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Tools and Techniques for More Strategic Leadership
Strategic Leadership Tools
Creative Team Tools
Strategic Leadership Tools
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Assessment Tools that can help leaders create and maintain a culture of sustainable innovation: | ||
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The Leadership Versatility Index® (LVI)® a 360° assessment tool designed to assess a leader's ability to provide the right balance between a strategic and operational mindset and a forcing and enabling leadership style, important competencies in building a sustainably innovative organization. Read an interesting article on the LIV®. If you are interested in learning more about the LVI, please email me and I will be happy to set up a complimentary telephone conversation. | |
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Hogan Personality Inventories that identify a leader's capabilities, fit with the job, and possible derailers. | |
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Denison Organizational Survey, an instrument designed to evaluate an organization on the four determinants of culture and most importantly its alignment, so necessary for building a culture of innovation. | |
Strategic Leadership through the Power of Questions
Experts agree that opening new worlds for yourself, your employees, and your organizations requires asking new questions. And to produce more creative solutions, these questions need to be bold and expansive in order to widen your perceptions of what is possible. More on the Power of Questions
Here are some suggestions to start building a portfolio of wise questions when facing particular leadership challenges:
When conducting a performance appraisal, you can ask: |
| How do you feel about your performance to date? |
| How does it compare to what you expected to accomplish? |
| What were the reasons for any differences in expectations? |
| What will you do differently in the future? |
| What can I do to help? |
When coaching, you can use the following questions to start a dialogue: |
| What are you hoping to achieve? And what does that look like? |
| How do you feel about your performance to date? |
| What can you learn from your experience? |
| What would you have done differently? What would you change and how? |
When creative solutions are required, ask: |
| What are we trying to achieve? |
| How can we see the challenge differently? |
| What has worked and why did it work? |
| What steps can we take in the short-term to address the situation? |
| What steps do we need to take to resolve the situation in the long run? |
When managing resistance, start the conversation with: |
| What possibilities do you see coming out of this? |
| What are your major concerns? |
| What other choices do you see? |
| What can be done to make what we are trying to do work? |
When dealing with conflict, be sure you understand the issues by asking: |
| What would you like to see happen here? |
| What are your objectives? |
| What do you see as areas of agreement? |
| What do you see as areas of disagreement? |
| What sort of solutions could we come up with that would satisfy all of us? |
With thanks to Dorothy Leeds, "Smart Questions" McGraw-Hill, 1987 and Marilee G. Adams, Marjorie Schiller, and David L. Cooperrider, "With Our Questions We Make the World," in "Constructive Discourse and Human Organization," ed. by David L. Cooperrider and Michel Avital, Elsevier, 2004.
If you have any wise questions that you would like to add to the list, please email them to me at lynne@breakthroughcreativity.com!
Strategic Leadership through Appreciative Inquiry:
Appreciative Inquiry is another approach that can aid a leader in the quest for a more learning and questioning attitude.
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For more information about Appreciative Inquiry, one very helpful website |
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The best book I have read so far on this topic is Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination, by Jane Magruder Watkins and Bernard J. Mohr, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 2001. Available at amazon.com |
| The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry, by Sue Annis Hammond is also highly recommended and is available through Thin Book Publishing. To order |
Strategic Leadership through Scenario Planning:
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Scenario planning is a process used to stimulate imaginative, creative thinking to better prepare an organization for the future. Scenario planning is different from traditional strategic and contingency planning. It does not assume that there is one best answer to a strategic question or one best way to deal with a single uncertainty. Instead, it forces leaders to consider multiple possibilities and multiple uncertainties. For these reasons, Scenario Planning is particularly useful in situations where leaders need to break mental models about the future. |
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For more information about Scenario Planning, A Note on Scenario Planning by David A. Garvin and Lynne C. Levesque provides a step by step guide and detailed example on scenario planning. To order |
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Lawrence Wilkinson has an excellent article on Scenario Planning |
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Peter Schwartz's book, The Art of the Long View (Doubleday, 1996) is a very informative book with much detail on scenario planning techniques. Available at amazon.com |
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The Global Business Network has many resources (some free) regarding scenario planning. |
Creative Team Tools
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Breakthrough Questions| 1. | You find yourself alone and needing to access unfamiliar talents to expand your creative responses and build your resilience; |
| 2. | You need new perspectives to add color to black and white thinking, to see the possibility of "both-and" solutions vs. "either-or" alternatives; or |
| 3. | You and your team are wrestling with a tough problem and need to include the insights of talents that may not be represented on the team. |
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The book "Breakthrough Creativity: Achieving Top Performance Using the Eight Creative
Talents" provides insights into the strengths and challenges of each of the
talents and also contains additional questions that the talents might generate.
To order
The "Breakthrough Creativity Profile," available through HRDQ is another powerful tool for teams. To order
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