13L
Based on Leadership
Made Simple: Practical Solutions to Your Greatest
Management Challenges by Ed Oakley and Doug Krug
The goal of this book is to simplify complex leadership challenges into a useable, understandable, and actionable framework based on several decades of experience by the co-authors. They’ve taught their Framework for Leadership™ to many clients in the private and public sectors, with great success. The intent is to shift one’s mindset from a problem-solving orientation to a solutions-based orientation in the belief that what one focuses on expands. The Framework for Leadership™ is simple and profound.
The Framework for Leadership™ is a 5-step process designed to reliably generate positive results. By practicing these steps in real world situations, the authors believe that one will enhance their leadership ability:
Step 1: Focus on the successes you
are already having.
Step 2: Analyze those successes for what made them work.
Step 3: Continually clarify your goals or objectives.
Step 4: Determine the benefits of achieving those objectives.
Step 5: Establish an action plan and accountability.
During each step, the authors pose several questions, the whole of which they believe is greater than the sum of the parts.
The questions in Step 1 are designed to encourage users to look at the past through an appreciative lens and to prime the pump of creativity and develop a solutions focus. The appreciative inquiry approach generates positive energy and enthusiasm, while building trust among team members. Illustrative questions are:
- What is already working?
- What successes have we had?
- What is working well?
- What are you pleased about?
The questions asked in Step 2, the authors believe, are seldom asked, yet the cost of not asking them, are substantial. When a team understands what caused past successes, they can consciously leverage these strengths. Illustrative questions intended to identify the root causes of success are:
- What makes it work?
- What caused that success?
- To what do you attribute that success?
- What about this success pleases you most?
- What specific talents most contributed to the success?
Step 3 builds on the participation, acknowledgement, and learning in the first two steps. It looks at the objectives to determine if they are the right ones and if all of the participants are aligned. Granted, to begin using the Framework for Leadership™ one must have some idea of the intended objective. The co-authors find it extremely valuable to reflect back on the objective through new perspective and energy created by the first two steps. Questions posed in Step 3 include:
- What is the objective?
- What are we trying to accomplish?
Having established the objective, the next step is designed to achieve buy-in by enabling the participants to identify what is in it for each of them. Typical Step 4 questions include:
- What are the benefits of
accomplishing this goal/task?
- What will accomplishment do for each of the stakeholders?
The fifth and final step again mines the creativity, clarity, and energy generated in the previous steps and focuses the participants on the actions needed to achieve the goal. Typical Step 5 questions are:
- What can we do more, better, or
differently to move closer to the objective?
- Who will do what by when?
- How will we measure progress?
In summary, Krug and Oakley believe that focusing on the solution is more energizing and more likely to invite full participation without blaming people for the problem. That said, they realize that the gap between Step 1 – What is already working? and Step 3 – What are we trying to accomplish? is essentially the reframed problem. They encourage people to use the Framework for Leadership™ as a continuous process, what they call the Circle of Transformation™.
