Uplifting Leadership

• In Event: Leading from Within: From Mindfulness and Self-Reflection to Uplifting Leadership

Short Description

Uplifting leadership elevates performance by uplifting people’s spirits, uplifting their communities, and uplifting themselves. This presentation will discuss six facets of uplifting leadership consisting of six pairs of opposing factors. Examples will show how, when linked together, these factors have helped create high-performing organizations that have achieved improbable success.

Detailed Abstract

Uplifting leadership extends throughout an organization and uplifts performance by uplifting people’s spirits, uplifting their communities and uplifting themselves. People join in an epic journey together, and they support each other when times get tough by combining skills and qualities of a “soft” and “hard” nature that others might have regarded as mutually exclusive.
Uplifting leadership consists of six factors, each of which combines these opposites, to link together to achieve improbable success.

1. Dreaming with Determination

The journey of uplifting leadership begins by defining a clear and compelling “dream” or destination -- and determining how we’ll get there from an unwanted or underestimated departure point. This destination also resonates with or revives people’s sense of their own best identity. The process requires that we set out for a distant and improbably fantastic destination from a lowly, unlikely, and even stigmatized starting point. It is a compelling journey, necessitated by a moral imperative that is greater than anyone undertaking it – to support or even save the community they serve, or to create something of new or greater value that did not exist before. In this courageous and committed quest, destiny and destinations are connected to what people feel part of, to where they have come from, and to the best of what they have been before.
In uplifting leadership, the dream is worth fighting for, and pursuing it is a matter of resolution and persistence as well as imagination and inspiration. This builds momentum and helps ensure the effort does not fall short of the mark. In the quest to achieve and sustain high performance far above normal expectations, progress is typically uneven, adversity is abundant and obstacles or even enemies have to be surmounted and surpassed. But the memory or prospect of failure is a constant force that deters backsliding and fuels determination to keep on moving forward to fight for a higher purpose rather than taking flight from the fray.

2. Creativity and Counter flow

Uplifting leadership forges creative pathways to reach the desired destination. You won’t always be able to take the easiest or most obvious path. In part, creativity consists of flair, fantasy and playful speculation about alternate possibilities to what already exists.
But the creativity of uplifting leaders is also counterintuitive. It goes against the flow at the risk of provoking doubt and derision. Uplifting leaders see opportunities that their competitors miss. They use opposing forces to their advantage. They do not follow in others’ slipstream, but head into the wind to force a change of direction.

3. Collaboration with Competition

Part of the counter-intuitive approach to uplifting leadership is to collaborate and combine with actual and potential competitors. Leaders and members of uplifting organizations know that competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive alternatives, but co-exist in unlikely combinations.

4. Pushing and Pulling

Uplifting leadership harnesses the power of the group to push and pull the team to complete their challenging journey together. The secrets of achieving far above normal expectations are to be found in the fellowship of the team. Team members draw themselves and each other forward. If they get knocked down, they spring back up again and lift up those who have fallen around them. They also push each other to keep moving ahead. The team remains true to each other and to the common, inspiring purpose that binds them.

5. Measuring with Meaning

Uplifting leadership identifies indicators of direction and progress for navigating the route and for ascertaining how far an organization or system has come -- and still has to go -- in reaching its destination. Indications of early success build collective confidence and become a psychological investment for accepting greater struggles in the future. Every horizon that team members glimpse and then reach and every summit they surmount provides hope and optimism to continue the journey ahead. It both encourages and emboldens leaders and their teams to persist with their quest together. Uplifting leadership makes extensive use of data to manage and monitor progress, but also uses data intelligently in ways that fit the values of the organization -- and that is meaningful to and genuinely owned by the people who work there.

6. Sustainable Success

Uplifting leadership takes off from a solid foundation and proceeds at a constant rate that does not consume everyone’s effort and energy before they achieve the final objective. Leading people far above expectations is not merely initially successful; it must also be sustainable. Progress is rarely swift, and both leaders and team members must take care to avoid exhaustion as well as overreach. Although it can be easy to start something new, uplifting leaders know that it is much harder to keep things going after they have started. Uplifting organizations and their leaders do not think about sustainability once the first flush of innovation has passed. They plan and prepare for it from the beginning.

Participants

• Andrew Hargreaves, Boston College

• Alan Boyle, Leannta Education Associates

• Lea Hubbard, University of San Diego