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

This video presents the interview with François Héon about his book “Leadership Is a Choice” at the Ottawa International Crafts & Book Expo 2023.

This video presents the different levels of intentional leadership for individuals and collectives.

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)