The Third Turn

One of the reasons meetings become such wastes of time and money is that leaders, managers, and meeting facilitators repeatedly fail to frame the context. Another is that leaders and managers dominate the conversation and fail to assume a sincere listening posture.

For some time now we’ve been making a distinction between Process and Product when it comes to consulting:

• Product diagnoses and tells. Process listens and helps.

How does one lead without micromanaging, most especially when there is such high risk of liability/failure/ethical compromise?  What distinction can be drawn, really, between that of Management and Leadership, when it comes to function?

Recent work with a client led to developing these thoughts on the act of scapegoating. 

If you search the web for images of "rut" or "groove" you get pretty much the same set of photos.  Look more closely and you will see a few different images in the results.  Where they differ is that "rut" tends to produce more photos of desert tire tracks and "groove" tends to gather images of vinyl records and people dancing.

Here is a recent exchange with my class I'm currently teaching for CLA's Online Academy regarding executive leadership (FYI - the next round of classes are about to start!). It is brief but I thought it worthy of a larger audience.