Embed Innovation Systematically – Eric’s Story

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Michael Jordan TryI’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at Metcalf & Associates. Congratulations! We have arrived at the final step in innovative leadership development. In this post, we will begin creating a Personal Transformation Log. With this, we will know how to track our actual behaviors toward our goals, measure progress, and compare them to expected behaviors and progress. As always, my responses are in italics, which you can use to strengthen your understanding of the question. The next part of this post will give you real-world application suggestions.

Eric Transformation Actiity Log

Real World Application: Expect the Unexpected & Fail Fast

While it’s important to focus on what’s in front of you in the present, it’s also important to consider the future. As you progress on your current goals and you’re in a good rhythm, take a few moments occasionally to consider what goals you could set. Consider upcoming events, such as job hunting or graduate school programs. What kind of skills and behaviors would you like to develop by then? Another important thing is to take unpredictable events into account.

One thing guaranteed is that some completely unexpected and uncontrollable events will happen in your life, which could greatly impact your short- and long-term goals. Due to this, it may be worth considering strengthening your resilience and problem-solving skills/behaviors when setting goals in the future.

Remember, failure is natural, and no one is perfect. View mistakes and failure as an opportunity to learn. After all, the only true failure is failure to try.  Remember to think like a scientist and use experiments or constant trial-and-error. We like to use the term “fail fast”, meaning the faster you figure out what does not work, the faster you can determine what does.

In the next post, we will answer reflection questions to systematically strengthen your understanding of embedding innovation.  

Photo credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua

Take Action to Develop as a Leader – Eric’s Story

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Taking actionI’m Eric Philippou, writing this blog during my college internship at ILI. In this post, we will take the next step in the innovative leadership development process: taking action. This post will discuss how to start effectively and mitigate any potential barriers.

Start Effectively

First, you must believe you can accomplish your short-term milestones. If you’ve been closely following the previous posts and participating in the exercises, and you’re serious about chasing your life goals, then you are more than capable of accomplishing these short-term milestones. You may seem intimidated and overwhelmed, but that’s what you want. If you’re not exiting your comfort zone, you’re not growing.

Secondly, this process will not only take you out of your comfort zone but will require some consistent commitment. If you must, do not start out too extreme. Take it slow in the beginning, familiarize yourself with the routine, and gradually push yourself to greater limits.

Overcoming Barriers

Most importantly, you’ll need to allow yourself some flexibility in your plan because you will likely face obstacles that may require you to modify your routine temporarily. Below is a worksheet to help you overcome your barriers. Feel free to refer to my answers to see how to answer each space. The goal I’m referring to is how I want to increase my productivity with work.

Barrier Action Planning Worksheet
Category Barrier Impact of Barrier How to Remove or Work Around Support I Need to Remove or Work Around This Barrier
In my thinking I over-analyze small details, which take me on tangents about unrelated things. It distracts me, removing my focus from the actual task, and I think about something completely irrelevant. Maintain perspective on the overall goal of certain tasks to better understand the functions behind the smaller details, requiring less thought later on. Personal support to hold me accountable each day.
In my behavior I try to multi-task way too much. This impedes my productivity. Focus on one task at a time, do it right the first time, and practice “essentialism.” Personal support, casually reminding each other about essentialism.
In our beliefs We depend on third parties to do their part of a task too often. This slows us down because we wait for them to finish. Rely less on external sources’ work and consider doing their part by ourselves. Professional partnership support to find out what we can do without a third party.
In how we do things We multi-task as a group. It impedes productivity. We are reminding each other to focus fully on the tasks at hand. Remember that I must also focus and ask others to do the same.

Real World Application: Create a Barrier Log

Review your responses for the Barrier Action Planning Worksheet and create a spreadsheet document. Label the first column “Barrier”. Move one column to the right, and label the next five columns, from left to right, “Attempt #1”, “Attempt #2”, and so on. In the column labeled “Attempt #1”, write how you plan to overcome the corresponding barrier, perhaps using the response you put for the Barrier Action Planning Worksheet. If you fail on the first attempt, write a new or refined way to overcome that barrier, plus what you did wrong in the previous attempt in the Attempt #2 section, and continue this process until you eventually overcome the barrier. On the attempt where you finally succeed, highlight that box in green. As new barriers rise, add them to the log; however, after you complete a barrier, it is critical that you keep it on the log and do not delete it.

This barrier log will be useful because you can track what did and did not work to overcome a barrier. You will likely come across barriers similar to previous ones, so knowing what worked (and what didn’t) in advance makes the barrier easy to overcome. As time passes, and you begin to see a long list of old barriers with green boxes, signifying success, your confidence in overcoming barriers will increase. It may be grueling to add more attempts because you keep failing but understand that only true failure is failure to try.

Feel free to include barriers outside the leadership development process, such as academic, social, and even health barriers. Save this document in a cloud storage service for both safety and convenience. Update it regularly. Also, if one of your mentors from the Build Your Team section is an “equal” or someone in the same situation as you, have that person make a barrier log and share logs with each other online or during meetings.

In the next post, we will answer reflection questions to strengthen our understanding of how we’ll take action.

Photo Credit: www.flickr.com Celestine Chua

Plan Your Career Development Journey Reflection Questions – Eric’s Story

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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. In my last post, we analyzed in-depth our short-term goals to help reach our next career milestones and discovered effective time management techniques. Now, we will fine-tune our short-term goals by answering specific reflection questions. In accordance with the nature of innovative leadership, we not only consider how our personal development goals impact ourselves, but we also consider how they impact our organizations.

Reflection Questions for Plan

We have reached the end of the Plan Your Journey step. This is the third of the six processes of developing innovative leadership – you’re halfway there! As you can see in the graphic below, the next topic is Build Your Team & Communicate, in which we will create a group of mentors and partners to help us before we go all-out in the Take Action step.

Plan Your Career Development Journey Part 2 – Eric’s Story

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IGoals’m Eric Philippou, writing this blog during my college internship at ILI. In the last post, we discussed identifying a skill/behavior that you would like to improve to help you reach your next career milestone, with the understanding that our long-term life goals comprise a series of short-term goals. In this post, you’ll identify the skill/behavior you’d like to improve upon and then create a plan outlining how the current state of that skill, future goal, daily routine/actions, deadline for completion, and a way to measure progress.

Your goal should be S.M.A.R.T.

We recommend that your goal be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (S.M.A.R.T.).

  • Specific: clearly defined. When goals are specific or clearly defined, it is easier to know when they are reached. Specify the goal by clarifying what is expected, why it is important, who is involved, and where it will happen.
    • For example, I want to increase my focus/productivity by 200%, independently, each month during internship/work hours because I can get twice as much work done and be better prepared for when I enter the workforce upon graduation.
  • Measurable: establish criteria for measuring the progress of each goal. This shows what and how much change we are expecting.
    • Focus/productivity will be measured in how many tasks I accomplish during work hours each day. Let’s say I complete two big tasks each day; I will eventually focus on limiting distractions/overthinking to complete four big tasks each day.
  • Attainable: identify the most important goals to you, and you begin to find ways to make them come true. You develop attitudes, abilities, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin to see opportunities you otherwise may not see as you realize the importance of such goals. “Attainable”, in this case, refers to how reasonable the goal is overall, regardless of your ability to do it.
    • Doubling daily productivity or reducing time to accomplish each task in one month is attainable for many people in my situation. Many interns can do that as they develop knowledge and skills.
  • Realistic: to be realistic, the goal has to be something you are personally willing and able to work toward. You are the one who determines when it is completed, so make sure it is something you can realistically accomplish. “Realistic”, in this case, differs from “attainable” because it specifies whether you can accomplish the goal. There may be something unique about you, making you better/worse at accomplishing a task than most people in your situation. If it is too easy, increase the difficulty or tighten the deadline. If too hard, decrease difficulty or push back the deadline, but only after you’ve tried it for a bit – don’t give up too easily!
    • Doubling daily productivity is realistic because I am increasing my knowledge and skill of my work at a higher rate than I could have ever anticipated.
  • Timely: goals that lack time frames also lack urgency. When setting the time frame, set an actual number or defined time, like “one month” or “one school year”. Don’t just say “soon”, “ASAP”, or “eventually”. Would you rather your professors tell you, “You have an exam soon!” or “You have your exam one week from today”?
    • “One month from today” is a defined time.

Ensure your goal is written down in a way that meets the S.M.A.R.T. criteria. Next, we will use the Development Planning Worksheet. This chart should be simple enough to make in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet. Follow my lead:

Eric's development planning worksheet

I highly recommend using a digital calendar with cloud capabilities and managing time well. This link will help you manage your time during the academic semester: http://howtostudyincollege.com/time/. While the link specifies making time for studying, it is still a great time management strategy and will help you find time for your goals.

Now you have a great sense of your short-term goals and your strategy to reach them, plus some potentially life-altering time management advice! In the next post, you will be provided reflection questions regarding the entire journey planning process. After that, you should have a very firm understanding of how to plan your journey as an innovative leader and outstanding college student.

Plan Your Career Development Journey – Eric’s Story

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Journey withinI’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at Metcalf & Associates. I just completed the reflection questions associated with identifying my strengths and opportunities. It is now time to move to plan our journeys understanding that our overall life goals will be achieved by accomplishing many short-term goals. This is the third step in becoming an innovative leader while you’re young.

Short-term goals may consist of milestones that move you closer to your overall achievement, such as internships, degrees, jobs, or promotions. Other short-term goals, which are equally important, consist of personal development, such as learning new skills/behaviors, building on current strengths and minimizing weaknesses. The goals of personal development are very important because as you make progress through your academic and professional careers, you’ll have greater responsibilities and bigger challenges. That being said, to plan the short-term steps that will lead you to the long-term life goal, we must identify which career milestones we will need to get us there, and then choose which personal development goals to accomplish to help us reach the nearest milestone. For each milestone in your life, you may need to create new personal development goals. To optimize personal development (for short-term and long-term), one must include in his plan all four parts of the human experience: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual/purpose.

Short-term Goals: Career Milestones

As you’ve done for previous posts, research and list the steps it takes to get that “dream job”, or long-term goal. Then identify the nearest goal. For example:

    • My Goal: Marketing/management consultant and founder of a nonprofit
  • My Milestones:
    • Do marketing/consulting internships
    • Graduate with relevant degree and great GPA
    • Get marketing/consulting job upon graduation
    • Go to graduate school for MBA
    • Get a great job in marketing/consulting
    • After sufficient experience, create a highly successful nonprofit organization
  • Nearest goal: Job upon graduation

Short-term Goals: Personal Development

Look at your nearest goal, and think of everything you can possibly learn, strengthen and/or fix to achieve the nearest milestone. This will help you find which personal development goals to set to reach the next milestone. The human experience consists four parts: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual/purpose abilities. Enhancing all four of these types of abilities, you will optimize overall personal growth. We separate these four parts into two categories:

  • External abilities (physical and mental):
    • Body: exercise, weight lifting, yoga, relaxation, etc.
    • Mind: reading, studying, attending school/class, etc.
    • Professional skills, learned at school, work, internships, etc.; relevant to your career.
  • Internal abilities (emotional and spiritual/purpose) –
    • Emotional Quotient (EQ): meditation, maintaining strong friendships/relationships, etc.
    • Spirit/purpose: define vision, define values, religious practice, etc.
    • Includes intention, world view, purpose, vision, values, cultural norms, emotional stability, resilience, a sense of being grounded, overall personal well-being, intuition, balanced perspective, and attitude, and serves as the foundation for you to accomplish your deepest aspirations.

According to Ken Wilber, a leading philosopher, one can optimize improvement in one of these areas by “cross training”, or working on an external skill at the same time as an internal skill. For example, people who lift weights (external) and meditate (internal) tend to have more success in both areas than those who only do one or the other.

Planning Personal Development Goals

Choose amongst three developmental focuses: learning a brand new skill/behavior, building on a current strength, or minimizing a weakness. After you pick something to develop in one of those three focus areas, identify whether it is an internal or external ability, and then pick an activity that is the opposite ability for the sake of optimization by cross training. Click here to download the worksheet below (which doesn’t have my answers on it) and fill it out like I did. Feel free to view my answers to maybe better understand the question, or just to get more ideas.

behavior change priorities

Over the next few days, choose a skill and think about how great your life can be if you gain/improve it. In the next post, we’ll make a day-to-day plan for developing that skill to help you reach your next career milestone.

To become a more innovative leader, you can begin by taking our free leadership assessments and then enrolling in our online leadership development program.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future, via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible,  iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.  Stay up-to-date on new shows airing by following the Innovative Leadership Institute LinkedIn.

If you are interested in receiving Eric’s ongoing blog series or our other articles by email, please sign up in the box on the right labeled Get Email Updates From Us.

Reflecting on Your Strengths and Weaknesses – Eric’s Story

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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. I recently completed a series of assessments and the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis.  As usual, I like to finish each topic with some reflection questions. The “What do I believe” quadrant represents intentions, and “What do I do” represents actual behaviors. The “what do we believe” section refers to what our student organization, community, or major/department believes. The “How do we do this” section refers to the systems or processes of that organization, community, group, etc. In my answers, I am using the context of a competitive student organization, in which I am an emerging leader among students, and there are hired professionals at top management.

Eric Strength Reflection Questions

Next week, we will cover the third step in becoming successful as a college student and leader – planning your journey. Do as many of the assessments as you can so you have a full understanding of yourself, your strengths, and your situation while planning your journey.

 

Analyze Strengths and Weaknesses – Eric’s Story

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I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. I recently completed a series of assessments and will now analyze the information. Gather what you’ve learned about yourself into the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis tool. This is a great tool that you can use at any time for many different situations. You can use it n the context of your career plans and some athletes I know use it for their sports also.

Eric SWOT

Real World Application

It helps to take several different assessments to give me different views of myself.  I recommend taking all of the assessments, especially those that are free. After screen capturing or printing the results, please read them carefully to see how to apply them to your daily life. Remember to put 80% of your focus on strengths and 20% on weaknesses. Perhaps take some time Monday through Thursday to focus on a different strength each day, and on Friday, focus on a weakness. For example, I’ll play to my group’s strengths on Monday based on the vibrancy assessment. On Tuesday, I’ll focus on using my “Peacemaker” abilities from the Enneagram. On Friday, I’ll focus on mitigating the weaknesses and threats from my SWOT assessment. Do that, and you may become more comfortable as a leader.

In the next post, I will answer the reflection questions about what I learned during the assessments and SWOT analysis.

Defining Vision Based Actions for College Students – Eric’s Story

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Vision Based ActionsI’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my summer internship at ILI, a leadership and management consulting firm. I am entering my final fall semester at T­he Ohio State University, majoring in Strategic Communication. I like marketing and plan to attend business school in a few years. I’m also on the varsity fencing team at Ohio State.

This summer, I am starting a blog that helps students find their life purposes, plus a step-by-step guide on bringing this vision into reality. I am giving you information from a workbook written by a combination of college faculty and leadership development and executive coaching experts who make business executives very successful. This book will be published late in 2014. In this post, you will find your values. Throughout this blog, I will provide my answers to the exercises as an example. This is part three of the four-part Vision topic. My answers are in italics.

In this post, I’ll show you how to set a realistic career direction based on your vision.  We discussed creating your vision and identifying your values in the last two posts. In the next post, I will answer some great reflection questions. It turns out reflection is a key part of this process.  

Putting Vision into Action

Now that your vision is outlined, it’s important to put it into action. Consider your values and vision, as well as your skills. In this exercise, you will find ways to incorporate your passions into how you make a living. Also, think of ideas or topics that you find extremely interesting and are somehow involved in almost everything you do – school, work, social activities, entertainment media, etc.

Step 1: Identify your foundation.

  • What are you most passionate about?
    • Values: love, excellence, meaningful work
    • Respect
    • Order or being organized
    • Creativity
    • Doing things the right way and not cutting corners
    • Doing the right thing in general
    • Success/winning
    • I would be lying to myself if I didn’t put “food” on this list
    • Deep thinking
  • What are your economic needs, and what can you do to meet them?
    • Overall financial stability: enough to not be worried in case of some family emergency, such as one of my family members needing surgery.
    • I want to create sufficient funding for the NPO.
    • Somewhere between a modest upper-middle class lifestyle and the guy from ‘The Wolf of Wallstreet.’
    • Business strategy
    • Marketing/sales
    • Project management
    • Public speaking
  • What can you be great at?
    • Marketing/sales
    • Business strategy
    • Project management
    • Friend
    • Philanthropy/non-profit work
    • Teamwork
    • Public speaking

Step 2: Review and Identify Overlap.

  • Creativity and deep thinking are involved in all of the professional skills that I can be great at (my creativity led me to try marketing and strategy initially)
  • Excellence and success in my professional field(s) can create wealth
  • Doing the right thing and love overlap with philanthropy
  • Having a lot of money of my own can help fund my NPO
  • Meaningful work and philanthropy
  • Business strategy
  • Marketing/sales
  • Project management
  • Public speaking

Step 3: Harvest the ideas.

  • Based on overlaps, do you see anything that can be incorporated into what you do or how you work?
    • My passions for creativity, excellence, deep thought, and success, combined with economic needs/wants, tell me that I should pursue a career that involves marketing, business strategy, and/or project management.
    • I should work in companies and projects that I find meaningful, ethical, and beneficial to others.

Look at your answers carefully and consider as many ideas and overlaps as possible. Even if something you think is useless, writing it down anyway is good.

Next week, I will share my answers to key reflection questions. Building the reflection “muscle” is important as a leader. I will share my reflections for each step in the leadership development process.

Defining Personal Values For College Students – Eric’s Story

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Values I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my summer internship at Metcalf & Associates, a leadership and management consulting firm. I am entering my final semester at T­he Ohio State University in the fall, majoring in Strategic Communication. I like marketing, and I plan to go to business school in a few years. I’m also on the varsity fencing team at Ohio State.

This summer, I am starting a blog that helps students find their life purposes, plus a step-by-step guide on how to bring this vision into reality. The information I am giving you is from a workbook written by a combination of college faculty and leadership development and executive coaching experts who make business executives very successful. This book will be published late in 2014. In this post, you will find your personal values. Throughout this blog, I will provide my own answers to the exercises as an example.

This is part two of the three-part Vision topic. My answers are in italics.

Checklist for personal values

Step 1: Define what you value most. Values shape the way we think, feel, and act in our daily lives. To effectively achieve your life goals, they must match your values. From this list, select your top ten most important values to living your perfect life.

List of Personal Values:

Values checklist

  • My top 10: integrity, love, expertise, excellence, meaningful work, creativity, freedom, influencing others, self-respect, order

Step 2: Elimination. Now, from your top ten, narrow your list down to your top five values. Now narrow it down to your top three.

  • Top 5: integrity, love, excellence, meaningful work, influencing others
  • Top 3: love, excellence, meaningful work

Step 3: Integration. From your top three values, ask yourself:

  • How would your life be different if those values were prominent and practiced more?
  • I would probably have better results in school, work, and personal relationships. If practiced earlier, like in high school, I may be at a different university or even a different area of study.
  • What does each value mean, exactly? What do you expect from yourself, even in difficult times?
  • Love: care for the people around me, especially for the people close to me. In difficult times, I would think of those closest to me and perhaps look to them for help or motivation.
  • Excellence: overall skill, expertise, brilliance, and high-quality performance. I expect myself to always pursue excellence in everything I do, especially in difficult times when it is needed the most.
  • Meaningful Work: the work I do excites me, and I look forward to going to work and doing it every day. In difficult times, I would like my work to be meaningful, and something I love to do, because it will push me to keep going and give me less incentive to quit.
  • Does the personal vision you outlined reflect those values?
  • Yes, as far as I can tell.
    • If not, should your personal vision be modified?
      • If not, should you reconsider your values?
  • Are you willing to create a life in which these values are paramount, and help an organization put those values into action?
  • Now that I see how it could benefit me, yes. The things holding me back from doing so seem less important, and almost silly, so I have no reason not to go forward with such a life.

Real-World Application

So you’ve narrowed down your values and determined how to integrate them into your life. Try something out: write down your top three values and tape them somewhere so that you see it a lot, and strictly live by those values every hour of every day for the next few days. After a few days, monitor any differences in your usual days and the last few days of acting on your values. I tried this, and I found myself to be more productive in my work, more vibrant during personal interactions, and overall very happy. Hopefully you’ll get similar results, and if you do, you know you picked the right values to live by.

In my next post, I will discuss how to put your refined vision into a realistic plan of action, and I’ll give you some reflection questions. At the end of it, you should have a concrete plan of action that you can implement almost immediately, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a great leader and college student.

To become a more innovative leader, you can begin by taking our free leadership assessments and then enrolling in our online leadership development program.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future, via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible,  iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.  Stay up-to-date on new shows airing by following the Innovative Leadership Institute LinkedIn.

If you are interested in receiving Eric’s ongoing blog series or our other articles by email, please sign up in the box on the right labeled Get Email Updates From Us.

Photo credite www:flickr.com banksy graffiti

Innovative Leadership Fieldbook Reviewed by Harvard Professor, Jim Ritchie-Dunham

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Maureen Metcalf & Mark Palmer. Innovative Leadership Fieldbook. Tucson, AZ: Integral Publishers. Reviewed by James L. Ritchie-Dunham

What is interesting about this book?  One of my favorite papers on “interesting” suggests that showing what seems to be complicated and disparate is actually straightforward and connected is interesting (Davis, 1971).  The world of leadership development is definitely ready for a “straightforward and connected” contribution, and Metcalf and Palmer make it with the Innovative Leadership Fieldbook (ILF).

As a reviewer, I believe it is my responsibility to show you why I think this book makes a contribution, and is worth your investment of time.  To evaluate what a framework contributes, I will use the CRISP criteria (Ritchie-Dunham, 2008), which basically suggest that if we want to understand something through any given framework, the framework should support our understanding of how Comprehensive, Rigorous, Integrative, Simple, and Purposeful it is.  This book scores high on all five.

Using Wilber’s integral AQAL lens (Wilber, 2000), ILF defines a comprehensive leadership development framework as one that meets the inner and outer perspectives of the individual and the collective, at different levels for different types:  “An Innovative Leader influences by engaging self, culture and systems equally.” (p. 14)

  • On Comprehensiveness ILF scores high.
  • ILF defines rigor as a framework that is proven to deliver strong results and based on solid science.  The authors bring in very credible, often peer-reviewed tools that they have themselves tested with many leaders over many years.  ILF scores high on rigor.
  • Integrative means that the framework makes clear how the different elements fit together.  Using the AQAL framing and a pyramid structure, ILF is very explicit about how the inner, outer, developmental, and type perspectives fit together.  On Integrative ILF scores high.
  • Perhaps the authors’ most significant contribution is the Simple criteria.  Simple means understandable to intelligent leaders, in this case, not dumbed down.  Metcalf and Palmer provide an elegantly simple and, thus, very accessible entry to material that is often presented in very complicated and overly complex ways.  ILF excels on the Simple criteria.
  • The book also defines the Purposeful criteria for leadership development as one that enables leaders to critically self-assess and authentically engage in their own development, so that they can influence AQAL alignment and movement, directionally and tactically.  If it does not meet that purpose, it should not be in the framework.  On the Purpose criteria, the book does well, providing tools for critical assessment, examples of how others worked with the tools, and processes for implementing the insights from the tools.

These are five major contributions to a literature on leadership development that usually scores low on all five CRISP criteria.

Now that it is clear that ILF makes a contribution, what does the journey look like?  This is the content question.  ILF proposes a design for a multi-month journey into one’s own leadership.  The design comes in two segments: lenses and processes.  The first segment describes five different lenses into one’s own leadership, keying on different AQAL dimensions.  The second segment suggests a six-step process that uses the lenses to critically assess and re-define one’s own leadership.

  • The first segment looks at leadership development from the integral lenses of type, stages, resilience, all-quadrants, and behaviors.
  • For types, ILFuses the Enneagram to explore types of individuals and teams, providing a simple language, tables, examples, and reflections for using this lens.
  • For stages of ego development, ILF uses the well tested Maturity Assessment Profile developed by Susanne Cook-Greuter, providing brief, rich profiles of leaders at different developmental stages.
  • Resilience is explored using a physical well-being, thinking, emotional intelligence, and connection framework presented earlier in this journal (Metcalf & Gore, 2011).
  • Building on leadership type, stage, and resilience, an all-quadrants perspective is used to analyze any leadership situation.
  • Finally, the lens that rests on top is the Leadership Circle Profile of a leader’s creative and reactive people and task behaviors.  Each lens is presented simply, with clear leadership examples from the authors’ experience, ending with reflection questions for the reader.

The authors then walk the reader through a six-step process for living into what is seen through the integral lenses of innovative leadership.  Each step is broken down into a series of straightforward and insightful questions that uses the insights from the integral lenses.  The six steps are: (1) create a compelling vision of your future; (2) analyze your situation & strengths; (3) plan your journey; (4) build your team & communicate; (5) take action; and (6) embed innovation systematically.  The brilliance of the book is how CRISPly these traditional areas are presented, making the deep, transformative use of the material relatively easy, engaging, and useful.  That is a lot to accomplish in 263 pages.  I highly recommend the Innovative Leadership Fieldbook to anyone who is ready to take on the transformation of their own leadership.

Click here for more information about the Innovative Leadership Fieldbook or to purchase the book.

About the Reviewer

Jim Ritchie-Dunham is a student of the agreements that guide human interaction.  He explores these agreements through practice, research, and teaching.  Jim is president of the Institute for Strategic Clarity, a trustee of THORLO, and an adjunct faculty member at the EGADE Business School and at Harvard.

Jim’s work has focused primarily on understanding human agreements as integral systems, developing strategy from a systems-resource perspective, and fostering large-scale social-change as a collaborative, holistic inquiry. He has developed conceptual frameworks in his work with executive teams in corporate, government, civil society, inter-sectoral, and global-action-network settings for twenty years in seventeen countries. Jim co-authored the book Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources, and has written many articles on integral, systemic strategy for academic and practitioner journals.

Institute for Strategic Clarity, 108 High Street, Amherst, MA 01002 (603) 620-4472

jimrd@instituteforstrategicclarity.org

References

Davis, M. F. (1971). That’s Interesting: Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology. Philosophy of Social Science, 1, 309-344.

Metcalf, M., & Gore, B. (2011). Resilience Through The Integral Lens – A Case Study. Integral Leadership Review, 11(2).

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