Page 117 - Appreciative Leadership

90 Appreciative Leadership

collaboration. You will foster commitment to shared visions, goals,
and paths forward. And you will evoke inspired action on behalf of
the whole.

Inclusion Begins with You

Acts of inclusion range from the sublimely personal to the strategi-
cally global. Even, and especially, the healthiest of us carry multiple
voices—some logical, some intuitive, some the voices of our parents
and teachers, some the voices of experience. On this deeply personal
level inclusion is about acknowledging, listening to, and making sense

of your self-talk—your inner dialogue. The more you welcome, draw
on, and develop the multiplicity of voices you yourself carry, the more
likely you are to welcome and honor the voices of others.
Languages are among the greatest tools of Appreciative Leader-
ship. To read, write, or speak a language is to understand the con-
text, culture, and constraints of its people. Learning languages—be
they Painting, Poetry, Music, English, Spanish, Arabic, Mathematics,
Finance, or Marketing—enhances your capacity for Appreciative
Leadership by enriching vocabularies, expanding ways of knowing,
and opening you to new possibilities and paradoxes. The more inclu-

sive and diverse your self-talk, the more inclusive and diverse your
Appreciative Leadership practices can be.
Your range of inclusion is apparent in subtle and not so subtle
ways, in your actions, your language, and your writing. On a break
during a workshop, one of the participants asked to talk with us. She
said we were not being inclusive in our facilitation style. We asked her
to explain what she meant and to give us examples, which she did. We
had a number of young people in the class, and it seemed to her that
we were not affirming their ideas as frequently as we were the older,

more experienced participants. We thanked her for her observation
and said we would self-reflect as we went through the rest of the day.

Sure enough, she was right. We were skipping over the comments of
younger participants and consistently reinforcing the ideas of older
participants. Our habits of facilitation were not in alignment with our
value of full-voice participation. Having recognized this, we could do