
Power and Influence

Your boss and other senior authority figures are essential to any intervention you try to lead. To sustain their support, you need to do more than just figure out how they feel personally about the adaptive issue you are seeking to address. First, you need to prepare them for the disequilibrium you are going to generate in the organization. Second,
... See moreRonald A. Heifetz • The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
The first is learning how to disperse power on an orderly, nonchaotic basis. Right now the word “empowerment” is a very powerful buzzword. It’s also very dangerous. Just granting power, without some method of replacing the discipline and order that come out of a command-and-control bureaucracy, produces chaos. We have to learn how to disperse power
... See moreArt Kleiner • The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization
The second part of relationship responsibility is taking responsibility for communication. Whenever I, or any other consultant, start to work with an organization, the first thing I hear about are all the personality conflicts. Most of these arise from the fact that people do not know what other people are doing and how they do their work, or what
... See morePeter Ferdinand Drucker • Managing Oneself
To think politically, you have to look at your organization as a web of stakeholders. For each stakeholder, you need to identify her: • Stake in the adaptive challenge at hand. How will she be affected by resolution of the challenge? • Desired outcomes. What would she like to see come out of a resolution of the issue? • Level of engagement. How muc
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