François Héon Consulting is recognized as a one of the “Top” leadership development training/coaching companies in Canada by Manage HR magazine in 2025! The magazine published the article Empowering Collective Leadership!

What if I asked you: Who, among all the leaders you have interacted with, represents the best example of leadership for you? And what distinctive quality most characterizes the leadership of this exceptional person?

For over 20 years, I have asked this question during my international leadership workshops, and I analyzed the responses of 300 leaders as part of my Ph.D. research to identify the qualities most shared by these exceptional leaders.

The qualities collected from these leaders assembled thematically into two groups of complementary attitudes: appreciative (yin)—receptive, valuing, and unifying—and intentional (yang)—visionary, confident and determined.

This two-dimensional perspective of leadership is the fruit not only of the research work that I have carried out, but also reflects scientific research throughout the 20th century, and is found just as much in psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. If we consider leadership as a process of integration, rather than domination, these two complementary attitudes are the two transformational sub-factors.

From the answers collected, and my 30 years of experience in organizational psychology and international consulting, I created a new leadership model for individuals and groups, integrating these constants found in management, psychology, philosophy and in spirituality. This model, the yin and yang of leadership for individuals and groups, is simple, accessible, and effective.

Developing these two transformational attitudes—appreciative and intentional—brings individually and collectively:

• The ability to self-direct.
• Awareness of oneself, others and situations.
• Emotional intelligence.
• Meaning and direction.
• Authentic authority.
• Confidence and perseverance.
• The mobilization and committed development of people.
• Adaptability and experiential learning.
• And more! …

The analogy of blood pressure with the thrust of systolic pressure and the receptivity of diastolic pressure explains this dynamic and living vision of leadership and also highlights the complementary and integrative aspect of the two attitudes in the exercise of leadership of any person or group.

To learn more about this leadership model, use the buttons below to read my last two books published on Amazon.

Leadership Is a Choice: Choosing the Two Transformational Attitudes of Everyday Leadership (2023)

The Yin and Yang of Leadership: A Theoretical & Practical Guide to Democratic Leading (2018)

In future articles, I will present to you these two transformational attitudes with their respective sub-factors identified in my Ph.D. I will also explore how these two ways of seeing help any person and any group develop their leadership on a daily basis.

What is Appreciative Leadership? As I present in my two recent books: The Yin and Yang of Leadership: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to Democratic Leading (2018), and Leadership Is a Choice: Choosing the Two Transformational Attitudes of Leadership in Your Everyday Life (2024), appreciative leadership can first of all be described as the complementary leadership attitude to intentional leadership. One as the receptive yin, the other as the assertive yang. Both transformational attitudes have consistently been highlighted in management, psychology, philosophy and spirituality. My Ph.D. research on this subject using my leadership workshops with leaders from around the world led me to identify three subthemes for each of these leadership attitudes.

Three Dimensions to Appreciative Leadership

When I asked 300 hundred leaders from around the world which distinctive characteristic characterized their own personal best example of leadership, three appreciative subthemes emerged from the collected responses. And consistent with management, psychology and spirituality, these three appreciative subthemes could also be described as three progressive levels of attention, leading subsequently to intentional leading.

First Appreciative Subtheme: Open and Receptive Listening

The great paradox in leadership, is how humble open and receptive listening, characterizes good leadership; without judgment, reactivity, and self-importance, appreciation as open and receptive listening leads to awareness and connectedness.

Second Appreciative Subtheme: Valuing, Caring, and Empowering

The distinctive quality of appreciation, is how transformational valuing, caring and empowering can be. How good leaders enhance people and situations by how much they care, and see possibilities and potential where others do not. This heart-centered level of appreciation empowers, bonds, and generates positive emotional energy.

Third Appreciative Subtheme: Meaning-Making and Unifying

Humans are meaning-makers and they unify action forward around meaning. The Why? The What? The When? The How? that unifies and drives forward. Appreciation is a directional attitude; it gives meaning and direction; It highlights what you value and desire most, as an individual or a group.

Try this!
Experience the Transformational Effect of Appreciating

Take the time to answer each question and see what you come up with.

1. What have you appreciated the most of your day so far? (Eye of the body)
Take the time to fully review your entire day and identify the one thing you have appreciated the most. Enjoy the abundance of awareness.

2. What’s good about it? Why is it valuable to you? (Eye of the heart)
Appreciate the added value of what you have identified. Appreciate the goodness of it; and enjoy the abundance of positive energy that comes with it.

3. How does it inform you on what you want the most in your life? (Eye of the will)
How meaningful is what you identified in terms of what you want to the most to live in your life (your deepest intentions)? What does it say about what to do next? Enjoy the abundant significance of everyday events.

What is Intentional Leadership? As outlined in my two recent books: The Yin and Yang of Leadership: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to Democratic Leading (2018), and Leadership Is a Choice: Choosing the Two Transformational Attitudes of Leadership in Your Everyday Life (2024), intentional leadership can first be described as the leadership attitude complementary to appreciative leadership. One as the assertive yang, the other as the receptive yin. These two transformational attitudes have consistently been highlighted in the fields of management, psychology, philosophy and spirituality.

Being intentional, which is akin to being appreciative (with its reflective and generative properties), involves choice and consciousness, and has the benefit of applying naturally to both individuals and collectives: What do I want? What do we want together? The term “wanting” proposed here encompasses the three forms of wanting: 1. wishing (imagining), 2. willing (orienting action from desires), and 3. will power (sustained willing).

The Three Dimensions of Intentional Leadership

I did my doctoral research on this subject, using my leadership workshops with leaders from around the world, and when I asked 300 hundred leaders from around the world what distinguishing feature characterized their personal best example of leadership, three intentional subthemes emerged from the responses gathered.

Intentional Subtheme 1. Envisioning With Confidence and Determination

The proactive notion of being intentional; of orientating one’s actions to realize a particular vision of what an individual or a collective want, is at the core of understanding leadership; as a future-oriented and creative act. With calm, confidence, faith, belief, and determination, good leaders make manifest an individual and collective will; owning their human capacity to influence the future by the way they envision it.

Intentional Subtheme 2. Energizing With Passion and Positivity

If envisioning (having/sharing/cocreating a vision) stands-out at the top of intentional factors, it is the energizing and unifying effect of passionate and positive energy for that vision that will actually drive the voluntary endeavor forward, with creativity, and with others. This positive perspective is what researchers are identifying as one of the key factors not only in leadership success but also in psychological health, vocational performance, and emotional resilience.

Intentional Subtheme 3. Guiding With Authenticity and Exemplarity

Individuals and groups who show good leadership exhibit coherence between what they say and what they do; they also exhibit a genuine commitment and discipline regarding what they want to accomplish. This subservient focus and refocus on doing “the right thing,” on “keeping one’s eyes on the prize,” on “keeping the end goal in mind,” are all different expressions of this selfless commitment to do whatever it takes to serve the purpose, the intention, something greater than oneself.

“As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”

– Deepak Chopra

Appreciating as a Collective: Ken and the Law of the Situation

When I participate in the Significant Leader Exercise, my own example of a significant leader is one of those imprint moments of good appreciative leadership in my career: his name is Ken Wollack.

Ken was (and still is) president of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) in Washington DC. And Ken was my boss during my tenure in the mid-1990s as their field representative in Burundi, Africa, a war-torn and fledgling new democracy.

The quality that struck me most about Ken as my #1 example of leadership was his ability to listen, and to find solutions to very difficult and complex situations by just good listening.

One time in particular, his capacity to listen to the facts and examine with us the situation helped reveal the path forward at a crisis point of our two-year mission in Burundi.

Here is a memorable moment from those times which exemplifies well Ken’s outstanding appreciative leadership: The board of directors of NDI met in Washington D.C. one April morning in 1996, and the front page of that day’s Washington Post had a gruesome picture captioned ‘Massacre in Burundi.’ Shocked by the news, the board’s reaction was explosive: What are we still doing there? Let’s get our guys out right now! The response was unanimous and unequivocal. Our president telephoned us that evening, telling us the news of the board’s decision: it was time to pack our bags.

Despite these most recent attacks taking place in specific war-torn slums, we felt leaving Burundi at this particular moment would be the worst of all decisions. We were a few months away from completing an educational tool in both Kirundi and French, serving educational efforts for years. Suddenly leaving as a response to these recent attacks would only reward the divisionists (on both sides) and their tactics to scare away proponents of democracy and unification. Jean and I, each in our turn, tried to convince Ken to review the board’s decision demanding our immediate departure. We asked Ken to go back to the board (his bosses), to trust our judgment on the ground, and to reassess their rapid decision so we could complete our mandate.

The American ambassador to Burundi Robert Krueger, one of the most courageous men I have ever met, intervened on our behalf. Ken flew us back to Washington, D.C., to reevaluate our presence in the country. Ken could have very well said, ‘OK guys. Good work. Now come back home. Period.’ But Ken listened.

And what impressed me most for the rest of my career was the way he listened once we met to reevaluate our Burundi mission back in his office in D.C.

Once in Ken’s office, eight people involved in the East Africa program, including me, sat in a big circle around Ken’s desk. All of us were there to discuss whether we should continue our efforts to support the fragile democratic institutions or to leave because of the rising insecurity. It was a complex situation, and we were all very aware that Ken had the last word.

He opened the meeting and asked that we all share our opinions on the situation. To my surprise, he remained very quiet and just listened. He spoke few words, mostly to question and probe. I was surprised at how much freedom he gave us to express ourselves. But I was especially surprised at the way the meeting evolved. One by one, we shared our opinions and perspectives, he asked questions, and after listening to us for nearly an hour, he recapitulated in a few words the essence of what we’d been saying. He then proposed we return to Burundi to complete our mandate, appropriately, while developing an exit strategy. There was a silence of approval in the room. After too many roller-coaster discussions on this question, Ken had just summarized the best strategy in a few sentences, which brought us all together in an instant. After so much debate over this issue, I was impressed to see how a leader could, simply by good listening, lead us to find the perfect solution to a very complex situation. Ken didn’t have the last word by imposing it; he successfully decoded what Mary Parker Follett called the law of the situation with us: he mirrored it back to us, and the last word was actually the situation’s last word, which Ken, as a great leader, had helped us decipher and re-unify us around it to move forward.

The democratic leader is not necessarily the one ‘who knows’ but the one who knows how to bring people to a collective knowing, a collective feeling, and a collective willing.

Ken exemplified what Follett—a century ago—called in decision-making terms, “obeying the law of the situation,” another excellent example of scientific management and leadership as an integrative process.

…My solution is to depersonalize the giving of orders, to unite all concerned in a study of the situation, to discover the law of the situation and obey that. …One person should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take orders from the situation… From one point of view, one might call the essence of scientific management the attempt to find the law of the situation.

– Mary Parker Follett

This article is an excerpt from: The Yin and Yang of Leadership: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to Democratic Leading (2018)

One analogy I like to use to explain the dynamic quality of appreciative and intentional leadership is by comparing them to blood pressure. It’s simple to understand and is easy to apply individually and collectively.

There are two measures of blood pressure, the systolic pressure (the pushing pressure of the blood flow) and the diastolic pressure (the dilating and relaxing of arteries in order to fill-up with new blood).  Both can be used to explain the two complimentary principles of leadership.

1. Systolic Leadership Pressure

The passionate and confident vision, drive, and sustained determination to achieve something you or your collective wants. Without this systolic leadership pressure, without a forceful genuine intent, you are flat or simply going with the current without any self-directed impulse.

2. Diastolic Leadership Pressure

The ‘opening’ and ‘appreciating’ to new ideas, new relationships, new feelings, that bring new energy and renewed direction as to what you want now. Without diastolic leadership pressure, we act as a closed-system and are dry of new possibilities.

‘Leadership’ is consistently presented as integrating two complementary principles, whether we look at it from the point of view of the original Ohio State behavioral studies in 1957 or more recent Theory U in 2009 or Paradoxical Leadership Theory in 2010. The systolic and diastolic analogy is yet another good representation of this consistent leadership pattern, one we experience in our own lives.

When you get up tomorrow morning, why not try this?

Self-assess how are your systolic and diastolic leadership pressures. Jot down your results on the following page. You can make this exercise a regular one throughout the week or month. 

Check your systolic leadership pressure:

1. ‘Do I know what I want to achieve today?’
2. ‘How much systolic push do I have for what I will today?’

Also check your diastolic leadership pressure:

1. ‘What am I feeling, thinking, experiencing this morning? Am I connected ‘with’ the moment and the experiences of the morning, or am I swimming against the current?’
2. ‘Am I feeling grounded and connected with what I want to accomplish today?’

Here is a self-assessment diagram you can use.

Four Questions To Ask Yourself

1. How radically intentional and radically appreciative am I today?
2. How much am I pushing for what I want to make manifest?
3. How much am I open and appreciating what is?
4. How aware and connected am I to what surrounds me?

This article is an excerpt from: The Yin and Yang of Leadership: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to Democratic Leading (2018)

Surviving on a desert island, baking the best cake, or becoming the next top model… all of these emotionally charged reality shows are based on competition, but even more so on the human need for social inclusion and its conjunctive fear of exclusion. The fear of being judged, eliminated, not being good enough… This captivates audiences as vicarious fixes of emotionally charged fears being played-out. Leadership, on the other hand, is inclusive of diversity, it creates safe environments which are open and appreciative of different ideas and different people.

Leadership builds unity, engagement, innovation, and ethics, less by fear and control and more by inclusiveness and a sense of community, a sense of ‘oneness’. By creating safe and inclusive environments, groups also create more authentic cultures and therefore more integrity within the system.

As Srivastva, Fry and Cooperrider wrote in their seminal work Appreciative Management and Leadership:

The more the group or organization can accept an uncommon voice and promote the voicing of dissent, the greater the executive integrity of the system… When members actively promote diverse expressions, the group becomes more resilient. When members can appreciate one another’s diversity, they further the integrity of the system.

Similarly, Kim Cameron’s recent research (2017) on positive leadership practices and positive energy in corporations is another eloquent example that shows the direct effect of positive leadership on increased revenues and greater engagement among employees. Cameron’s research also shows that performing organizations have three times more energizing networks (i.e. positive relationships within the organization) than low-performing organizations. These latest findings in psychology demonstrate how leaders can be positive energizers; and humans flourish in positive energy. In the same vein, Ignacio Pavez of Case Western Reserve University shows in his award-winning research how appreciative practices are positively linked to group potency and collective self-efficacy (i.e. the collective confidence a group has that it can achieve a task or an objective together). Pavez (2017) found that high-performing teams shared more positive remarks and more authentic positive remarks with each other than lower-performing teams.

What 20 years ago was considered by some as touchy-feely management practices is now clearly becoming powerful positive social science. To read more on-line resources on positive psychology, visit:

• https://www.ippanetwork.org

And for more on appreciative inquiry:

• https://appreciativeinquiry.champlain.edu

This article is an excerpt from: The Yin and Yang of Leadership: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to Democratic Leading (2018)

My Personal Newscast

I was driving one day to an appointment while listening to the radio newscast. It was an election period and the commentator was describing each candidate’s daily schedule of events:
“The day of candidate So-And-So will start with a meeting with such-and-such workers … and then the other candidate Mrs. So-And-So will be visiting this hospital and then this factory…”
I stopped for a second, and turned the radio off. And I asked myself the question: What about my newscast? What would be my newscast today? What do I have on my agenda? What are my intentions for the day?

Rather than spending these precious minutes listening to what was going to be the official planning of each political candidate, I started to consider my own day. I began to review my schedule. The appointment at 9 am with… the conference call at 11 am with…, and so on. I took the time to visualize each activity by appreciating the stakes involved and clarifying my own intentions and my feelings, as well. It was a time to re-center and re-anticipate what I really wanted from these meetings or these phone calls. A bit like athletes who visualize the course before doing it for real. I discovered that defining my own morning news, my own intentions of the day had surprising effects on the outcome of my day.

What is happening in your day today? And what are you intentional about today? Try it and see!

This article is an excerpt from: The Yin and Yang of Leadership: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to Democratic Leading (2018)

In workshop after workshop, I hear leaders identify their significant leader as someone with a personal ethic, an inner moral compass, a personal discipline, integrity. And in a context where leadership and integrity are perennially questioned with so many of our leaders and institutions, it’s good to remind ourselves that leaders truly distinguish themselves by this inner sense of direction and purpose.

According to some scholars, the original root of the word sin refers to the idea of missing one’s target, like an archer would miss his target. In biblical Hebrew, the generic word for sin is ‘het.’ Which means ‘to err,’ or ‘to miss the mark.’ And the Greek word hamartia (ἁμαρτία) is also usually translated as ‘sin’ in the New Testament and also means ‘to miss the mark’ or ‘to miss the target.’ Based on these definitions, one could say that we actually sin or lack integrity when we lose sight of our target, of our own inner sense of purpose and direction.

In positive psychology, recent focus has been put on distinguishing between the two Greek notions of well-being and happiness: the hedonic quest for happiness through pleasure and the eudemonic quest for happiness through meaning and self-realization. Whereas hedonic happiness is based on experiencing a sense of well-being through good feelings, Eudemonic happiness is based on experiencing a sense of life purpose, challenges and growth. And recent research support the idea that happiness and wellbeing results from the pursuit of pleasure with the development of individual strengths and virtues.

From this perspective, leadership development and integrity imply the capacity for leaders to become truly intentional and self-directed. Whether it’s being intentional about how you want to experience your day, how you want to experience your next meeting, or how you want to experience your life. This subservient focus and refocus on one’s intentions can be seen as a dynamic pathway to decision-making, integrity, and happiness.

How can I show integrity if I don’t know what I will? Or how can we show integrity if we don’t know what we will together? To have more integrity, we need more intentionality; and to have more intentionality, we need more leadership.

As long as we keep purpose in both our organizational and private lives, we are able to wander through realms of chaos, make decisions about what actions will be consistent with our purpose, and emerge with a discernible pattern or shape to our lives.

– Margaret J. Wheatley

This article is an excerpt from: The Yin and Yang of Leadership: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to Democratic Leading (2018)

Leader and solitude

Recently, a manager was sharing with me his concerns about an upcoming meeting he had to lead. He was presenting a new project to his staff and partners. Even though he had worked long hours to prepare this meeting and had outlined a comprehensive action plan, he still felt anxious.

Predicting that certain people were prepared to resist his ideas, the manager wondered how to deal with the situation. So I asked him: “Rather than putting all this energy in developing your own action plan, and finding ways to convince different people to accept your vision, wouldn’t a better strategy be elaborating it with them? And if they don’t agree with your action plan, then what will you do?” He answered: “Well, since I am the leader, it’s my responsibility to give the vision.”

Unfortunately, many managers self-impose the burden of defining the whole vision on their own. Doing so creates distress in and around them. They become anxious leaders by putting the demand on themselves to “know it all” in order to be “good performers.” They also generate anxiousness in employees who do not understand the reasons leading to the changes they have to put into place. Thus questioning our notion of leadership can help us move beyond much unnecessary distress we see at work.

Leader and leadership

The role of leader generally has been associated with the person able to give vision and direction to others. Although this role remains an important one, leadership becomes more than transmitting the vision. It involves bringing people’s ideas together to create a shared vision that everyone can call their own.

Criticizing the personality cult in leadership literature, Henry Mintzberg of McGill University speaks of the value of “communityship” (La Presse, 2007). We have to find a better balance, as he says, “between the place taken by the leader and the recognition of collective processes as sources of vitality for organizations and our societies.” Leadership in this context is seen more as a collective dynamic than an individual achievement.

Dr. Yves Lamontagne, president of the Quebec Board of Physicians, explained in a recent interview the importance of leadership as a collaborative act: “In the past, we trained our physicians to be the best in their field. That’s OK, but what we really need today is not so much for people to be the best but to be better together.”

We are in an increasingly interactive world, where a manager’s legitimacy no longer rests on possessing information, but in the capacity to create shared meaning out of it, in a way that free and intelligent people will want to work together. The French management guru Hervé Sérieyx (2005) speaks of the necessity to develop what he calls “multiplying management”, a management which “multiplies interactive intelligences around shared objectives.” Therefore, the greatest challenge for organizations today is not so much to lead people into being better competitors, but into being better collaborators.

Leadership and collaborative processes

Many factors lead us to see leadership today more as a collaborative act.

The complexity and interdependency of today’s environment makes us collaborate more and more with people from different fields, organizations or cultures to deliver, together, better products or services. Additionally, the continuous increase in the quantity of information to manage, combined with a greater specialization of fields, makes it impossible for any single person to know or to control all the necessary information. Working together is an inevitable sign of our interdependency.

Moreover, a better educated workforce expects a work environment where one can participate in decision making. According to Estelle Morin, professor at the HEC Montreal, one of the four factors contributing to psychological health at work is “that people can participate in the decisions that concern them, that they do not feel as mere transmission belts but feel they can influence the decisions with which they will have to work.”

Last but not least, the increasing legitimacy of certain feminine values at work also influences the emergence of a more collective view of leadership. Qualities such as emotional intelligence, listening, recognition and compassion (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005; Goleman, 2001), have become key characteristics of leadership today. We tend to work in less hierarchical project teams, committees and networks where collaboration is essential.

Leadership and shared meaning

If leadership is the capacity to guide forward, a team will have leadership if all members guide forward, together. The management of change and transformation of organizations cannot be accomplished by decisions of super-CEOs or small groups of elites, but by creating a shared leadership culture, where the parking attendant and the CEO both become part of the same learning and developing community. The guiding factor then becomes not so much the leader, but the shared vision or collective aspiration.

Franco Dragone, artistic creator for the Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion, states, “what is most important in any creative project is the meaning we share together. My guide in any project is our quest for meaning. The leader, to Dragone, is responsible for putting into place this shared vision and for staying grounded to it. Otherwise, the risk is to suffer from what he calls “autism syndrome,” a phenomenon he describes as the gradual loss of awareness, in the midst of multiple tasks and emergencies, of the original meaning and intent of a particular course of action. Practical advice: In case of disorientation, leadership involves coming back to the original intent: What do we really want to do with this project? What is the core intention?

Team leadership and co-creation

One CEO recently confided her disappointment about her management team. “They don’t say anything,” she complained. “I have to decide everything. They should take on their leadership roles, but they don’t.”

Yet, after attending one of this particular CEO’s management meetings, I noticed how she would not really let things be said. Intelligent and action-oriented, she knew how to lead a discussion, but appeared to have little time to “waste” on hearing everyones point of view and building team reflection. Not enough time was invested in letting shared leadership develop itself to produce real, collective ownership over the decisions being taken.

Leadership is inevitably an act of dialogue. The Greek origin of the word, dia-logos, actually translates to “moving forward with words.” Nodding in response to the boss’ idea, while not really believing in it, is not a sign of collective intelligence and leadership. The law of silence stifles creativity and sows the seeds for errors or abuses due to a lack of collective intelligence. Fostering open dialogue, on the other hand, allows a group’s intelligence to develop.

Beyond organizational settings, the French scientist and humanist Albert Jacquard (2005) calls for a “democracy of ethics” based upon our capacity, as humans, to define together what is good and desirable. As he reminds us: “Being superhuman is not about a single human, it’s when humans come together.”

The capacity to create shared meaning can lead to masterpieces of harmony and beauty. Jean-Marie Zeitouni (2008), orchestra conductor, chooses to lead differently than in the traditional ways of mæstros by favoring leadership he describes as an exercise in two movements. As the conductor, he first defines his own interpretation of the piece. Then at rehearsal, when he meets his colleagues, a process begins in which he remains open to enrich his vision with various ideas and contributions.

Step by step, a group alchemy develops, as different changes and adaptations are included. This gradual process progressively builds up to a final interpretation which has then become a co-creation, a shared accomplishment much richer than the conductor’s original vision, in which everyone feels proud and part of the final result.

Shared meaning and organizational networks

The capacity to lead by creating shared meaning is also recognized as a key factor by experts on organizational networks. Since networks bring together free and autonomous parties around shared objectives, defining the latter becomes even more essential. Hervé Sérieyx opines that “you can manage a pyramid by giving orders but you manage a network by creating meaning. A network involves the sharing, by all its actors, of a common vision, of values and principles. The ‘what do we want to do together?’ constitutes the network’s original foundation and then its federative force.”

Real Jacob, professor at HEC Montreal, believes the key element of any network organization rests on its definition of a superceding common interest. Without this shared objective, conditions are set for the usual power games of personal interests, or chronic hyperactivity which excuses us from authentic dialogue and really defining shared intentions. If a group had only one question to ask itself in order to strengthen its leadership, it would be: “what do we want to do together?”. Sounds too simple? Try it!

Shared leadership in practice

Numerous approaches try to facilitate the emergence of shared leadership within organizational change processes. Appreciative Inquiry (AI), an innovative approach developed at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, has succesfully applied positive psychology principles to develop a strength-based approach to organizational development.

According to David Cooperrider, AI’s initiator: “The capacity to cooperate is more likely to develop by building on strengths rather than working on problems. There is little capacity for creativity and innovation when one is overly concerned with avoiding mistakes or repairing something” (Barret & Fry, 2008).

In practice, Appreciative Inquiry aims at generating a common vision of the most positive potential by first discovering the best that has been shared in the past. Four stages structure the AI process:

• Discovery: When we are at our best
• Dream: Images of the future we want
• Design: Aspiration statements
• Destiny: Action projects and ongoing process

Other approaches such as Open Space Technology, Theory U, Presencing, and World Café also propose participative methodologies so that members of an organization can become part of its strategy. Whether it is through sophisticated processes or simply by organizing a good strategy meeting, the intention is to find means by which team members can define and be guided by common ambitions. As management consultant and author Margaret Wheatley reminds us: “There is no greater power than a community that finds what it cares about.”

Try this: You can easily organize your own strategy team-building meeting by setting a few hours aside for your team to answer together the following questions and to identify those elements that bring you together:

• What do we appreciate most about working together and what do we consider important to keep in the future? (This will give you insight on your shared values)
• Where would we most want to be one year from now? (This will help you define a shared vision or direction)

Leadership, hope and health

Leadership means guiding forward and thus implies an element of hope in the proposed direction. We elect political leaders to guide us towards a better future. We choose leaders in organizations in the hope that they will lead their projects and teams towards greener pastures.

Hope is intrinsic to leadership. Leaders inspire others in believing they can accomplish something greater together than they would alone. Look at a group of children playing, when one of them shouts “Hey, let’s play this game!” and all of them rally with the shared hope that the game will be fun. For the artistic creator Franco Dragone, the question is whether we have the capacity to see our future as great.

In “Resonant Leadership” (2005), Boyatzis and McKee present hope as a key element of leadership. Integrating research on emotional intelligence at work, they show that a positive emotion, such as hope, has significant effect on:

• Psychological and physical well being
• Reasoning and problem solving capabilities
• Adaptability to circumstances and people

They also demonstrate that negative emotions such as hatred, envy or resentment generate opposite health effects such as anxiety, stress, and depressive feelings. Thus, building a team or organizational project that inspires hope is not only good for performance but also good for health.

To conclude, the human organizations in which we work surely have an instrumental function in delivering a particular product or service, but they also are living communities, places of belonging, sharing and accomplishments. The distress we see at work is too often symptomatic of a sense of fragmentation and lack of shared meaning. Leading with shared intentions not only develops an organization’s vitality and creativity, but can also prevent much unnecessary distress.

Selected references

Barrett, F. J. & Fry, R. E. (2008). Appreciative Inquiry: A positive approach to building cooperative capacity. Chagrin Falls, OH: Taos Institute Publications.

Boyatzis, R. & McKee, A. (2005). Resonant leadership: Renewing yourself and Connecting with others through mindfulness, hope, and compassion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press.

Cherniss, C. & Goleman, D. Eds. (2001). The emotionally intelligent workplace. Publishing City: Jossey-Bass.

Collins, J. (2001). Good to great. New York: Harper Business. • Genelot, D. (2001). Manager dans la complexité. Paris : Insep Consulting.

Goleman, D. (1996). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York: Bantam Books.

Jacquard, A. (2005). Travailler en réseau dans un monde de plus en plus complexe. Québec: Esse Leadership.

Tremblay, J. & Mintzberg, H. (2007). De l’obsession du leadership au communautéship. Montréal: La Presse Affaires, 2007, April 14.

Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday.

Senge, P. (2004). Presence: Human purpose and the field of the future. Society for Organizational Learning.

Sérieyx, H. (2005). Travailler en réseau dans un monde de plus en plus complexe. Québec: Esse Leadership.

Zeitouni, J.-M. (2008). Jouer son rôle de leader, sans fausse note! Québec: Magazine Vivre, Sep.-Oct. 2008.

Translated and adapted from a French article published in the Canadian Magazine Spiritualitésanté, Vol. 3, No. 1, published February 2010. Written in collaboration with Pierre Agard and Lisa Nelson.