appreciative enquiry

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Could it be the active recruitment of incompetent men that stops women getting to the top?

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The central cause, argues Tomas Chasmorro-Premuzic, of the low numbers of women recruited into leadership, ranging from 36% in bottom tier management to only 6% at CEO level, isn’t that they aren’t competitive, assertive, bold, talented or in some other ill-defined way, enough like men; but rather that a persistent systematic mistake is made during the recruitment process. A mistake that leads to many of the opportunities, up to 74% according to one survey quoted, being filled with incompetent men.

Hence the question isn’t: how can we get more women into management, but rather, how do we stop so many incompetent men filling the available positions?

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How Appreciative Inquiry Supports Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

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How Appreciative Inquiry Supports Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

The words are easy: we want to create a diverse and inclusive culture, that promotes equality of access and opportunity. The business case for creating a work environment that is inclusive of difference, that honours and makes good use of diversity, and that manages itself in such a way that all employees feel they are fairly treated, has long been made. The challenge is how to achieve such an environment. I want to briefly consider how using Appreciative Inquiry can support the development of such a culture.

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Highlights from ABP conference

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Highlights from ABP conference

At the ABP conference on the 10th and 11th of November, I was struck by the professionalism of the presenters and the high standard of their content. I wanted to share a few of the ‘nuggets’ I picked up with you.

The ‘know it all’ and ‘learn it all’ culture difference

Matthew Syed introduced these two terms, the first reflecting a fixed mindset. The ‘know it all’ mindset can have some adverse effects:

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How can we bring the benefits of Appreciative Inquiry to stuck change projects?

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How can we bring the benefits of Appreciative Inquiry to stuck change projects?

There are various signs that a change project has got stuck. One is that the senior managers are working all hours while everyone else is sort of waiting, not knowing what to do. Another is frustrated change agents pointing to the plans and diagrams all over their office walls while talking about their problems of ‘resistance to change’ and ‘lack of buy-in’. Yet another is a workforce that is demoralised, demotivated and rapidly losing hope of any improvement any time soon.

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How Positive Psychology Can Promote Children’s Wellbeing and other Benefits

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Young children need to learn the skills necessary for managing their emotions. Adults who can model this are essential in helping to shape children’s emotional development. There is a strong link between mental health concerns in children and their ability to regulate their emotions. Assisting children to cultivate positive emotions helps to mitigate mental health issues not just for them but for future generations also.

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Optimism

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At some point or another in life, we all face hardships, encounter adversity, and have to deal with difficult situations. However, it’s how we view and talk about these adversities that influences our wellbeing and outlook on life - a bad experience for one person may be a learning experience for another. Positive psychologist Martin Seligman explains how it is possible to cultivate positive perspectives in his book Learned Optimism (1990).

How our pets have been helping us through difficult times, and what this means for the workplace

As humans we have been domesticating animals for tens of thousands of years, taming wolves for protection, horses for transportation and livestock for food. Our relationship with domesticated animals began for these kinds of practical reasons, however when we consider the definition and purpose of the pets we know and love today, it is drastically different.

Are we having fun yet? Why having fun is no frivolous matter

When I began this article, I was pondering why had I put myself through the mildly stressful (dynamic pricing of the chalet booking, the race to book limited places on fun activities), definitely expensive and logistically challenging experience of organising an over-in-the-blink-of-an-eye holiday for the group of adults ranging in age from 26 to 75 who currently constitute my family? The answer, of course, is that I keenly anticipated having some fun. Why though? What does having fun do for us? And what, exactly, is it?

Feeling Tired? You need more than just a good’s night sleep.

Feeling Tired? You need more than just a good’s night sleep.

Did you know that there is more to being rested than just getting a good night’s sleep? Dr Dalton-Smith has identified seven different forms of fatigue. Each one offers a different path to feeling restored, rested and rebooted!

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How a dose of humility helps leaders succeed

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How a dose of humility helps leaders succeed

In our narcissistic world the idea that being humble can help us succeed sounds counter-intuitive. Isn’t being successful based on making sure our achievements get noticed?

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What Is The Most Effective Way To Achieve Organisational Change? New Research Results

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Ever felt that the traditional approach to change doesn’t deliver the results you hoped? Wondered if there is a better way? Well interestingly Bradley Hasting and Gavin Schwarz[i] recently published a lengthy paper comparing the effectiveness of two different approaches to organisational development. One is the traditional mode, known as diagnostic, and the other a more recently developed approach, championed particularly by Bushe and Marshak[ii], known as dialogic….

Ten Top Tips For Online Training

Like many others, over the past months I have delivered a lot of training online that I would normally have delivered in person. Here are some of the things I learnt.

1. Breaks

Resolve to take a break of 10 minutes every hour. It is constraining and exhausting being stuck in one position with a fixed gaze. The last course I ran, one of the spontaneous comments made was, ‘what I love about this course is the breaks.’ Well, good to know I’d got something right!

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Boosting your resilience and adaptability

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Lockdown is easing, but that doesn’t mean we are going back to normal. We need to think instead of ourselves as moving forward in to a new normal. This new normal involves living with the reality of coronavirus: a winter surge is predicted by many experts. Navigating this new normal will take resilience and adaptability.

What helps us be more resilient and adaptable?

Resilience can be defined as having the resources, mental, physical or experience-based, to cope with unexpected, difficult or adverse situations.

Being adaptable means being able to flex our expectations and behaviour when circumstances change.

For both resilience and adaptability, being resourceful is key.

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It’s OK To Not Feel Great, We’re All In Mourning For Times Past.

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I suppose it was that Sunday evening press conference that brought it home to me. It was as Boris articulated the ambition to get people back to work, hung about with caveats and advice to avoid public transport, that the penny really dropped: that ‘getting back to normal’ was a complete pipedream. What he was doing, never mind the rhetoric, was starting to articulate the new normal, which wasn’t going to be a whole lot like the old normal.

10 Top tips for keeping up morale

Many of us are having to manage more anxiety than normal, as well as drastic changes in our daily lives. There are two key principles which it is useful to bear in mind: Managing anxiety takes mental strength and energy, and, that the state of our morale affects the state of our immune system. (At this point I have to say this doesn’t mean that anyone who becomes ill wasn’t positive enough. Absolutely not. Rather just that we know that keeping our spirits up is important to supporting our immune system. It’s not a guarantee of perfect health!)

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Using Lego in Appreciative Inquiry

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I recently posted some pictures on Twitter and Linkedin of a leadership development session I ran with a colleague where we used Lego to conduct an Appreciative Inquiry. This stimulated some interest and requests for more information on what we did, so I thought I would explain in a little more detail.

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Appreciative Inquiry: working with a system in sections

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Over the years I’ve had a number of requests to run an Appreciative Inquiry event for a system that is unable to come altogether at the same time in the same space. I have found ways to accommodate this, but I have never felt the process to be entirely satisfactory. Just recently I have had two more requests like this, so when I heard the UK Appreciative Inquiry Network was coming together in December, I decided this was a great challenge to take to the group.

A group of six of us had a great conversation about this challenge: How to design an AI event for a whole system that is unable to come together for a day or more in the same space at the same time?

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Is Mindfulness the new opium of the masses?

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This seems to be what Ronald Purser is suggesting in his book McMindfulness. It’s an interesting read with some impressive statistics about the size of the Mindfulness industry ($4 billion anyone?), an account of its development and some nice juicy gossip about some of the insiders.

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What does ‘Evidence based practice’ mean for practitioners in the field?

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Are you a practitioner, keen to practice in an evidence-based way but with little time to keep up with the research? Maybe you find scientific papers unreadable? Or perhaps you support the aim in principle, but find it hard to set up gold-standard science-based evaluations of your interventions with your clients? You are not alone.

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Why coaching isn’t as easy as people think, and something to help

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And so it has come to past that from time to time I find my self teaching groups ‘coaching skills’. Sometimes this is groups of managers, sometimes fledging professional coaches, and sometimes people with post-graduate coaching degrees or similarly impressive credentials. And yet, for all these groups, one of the hardest challenges seems to be developing the skill of asking questions rather than more tempting options like: offering solutions, giving advice, sympathising, sharing their own experience, or in some other way failing to inquire.