The Leaderful Fieldbook: Strategies and Activities for Developing Leadership in Everyone
ISBN: 9780891063803
Publisher(s): Nicholas-Brealey
The Global Economy—the flattened networked world—demands a new type of leadership: one that is collective and collaborative, where solutions and vision are co-created by everyone. Although generously depicted in the author’s Creating Leaderful Organizations, the practical application of collective leadership remains a mystery to many practicing executives and managers.
It is evident that the development of leaderful organizations cannot happen overnight; in fact, we need agents to emerge to help us learn how to change longstanding regressive organizational cultures into more leaderful communities. When we say “leaderful,” we refer to leadership practices that are collective and concurrent – people can serve as leaders all together and at the same time.
This fieldbook is designed for these change agents – coaches, facilitators, OD consultants, and weavers - wishing to embark with their clients on a leaderful journey across a range of levels – from individual to network - and adopting a style of collective engagement that matches the democratic processes that they are seeking to produce. The fieldbook presents the most practical of recommendations in the form of an array of exercises that can be adopted immediately across these multiple levels of experience. It also features a set of cases that demonstrate the use of the exercises in each of these levels – individual, interpersonal, team, organizational, and social network.
It is the hope of the author – Joe Raelin – that people in their collective endeavors by acting together in the world can shape their local communities for the better, that is, in ways that are more responsive to their mutual needs. It has become too easy to fold our tents around the hierarchical principle of organizational behavior. So, quoting from the Fieldbook, “….let us begin, simply but unequivocally, in the day-to-day behaviors that we people of good will may extend to one another. Everyone can be a party to leadership. Everyone can value another’s interest. In due course, we may also take it as natural to enlist our partners to forge a leaderful identity.”
