Becoming a Resonant Leader: Post #5--Teams

Igniting Resonance: Creating Effectiveness in Teams, Organizations, and Communities. Building a team requires leaders to know all team members well—what motivates them and what is their personal vision and how can that tie to the team’s vision. How does this work?
a.    Start with yourself: It’s impossible to get others resonant and headed in the same direction with enthusiasm if you, as the leader, are not. So start figuring out your Ideal Self and working toward it. Enlist team members and others to help you do that.
b.    Build Resonance with those around you: Recognize how each person is part of the social system and develop resonance with each other to accomplish both personal and team goals.
c.    Attend to all levels of the social system: Trying to fix one or several people will not change the system. It’s more complicated than that. Sustainable and resonant change only happens when several levels are affected.
i.    Interdependence between people, teams, organizations and communities—and the dynamics they offer—is the key to change.
ii.    My Social System (see pp. 183-188). The authors look at the various interdependent levels (me, my partners, my team, my organization, and my community) and then ask a range of questions about values, shared purpose, challenges, aspirations, and conflict across the social system to determine patterns across levels that might help us resonate across levels.
d.    Explore the Power of Subjectivity: Leaders often focus on objective measurable behaviors, which are easier to spot than more subjective sensations and experiences like motivation, values, philosophy, language, conflicts and influencers. However, these subjective elements can make the difference between resonance and dissonance (see the charts on pp. 190-192).
e.    Discover your system’s “Real Self.”
i.     What are the shared principles, beliefs, values, myths, and experiences of the group? What are the thoughts, feelings, meanings and culture of the group? What is the group’s emotional reality (resilient and optimistic vs. hopeless and depressed)?
ii.    See heading #2 (The Real Self) above. Explore the group’s lifeline, especially transitions that were good and not so good. Explore the group’s social identity (beliefs, habits, culture), strengths (what the team’s good at and not), and social relationships (friends, family, etc.).
iii.    Interviewing people in confidence to elicit their genuine feelings gets the best results. Questions: What do I need to be successful? What does the group need to be successful? What do different levels of the system need to be successful?
f.    Engage their hearts and minds: Engage the group’s Positive Emotional Attractor. Get them out of their habitat to someplace very different—like a lodge, not simply a hotel.
i.    Select activities that progress from light and safe activities (tell a funny story about your life) to more risky ones (what’s something you fear about your business) to help people get to know each other.  Consider individual self revelation exercises around Ideal Self, Personal Learning, and Learning Plan.
ii.    Sharing them and connecting them can lead a team to a collective view of the future.
g.    Collective Visioning—Getting to Resonance
i.    Using “Creating a Shared Community Vision” (see pp. 200-204), the group works through individuals, teams and then organizations to come up with a common path of a shared vision for the organization in the future.
ii.    The process involves the following steps looking 10 years into the future: Step #1—My Dream for the Organization (the most exciting aspiration you have for the organization); Step #2— Small Groups Build the Vision (each person presents his/her dream of the community and the small groups look at trends); Step #3—Build One Vision:  All the small groups get together to coalesce around exciting ideas for the future. The larger group creates a path toward the shared vision of the future; Step #4—Commitment to Change: Small groups discuss and argue for their point of view. In some cases, the representative has to negotiate how and why certain ideas made it and others did not; Step #5—Implementation: each team and person must articulate what s/he will do to implement the vision.
h.    Express Personal Accountabilities and Commitments: To make the team/organizational vision happen, leaders and their followers have to commit to accountable actions. It all starts with the leader stepping up and out—putting a stake in the ground to hold the company and himself or herself personally accountable.