This is a guest post from Dr. Greg Waddell. Management and Leadership are two very different systems of human behavior. Both are essential to the success of an organization; yet, like the repulsing polarity of two magnets, they push against one another and, if not kept in balance, can end up ejecting one or the …

This blog entry – consistent with my entry from October 7 -- is a commentary on Whitney, Trosten-Bloom, and Rader’s book Appreciative Leadership: Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization. I want to be transparent about my biases related to this current series of blog entries on Appreciative Leadership (AL).

In this posting, I build on the October 7 blog, in which Steve Wolinski introduced Diana Whitney’s, Kae Rader’s and my book, Appreciative Leadership: Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization. Expanding upon Steve’s clear summary of our book’s content, I provide some history behind the approach and the design of the text, along with more detail about the five core strategies that together unleash positive power.

This blog entry is intended to be a quick and basic introduction to the theory and practice of Appreciative Leadership as espoused in a recent book by Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, and Kae Rader. The name of the book is Appreciative Leadership: Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization.

In his last post, Steve Wolinski amplified the conversation I started this month on women and leadership. He ended his blog entry with an assertion based on recent research that shows while more and more women have reached the ranks of middle management, still woefully few of us are represented at the top. His conclusion …

The movement of women into senior leadership positions continues to be incredibly slow in the U.S. Among Fortune 500 companies, only 16% of corporate officers, 14% of board directors, 5% of top earners, and just over 1% of CEOs are women. Women in these settings continue to be viewed as having more nurturing, supportive, and communal tendencies, and are evaluated more harshly than men if they demonstrate these qualities, especially in more senior leadership roles.

The main premise of this blog entry is that among all the leadership skills taught to prospective female managers and leaders, education in the successful use of personal and organizational power is still sorely lacking. It is well accepted that the skills that enable a person to excel in their chosen field are very different than the ones necessary to lead and manage others. However, for women, the challenge is different than for men, not necessarily only because of possible discrimination, but because our socialization still does not prepare us to handle organizational power and influence well.

A Major Gifts Program’s Leadership: Part Two Once your Major Gifts Committee has created its list of “Suspects,” they must pair (on paper) those people with individuals (volunteer leaders) who know them, who have access to them, and can (and will) be involved in the process of turning those “suspects” into “prospects.” The volunteer leaders …

In the book, Dynamical Leadership: Building Adaptive Capacity for Uncertain Times, Royce Holladay and Kristine Quade offer a model of leadership built on assumptions about organizations as complex systems. While some of these may sound counter to traditional approaches, they express a worldview of human system dynamics that honors inherent complexity of organizations in the 21st century and explain why adaptive capacity is crucial today.

The most critical factor in creating a MG Program is the availability and willingness of a Leadership cadre — volunteers who will accept responsibility for the success of that program. It is a “given,” in the creation of a major gifts program, that if you build a relationship with your “Friends”/“Prospects” that involves them — …