Leading as if Life Depends on You

In honor of Earth Day, it is helpful to remember our dependence on the natural world. Leaders at all levels and locations have a special role in guiding sustainable practices, helping people work together in ways that affirm life. Like geese, we depend on each other for our survival.

Leaders take turns guiding the team, helping others lead when the leader needs to reflect before acting. Geese fly together in a flexible formation that changes to meet the needs of the situation. Geese talk together to stay connected.

6 tips for greater collaboration

Collaboration is a needed capacity for working together, and here are six tips for collaborating more effectively wherever you are, whatever you do.

The first three tips are about inquiry. Please don't take my word for the value of asking, listening, and being influenced. Practice, experiment, and see what happens. Here are the inquiry tips:

1) Ask questions to understand and clarify.
2) Listen deeply.
3) Be willing to be influenced by others.

Three steps. You can do this online, face-to-face, over the phone, wherever.

The next set of tips are about advocacy. Sometimes you need to advocate. Collaboration depends on your good judgment, your willingness to stand for what you value and believe in. Here are a few tips for stating your point of view in a way that builds collaboration. Once again, try it, don't just believe me.

1) Say what you believe and why you believe it. Explain how you got to your belief, and why you adhere to your point of view.
2) Describe your belief and ask, "What did I miss?" or "How do you see things?" "Where do we see things differently? Where the same?"
3) Be clear that you have a point of view, explain that you are advocating and why it's important to you.

Good luck! Let me know how your practice goes.

Virtual Team Meetings

Meeting virtually is a breeze. Webcams and video make meetings come to life. The disembodied voice becomes personal when you can see each others' faces.

Seeing the person you are talking to prevents that attention drift that happens when people become bored with the conversation. When the camera is on, it is harder to read email, surf the web, play with your PDA, or text someone (whether they're in the room or not).

Seeing each other, even with small pictures on a screen, improves the sense of connection. You can read body language and even see when someone doesn't feel well or disagrees with something somebody said. People who don't know each other get to see each others' faces and this helps build trust and friendship.

There are lots of different options for virtual meetings: Skype is free for online calls with video and works internationally and within the US. Most of the time it works well, but in my experience, it can be unstable. Because calls drop off unexpectedly, it disrupts conversations and meetings. For example, tonight on a call to China, the Skype connection went out several times. We ended up speaking on cell phones.

WebEx is stable, and provides great meeting and learning tools for a modest monthly fee. I have tried a lot of online systems, and I keep going back to WebEx. When my team and I are working on a project, we can share documents, whiteboards, generate ideas through mind mapping, and even work on the same document together. For training purposes, WebEx is good as well, although the cost for their training center bumps up quite a bit.

Many people recommend Elluminate, and a friend of mine created a fabulous dialogue training through its platform. Elluminate has a breadth of services that are comprehensive and competitively priced.

Some applications provide a bit less than a full solution. Maestroconference includes telephony with breakout rooms, but you can't share slides or other visuals; freeconference call is a free and easy solution to telephone meetings and it includes only conference call capability. There are lots of solutions available, and it takes awhile to find the right solution at the right price.

Virtual team meetings are essential for working these days. We need to collaborate with people around the globe, in the next town or state, and around the block in a home office. For me the right solution includes video, an ability to present and share documents, and the capability to work together on applications, whether its an online learning, writing, or international collaboration.

Our relationship with all things

At dinner the other night some friends and I got to talking about the health of the world's oceans. It was painful to think of the dead spots, the pollution, the mass harvesting of sea life with its collateral damage to so many species. Long lines do not discriminate. Fishermen go after sharks and kill sea turtles and dolphins and sea birds and much, much more.

I began looking at shark fishing and ran across a wonderful series of videos Sharkwater by Rob Stewart. His film moved my heart and shifted my thinking. I learned that 90% of the world's sharks are gone. When the top predator that shapes ocean life is gone, it is very hard to imagine the potential impacts. One possibility is that the animals that eat phytoplankton will proliferate and decimate phytoplankton supplies. Phytoplankton absorbs CO2 and produces O2 (if I understand this right). Without phytoplankton, what will happen to the oxygen levels that we depend on to live?

From a systems perspective and from a Buddhist understanding of interconnectedness, we need to act from a high enough perspective to hold and protect the whole. No one protects the oceans; and sharks are considered by so many as harmful and dangerous. And shark fin soup is so prestigious.

With the shark's demise and the crashing populations of sharks all over the world, the web of life is damaged.

With a great hole in the web of life, all life suffers. It may not seem like our lives depend on the sharks, but in the interconnectedness of all things, we don't have a separate existence. Without the sharks, I am less, we are diminished, and life has an absence--something missing in the web.

What will we say to our grandchildren about how we lost the life of the oceans?

Guanxi

It's really all about relationships. In the US we aren't so explicit, and in China, guanxi is everything. Business lives and breathes through guanxi. Actually, all our lives interconnect in relationship.

When we are aware of the centrality of relationships, do we act differently?

Synergic Leadership

As I prepare for a visit from a friend and colleague from China, I marvel at our different approaches to leadership and our synergy as well. My friend and I have great respect and appreciation for each other, and those go a long way toward developing synergy.

When we can work together in ways that build on our differences, we actually strengthen and expand what we can achieve. The hard part is when our differences clash and we shore up our positions to make ourselves Right.

Being right is a trap that catches us over and over. Anyway, that's my opinion and if you disagree, I'll argue with you!

Learning to inquire when we're triggered isn't easy. Synergic leadership says, "Wow, you disagree with me! Where are we different? How can I learn from you?"

Even if we take it on as an experiment, I think it's a helpful practice to inquire rather than to become rigid and Right. Where do you disagree? What can I learn here?