
Skipper
Thanks...glad to inspire. I have also applied this activity to igniting conversation on 'change' and 'team'. I employ the same format...what begins with 'C' or 'T' and amazingly enough, it triggers endless conversation and learning. Feel free to contact me for more intriguing 'methods'.
Rochelle
May 25, 2008 at 5:18pm by Chuck Bolton
What a great idea! The "L" exercise... Thanks for sharing. I'm going to use in my work, too.
May 26, 2008 at 6:27am by Jay Tatum
Dear Rochelle,
Enjoyed the exercise as a creative process for leading people to think, especially your comment about the other dimensions to leadership. In particular I wanted to comment on the cerebral dimension of leadership. In many of the social science constructs of reality, leadership is divorced from anything that isn't cerebral, as if it were a quality that exists without any connection to one's own experience and emotions. I would go so far as to suggest that the cerebral and emotional dimensions were two sides of the leadership coin and you can't have one without the other, although many folks try. The exercise itself shows how engaging the process can be when one is encouraged to be engaged at All levels. Well done.
Conversely, though, I would also suggest that a distinction could be made between leading collectively, as in "us" and "we," and "I" and "me." On the one hand I am reading you comment with some disdain when it comes to admiring and aspiring leadership that is gronded in the "I" position. I don't know how far I could address this, but my prejudice is that anytime I see "we" associated with leadership, I tend to characterize it as "Crab Bucket Leadership," where no one ever achieves a higher level of performance because the other crabs in the bucket tend to pull you back down into the bucket (you can also call this sabotage). But there are limits to metaphors, for what it's worth.
Overall, the exercise rocks. I've used this with clergy in workshops I've done and tried to tie it to leadership qualities of people of faith. While you probably wouldn't be surprised by this, your readers may be interested to learn that the leaders we admire and aspire to be like most are the ones associated with our belief systems, even when that belief system goes beyond organized religion and spills over into Civil Religion! Keep it up.
On the other hand, there is something to be said about collective leadership and team work. Without it, "we" could not accomplish much at all but the distinction still needs to be made between leadership and followership and vision. Show these dimensions and you'll be on track with a great model.
May 26, 2008 at 9:39am by Rochelle Mucha
Chuck
Glad to help. I have always found that a 'quick' to the point activity such as this helps the group discover what they already know, or suspect, but may need some guidance to bring to the surface and connect.
May 26, 2008 at 9:40am by Rochelle Mucha
Jay
Appreciate your thoughtful response. Blogs are great as a conversation starter...no need for us to agree on any or all points. What is best is that ideas beget more ideas. Thanks.
May 31, 2008 at 12:03am by Phil Clark
Rochelle,Another exercise I use to start the leadership discussion is to have groups write down the traits or behaviors they have witnessed in someone they thought was a
leader. I usually get traits like trustworthy, easy to talk to, honest, have vision, etc. I then ask them to tell me what the traits look like in the workplace. Whoa! That really starts the discussions. If they say trustworthy...I have them tell me what that looks like. How do they know someone is honest? The reason I push them is that real leadership is demonstrated and measured by action not words.
May 31, 2008 at 11:00am by Rochelle Mucha
Phil
Thanks for sharing your activity. It sounds like a 'conversation' I have at the onset of a leadership coaching relationship. Like you, I ask the person I am working with to describe a leader they admire. Like you, I ask them..'How do you know', and that leads to surfacing 'actions, behaviors, impacts', etc. Then I ask the coaching client to reflect on their own leadership behavior in comparison to the folks/traits they admire. The gaps usually lead to a good starting point for leadership development.