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Dynamic
Engagement:
leadership development in complex
times
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Dynamic Engagement is a
specific, yet emergent kind of leadership intervention that is orchestrated
to meet the needs of leadership performance, development,
succession and sustainability.
Listen to an overview
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This series of teleclasses provides
a review of the 10 paradigmatic dynamics in leadership.
Beginning with an overview and continuing with a discussion
of each way of assessing these dynamics, the program
outlines specifically what tools can be used at each level
to create a complex view of leadership and leadership style.
This program is for people who are interested in Spiral
Dynamics, Integral Theory, Emergence, Motivation,
Developmental and Cognitive Psychology as well as a number
of leading theorists who have presented paradigms for
exploration: Steven Reiss, David McClelland, Robert Kegan,
William Torbet, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Ken Wilber, Carl Jung,
Michael Commons, Kurt Fischer, Theo Dawson-Tunik, Elliott
Jaques, David Bohm, Albert Bandura and others.
When we cannot talk, we must act
out our thoughts. When we cannot engage or be engaged,
we will act irrationally and unreasonably. Unexamined
projections, both active and passive, damage engagement
with the other and prevent civilization. Engagement is
the field of freedom’s exercise. Wholehearted engagement
is the encounter, the essential part of Transformation.
The choice to engage, the refusal to exclude...is
heroism. Engagement’s reward is life and richness,
though not without conflict and pain. Exclusion’s price
is isolation and constant awareness of difference...an
impoverishment paid for a false sense of security. -
Stan De Loach
One of the distinctive
features of this system is the focus on parallel streams or
domains simultaneously to allow for development across the
leadership system. Yet before we can even take one step, we
have to illuminate the essential questions:
There are several
essential systems which are defined through our approach in
Dynamic Engagement. These parallel dynamic streams of
awareness, purpose, competence, well-being and results can be
engaged singly, or in parallel depending on the capacity,
capability and potential of the leader, or manager.
The following dynamic
systems or paradigms of engagement allow for linear, as well as non-linear growth in
leadership and management systems. These dynamics also create
a leadership inventory in each area and the OPPORTUNITY to
match the demands in the leadership environment with design.
These dynamics are outlined as:
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Motivational:
core trait-motives or motive systems
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Developmental:
hierarchical progression and capacity
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Functional:
innate programs identify the processes guided by
induction
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Instrumental:
means structures employed to facilitate ends
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Reciprocal:
correlation between conditions and action
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Integral:
systems processing produces multi-level considerations.
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Differential:
capability to discern and identify constituents of
multilogue
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Experiential:
topology or phase space of subjective experience
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Emergent:
agents, rules, tensions and conditionals in non-linear
events
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Energy:
energy and information
Listen to an overview
of Dynamic Engagement.
This incredibly
profound Audio Review discussing how to engage people
differently is available for $97 + shipping by clicking
here.
In the first four
dynamic systems: motivation, development, ego and spiral,
assessment allows us to map the leadership capacity,
capability and potential into specific stratums of work
complexity using Differential Dynamics.
Graphic redrawn from Jaques & Cason, Human
Capability, 1994
Completing an inventory
of leadership through assessment or mapping is essential in
identifying current and future leadership and management
inventories—individually and collectively. These inventories
identify leadership hiring, retention and succession
strategies over time. Just like an inventory of products and
services allows the business to structure its value chain, an
inventory of leadership potential allows you to structure and
optimize your leadership chain.
"100% of the
people around here agree we need to change, but 90% of
them don't really want to change themselves."
-Nobuyuki Idei, Sony Corp
Dynamic Engagement goes
beyond asking people questions like those questions surveyed
in the Gallup Q12™ Surveys:
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Q1. I know
what is expected of me at work.
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Q2. I have
the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
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Q3. At work,
I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
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Q4. In the
last 7 days, I got recognition or praise for doing good
work.
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Q5. My
supervisor, or someone at work, cares about me as a
person.
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Q6. There is
someone at work who encourages my development.
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Q7. At work,
my opinions seem to count.
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Q8. The
purpose of my company makes me feel my job is
important.
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Q9. My
associates/fellow employees are committed to doing quality
work.
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Q10. I have a
best friend at work.
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Q11.
Recently, someone at work has talked to me about my
progress.
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Q12. This
last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and
grow.
While all of these
things count, what is more critical, once you have the basic
alignment in place, are the systems behind these
questions.
The systems that are
required to support the sustainable achievement of results are
the underlying dynamics that affect individual and
organizational success over time, like motivation,
development, ego complexity and instrumentation of values. We
can’t overlook the leader's role of engagement through these
dynamics into the trailing system or array as noted above in
the graphic.
Dynamic
engagement takes
us into territory where strategy and execution rule but they
are only the ticket to the game of sustainable results. Almost
anyone with any talent or experience can get short-term
results. However, to achieve sustainable results over time,
leaders must innovate or their organizations and the people in
them, suffer needlessly.
We have to begin to
assess engagement in an entirely different realm of being,
doing, having and becoming if we are to rise above the common
mistakes for which change will make us pay dearly. No longer
can we afford to be caught working in too narrow a focus, with
too little bandwidth, innovating too slowly or failing to
engage the leadership and management system with a robust
system of continuous, yet sustainable improvement.
Here is a sampling of
questions that engage leaders, not just followers:
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LE1: Who Am I? What are my end goals
in life, work and leadership?
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LE2: What is my developmental skill
level and what does it mean?
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LE3: How do I make problems and
is this bandwidth wide enough?
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LE4: What has me and how do I engage
others effectively in that light?
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LE5: How do I instrument my end
goals through my value system?
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LE6: What do I engage others to
create teachable points of view?
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LE7: Is my perspective-taking and
decision-making integrally-informed?
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LE8: Do I take action on several
levels geared to each level's specific need?
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LE9: What is my experience
supporting in my leadership engagement?
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LE10: Can I juggle innovation and
adaptability with sustainable resilience?
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LE
11: What
resources do I need to keep myself energized?
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LE12: Why is my thinking and feeling
different now than it was last year?
Not only is each of
these questions powerfully important to leaders who wish to
engage others efficiently and effectively, but in order to
reach more nimble levels of engagement, the leader, manager or
coach must address each and every dynamic in the context of
the whole.
Leaders are not
presently asking themselves these kinds of questions. They are
more concerned with execution and strategy—trailing indicators
compared to dynamics which are leading indicators. Because
they are "in" leadership and are confronted with the work of
managing and guiding others, they may neglect or get too busy
to take time to sharpen the saw.
Becoming an engaged
leader lifts the veil of the present and allows us to see into
the perfect storm—where all these dynamics function
simultaneously to influence, inspire and integrate. Within
that storm, leaders must engage themselves and others with
these dynamics in mind.
It would be trite to
advise you that change is accelerating in organizations. It
would be redundant to warn you that the sand underneath your
feet is constantly shifting...you feel this, you know this,
yet what do you do about the change you know you have to
face?
Research has shown that the most effective
developmental interventions employ content that is
developmentally appropriate and immediately relevant to
the experience of learners. This is because it takes
repeated experience and practice for skills like
critical thinking to become
generalized.
Consequently, it is unlikely that new skills learned in
the context of analyzing dilemmas from literary sources
will transfer readily to the analysis of workplace
dilemmas (unless these skills are already well-developed
in the workplace context). Research indicates that the
most effective way to promote the development of
critical thinking is (1) to employ content that is
familiar and immediately relevant to the contexts in
which the skill will be applied; and (2) provide
opportunities for participants to reflectively apply the
targeted skills in less familiar contexts. Theo
Dawson |
Axioms of Dynamic Engagement
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Becoming engaged doesn't
solve all of your problems, but it helps you learn to
make different kinds of
problems. |
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Becoming engaged doesn't
provide a panacea for all the fires that are currently
burning, but allows you to see which must be allowed to
burn and those that must be
extinguished. |
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Becoming engaged allows you
to realize your own path before the events of your life
create your path. |
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Becoming dynamically
engaged offers you the opportunity to see the world
through a striated lens that won't permanently stain the
view. |
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Becoming engaged is about
the ability to stand back from your life and work, and
examine the experience without losing yourself in it, or
losing your life to the engagement. |
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Becoming engaged is more
than making things work right and giving people the
opportunities they deserve; it is guiding the ship out
of the way of the storm. |
So many leaders and
managers today are bound by the bonds of crisis, they fail to
see they are the ones who make crisis. Being too close
to the action is not execution for a leader, but a
distraction. Failing to confront the reality of changing
paradigms, or realizing how drastic the outcomes of these
shifts are in your organization…are at this moment creating
unsustainable fortunes for you and the people you
serve.
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Leaders must
look out for people and systems with insufficient
capacity.
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Leaders must
design stable bridges across treacherous territory.
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Leaders must
take power, accountability, authority and responsibility for
adapting the organization proactively-not
reactively.
No longer are we in a
position to allow leadership to undermine the fortunes of
those whose very livelihood depends on the capability of the
leader to engage.
It is now time that you
look around yourself and do the work necessary to become a
dynamically engaged leader at multiple levels
simultaneously; to take inventory of your own capacities,
capability and potential; and to set in place a resilient
design for your life, work and organization.
When you decide to
accept the power, accountability, authority and responsibility
for success and failure...when you're ready to really
engage...complete your own inventory of capacity, capability
and potential by qualifying and quantifying your leadership
dynamics through a cross-paradigm approach of dynamic
engagement.
Order the Audio Series for Dynamic Engagement, more than
12 hours of discussion around this model.
Listen to a sample now
on Instrumental Dynamics and we know you'll be excited about
getting the entire program. Feel free to tell your friends
about this offer. If you purchase before June 1, 2005, we'll
include a FREE tuition voucher for our live program coming
in the fall of 2005.
Join us for the fall
program in Dynamic Engagement 2.0 System at LeadU. | 
