Keith E. Webb's Blog, page 25

Leading With Curiosity

Great leaders often have a hard-to-pin-down quality: curiosity. In leading others, it is far easier to talk than to ask and listen. Yet, we don’t learn much when we do all the talking. Leading with curiosity fuels more powerful questions, which leads to relationship, innovation, and transformation.

www.istockphoto.com

Curiosity leads us to new thoughts and perspectives. Curiosity helps us break away from status quo by asking why things are the way they are and not some other way. Curiosity loo...

“Open Space Technology” by Harrison Owen

How many conferences or seminars have you been to where the most stimulating parts were the coffee break discussions between sessions?

Harrison Owen, the originator of Open Space Technology, designed a strategy to power the whole event with the energy and learning of coffee break discussions.After reading this book I dove in and successfully facilitated two Open Space events myself.

Open Space is a facilitation strategy that enables groups of 5 to 2000 people to create their own agenda and self...

Who Else Wants to Eliminate Email Interruption?

If you want to get rid of email interruption so that you can focus on important work, then this could be the most important post you will read this week.

www.istockphoto.com

The leaders I coach all struggle with the volume, randomness, and interruption of email. Email distracts us. The false-urgency of email “pinging” into our inboxes takes our attention away from important, productive work.

Constant Interruption

Like Pavlof’s dog, when we hear the “ping” we drop what we are working on and go to...

What I Learned About Leading Effective Teams from 80 Goats, 2 Big Dogs, and a Llama

I witnessed an effective team in an unlikely place: a goat cheese creamery.The other day I visitedMountain Lodge Farm in the Cascade foothills near Mount Rainier. As I approached the goat enclosure I was surprised to see a 6 foot tall llama and two big dogs right in there with the goats. While unraveling this mystery, four questions for leading effective teams hit me.

The Problem with Teams

People have a love-hate relationship with teams.

Too much time wasted in meetings…

Complementary strengths...

“Senior Leadership Teams” by Ruth Wageman, et al

Do we need another book on teams? This one is just enough different from the rest to make a significant contribution to your leadership team.

The focus of this book is senior executives as a team. These highly skilled individuals have the dual responsibilities of managing their departments and the enterprise as a whole. The management function of senior leadership teams often feel like a distraction from their “real work”. Yet, senior leadership teams provide a key function that every organiza...

How to Ask Questions that Generate Possibilities

Not all questions are equal. Some questions engage the listener, promote creativity, and generate possibilities. Other questions shut down creativity through the question's pre-determined limited responses. I want to ask questions that generate creativity and possibilities, how about you?



Questions that Limit

First, let's look at what limits creativity. When we ask a question that includes an answer, the listener must respond to that answer, often with a “yes” or “no”. This type of question...

How to Follow the Coachee

In a courtroom scene in a movie, an inexperienced prosecuting attorney asked the witness a spontaneous question. The witness' answer opened up huge doubt in the attorney's carefully crafted case. Afterwards, the attorney's old mentor told him, "Never ask a question that you don't know the answer to. Otherwise, you risk exactly what happened today in court."


Many coaches follow the old attorney's advice, never asking a question that you don't know where it will lead. They use questions to co...

How to Travel Rough Roads

There are few things more disruptive than a major illness or an international move. The good news is I've only experienced an international move. The bad news is we have moved internationally five times!



Moves and job changes, dating and marriage, births and deaths, accidents and illnesses - actually, transitions of any sort are emotional equivalents of rough roads. Coaching helps people travel these roads.



Let's use an international move as an example of a rough road. Here are ways to help...

Listening For What You Want to Hear

Two people hear a news report about the President. One person scoffs, thinking the President is ruining the country. While the other person is inspired by the President's leadership on a tough issue. Same information, opposite interpretations. Why?



We know that "the mouth speaks what the heart is full of" (Matthew 12:34), but how about "the ears hear what the heart is full of"? The fact is, we listen through the filters of our beliefs, experiences, emotions, expectations, etc.



During a coac...

Gratitude

A little thanks goes a long way.



In Luke 17, Jesus healed ten lepers and only one came back to give God thanks.



Recently, an executive told me, "I am always willing to help someone, even more so when I know they did something with that help." All too often we accept the help and then fail to thank the person who helped us.



We don't thank others for any number of reasons: we're too preoccupied, we figure we could have done it on own anyway, we didn't follow through on what we said we would...