From The EarthAsylum Leadership Circle Newsletter

Learn, Grow, Lead ... Without Changing Your Job

Practice and Learn: How to Grow Leader Competencies

To learn a new skill, you need the opportunity to practice it. In many fields, this is an obvious approach. If you are a radiologist, for example, you would attend a course to learn the latest imaging techniques and practice them under the supervision of a more experienced professional. For leaders, however, the connection between needed skills and how to learn them is often unclear.

CCL has developed a Model of Leader Competencies (see Figure 1) to help leaders see the broad repertoire of knowledge, skills and abilities needed to be effective. Looking at the model, it makes sense that different types of activities and assignments develop different competencies. Your task is to seek out experiences that will give you the practice you need. Cynthia McCauley, author of Developmental Assignments: Creating Learning Experiences without Changing Jobs, offers these guidelines.

To practice:

• Adaptability: Choose experiences that force you out of your routine or make you consider perspectives different from your own.
• Self awareness: Seek experiences in which people more readily give you feedback because you are new to the work or are trying to change or improve a situation.
• Managing yourself: Find chances to set priorities, manage stress and keep balanced amidst the pursuit of difficult goals.
• Capacity to learn: Take on experiences that add diversity or require you to work in a completely different setting.
• Leadership stature: Seek out experiences that you are attracted to and excited about taking on.
• Drive and purpose: Find a way to play a key role in seeing that the organization achieves important outcomes.
• Ethics and integrity: Commit to an experience in which having high-trust relationships is essential.
• Managing effective teams: Practice managing a wide variety of teams in a wide variety of contexts.
• Building and maintaining relationships: Choose experiences in which you are working with others to create change.
• Valuing diversity and difference: Seek out opportunities that expose you to the value of diversity and difference.
• Developing others: Find situations in which you must motivate and develop employees to be successful.
• Communicating effectively: Practice your communication skills with different audiences.
• Managing change: Choose experiences in which you are creating new directions or fixing problems.
• Solving problems and making decisions: Find situations that require addressing ill-defined or recurring problems or making decisions that require broad input from across the organization.
• Managing politics and influencing others: Take chances to work across organizational boundaries, exert influence without hierarchical power or engage in high-visibility work.
• Taking risks and innovating: Search for experiences in which you and others are bringing fresh perspective to a situation or need to find new solutions to problems.
• Setting vision and strategy: Work in situations that allow you to think about possible future scenarios and craft strategies for aligning people and systems to achieve long-term objectives.
• Managing the work: Choose experiences that draw on managerial knowledge and expertise.
• Enhancing business skills and knowledge: Find opportunities to be exposed to parts of the business with which you are less familiar.
• Understanding and navigating the organization: Seek out ways to operate within broader strategic initiatives, competing priorities and a network of relationships.

Figure 1. CCL's Model of Leader Competencies

This article is adapted from Developmental Assignments: Creating Learning Experiences without Changing Jobs by Cynthia D. McCauley, Center for Creative Leadership, 2006.

© Copyright 2006, Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.
Used with Permission from www.ccl.org

Everyday Leaders - Everyday Challenge

Everyday leaders don't have it easy. From the school teacher struggling to motivate students, to the mayor trying to balance various political agendas, to the day-to-day work of running a business, everyday leaders continually face complex challenges.

CCL recently conducted a study of educators, public sector employees, small-business owners, professional service providers and atypical leaders to better understand the challenges they face.

"By listening to leaders describe their struggles, we learned that the specific challenges of everyday leaders vary greatly," says André Martin. "However, like leaders in the business arena, many are dealing with change, uncertainty and multiple demands."

The challenges faced by the educators dealt almost entirely with their interaction with students, parents and other stakeholders. Generally, there was a sense of being overwhelmed by the multiple tasks in a given day and the importance of their role. They struggled to find the time and resources to develop others, motivate students and meet their non-teaching responsibilities.

Public sector employees focused on the challenge of balancing multiple demands. Prioritizing effectively and finding time to solve problems were among their concerns. Other challenges had to do with keeping others motivated in tough times, setting boundaries and sticking to them and balancing multiple political agendas. They also had difficulty balancing professional and personal pursuits.

Challenges for professional services providers were connected to client and relationship management: dealing with multiple stakeholders, working across boundaries, advocating on behalf of patients/clients, judging conflicting ideas and direction and keeping staff motivated during trying times. Time management was mentioned frequently as a reason why meeting these challenges was difficult.

Small business leaders' challenges are tied to "keeping the ship afloat." Keeping the business running efficiently included specific challenges such as dealing with employee issues, client satisfaction, providing a vision for employees, hiring staff and keeping employees happy.

In the group CCL researchers named "atypical leaders," there was little common ground around specific challenges. However, for each of these individuals, self-reliance and ingenuity was a theme. This was true for the teacher having to develop experiences for a class that mixes adults and children of varying ethnic backgrounds as well as for the consultant working without an assistant or a Blackberry. One stay-at-home mom put it this way: "I am the CEO of my house. My husband has no clue what goes into running the house. From 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., I must be 100 percent with my kids. It is a full-time job."

© Copyright 2006, Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.
Used with Permission from www.ccl.org

ABC's "The Path To 9/11"

Factually shaky, politically inflammatory and photographically a mess, "The Path to 9/11" -- ABC's two-part, five-hour miniseries tracing events leading up to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- has something not just to offend everyone but also to depress them.

The docudrama -- allegedly produced as a warning to the United States that the attacks, or something like them, could happen again -- falls clumsily into traps that await all those who make fictional films claiming to be factual. Except this time, the event being dramatized is one of the most tragic and monstrous in the nation's history, not something to be trifled with.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/

ABC's entertainment division said the six-hour movie, "The Path to 9/11," will say in a disclaimer that it is a "dramatization . . . not a documentary" and contains "fictionalized scenes." But the disclaimer also says the movie is based on the Sept. 11 commission's report, although that report contradicts several key scenes.

Former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright called one scene involving her "false and defamatory." Former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger said the film "flagrantly misrepresents my personal actions." And former White House aide Bruce R. Lindsey, who now heads the William J. Clinton Foundation, said: "It is unconscionable to mislead the American public about one of the most horrendous tragedies our country has ever known."

Berger said in an interview that ABC is "certainly trying to create the impression that this is realistic, but it's a fabrication."

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14707869/

"Let me start by saying that "The Path to 9/11" is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible.

This is the first Hollywood production I’ve seen that honestly depicts how the Clinton administration repeatedly bungled the capture of Osama Bin Laden. One astonishing sequence in "The Path to 9/11" shows the CIA and the Northern Alliance surrounding Bin Laden’s house in Afghanistan.  They're on the verge of capturing Bin Laden, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to go ahead.  They phone Clinton, but he and his senior staff refuse to give authorization for the capture of Bin Laden, for fear of political fall-out if the mission should go wrong and civilians are harmed.  National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in essence tells the team in Afghanistan that if they want to capture Bin Laden, they'll have to go ahead and do it on their own without any official authorization.  That way, their necks will be on the line - and not his.  The astonished CIA agent on the ground in Afghanistan repeatedly asks Berger if this is really what the administration wants.  Berger refuses to answer, and then finally just hangs up on the agent.  The CIA team and the Northern Alliance, just a few feet from capturing Bin Laden, have to abandon the entire mission.  Bin Laden and Al Qaeda shortly thereafter bomb the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing over 225 men, women, and children, and wounding over 4000.  The episode is a perfect example of Clinton-era irresponsibility and incompetence."

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24042

The Path to 9/11 appears to be part of a coordinated push—including speeches by President Bush and millions of dollars in advertising—to exploit the five-year anniversary of 9/11 for political gain. That's not acceptable from anyone—especially not a news organization like ABC.

It's not just that ABC's movie is slanted. Big parts of it are simply untrue. The producer himself even admitted to simply improvising a key scene which depicts the Clinton administration letting bin Laden go when they had him in their sights—a complete fabrication. Last night, the movie's star, Harvey Keitel, said "It turned out not all the facts were correct."

It's really pretty simple: ABC shouldn't have any role in the political exploitation of 9/11. But this docudrama is designed to do just that—spreading a false message to millions of viewers across the country.

Source: http://www.moveon.org/

9/11 Commission Vice Chair: Path to 9/11 Is ‘Not Good For the Country’
In his first public comments about the matter, former Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, said he was not asked to participate in the production of ABC’s The Path to 9/11, noting it is one of the few instances that he has not been asked to participate with Kean on a project related to the Commission’s work. He condemned the docudrama, saying that to fudge the distinction between news and entertainment “is not good for the country.”

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/?tag=Path+to+911

ABC-Sponsored teaching materials falsely suggest Iraq had WMD, link War in Iraq to 9/11
Using Scholastic, ABC Peddles False Information to School Kids Based on Flawed, Partisan "9-11 Docu-drama"

September 6, 2006 (Washington, DC) - Media Matters for America has found ABC is "generously sponsor[ing]" high school teaching materials in connection with its "docu-drama" the Path to 9/11 that leave out key information, resulting in a distorted account of pre-Iraq War WMD claims, and falsely link the war in Iraq to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"By pushing material with misleading information to students of all ages, ABC and Scholastic are engaging in the worst kind of political propagandizing and misinformation campaign," said Media Matters President and CEO David Brock. "It appears they are actively seeking to misinform our children on recent historical events that have shaped our world. Such behavior from a major network like ABC is not only unprecedented; it is highly inappropriate and deeply troubling."

Source: http://mediamatters.org/items/200609060005

ABC and Scholastic release skewed Path to 9/11 "Discussion Guide" for high school teachers to assign to students
Summary: In conjunction with ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, Scholastic and ABC have released a "Discussion Guide for the Classroom" aimed at high school teachers nationwide to "[e]ncourage your students and their families to watch The Path to 9/11 and use the accompanying" discussion guide as part of their lesson plan. A Media Matters for America review of the material finds it to be rife with conservative misinformation.

Source: http://mediamatters.org/items/200609060008

The Clinton administration poured more than a billion dollars into counterterrorism activities across the entire spectrum of the intelligence community, into the protection of critical infrastructure, into massive federal stockpiling of antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a possible bioterror attack, into a reorganization of the intelligence community itself. Within the National Security Council, "threat meetings" were held three times a week to assess looming conspiracies. His National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, prepared a voluminous dossier on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, actively tracking them across the planet. Clinton raised the issue of terrorism in virtually every important speech he gave in the last three years of his tenure.

Clinton's dire public warnings about the threat posed by terrorism, and the actions taken to thwart it, went completely unreported by the media, which was far more concerned with stained dresses and baseless Drudge Report rumors. When the administration did act militarily against bin Laden and his terrorist network, the actions were dismissed by partisans within the media and Congress as scandalous "wag the dog" tactics. The news networks actually broadcast clips of the movie "Wag the Dog" while reporting on his warnings, to accentuate the idea that everything the administration said was contrived fakery.

Source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083006J.shtml

About The Center for Creative Leadership

The Center for Creative Leadership is a nonprofit educational institution that serves as an international resource for increasing the leadership capabilities of individuals and organizations from across the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Our mission is to advance the understanding, practice and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide. Our role is to help individuals and organizations address leadership challenges.

The Center's nonprofit status and educational mission give us unusual flexibility in a world where quarterly profits often drive or confine thinking and direction. We have the freedom to be objective, wary of short-term trends, and motivated foremost by our mission - hence our substantial and sustained investment in leadership research. Although our work is always grounded in a strong foundation of research, we focus on achieving a beneficial impact in the real world. Our efforts are geared to be practical and action oriented: helping leaders and their organizations more effectively achieve their goals and vision. The desire to transform learning and ideas into action provides the impetus for our programs, assessments, publications and services.

About The EarthAsylum Leadership Circle

The EarthAsylum Leadership Circle is a business networking, support, and educational association started in January 2006 by six friends and family members who wanted a way to develop their own and other's leadership abilities.

We strive to understand and develop leadership skills and talent in a way that transcends trends and looks beyond short-term goals. We see our mutual role as supporting individuals and organizations in achieving effective and transformational leadership through life affirming and supporting practices.

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