Page 120 - Appreciative Leadership

The Genius of Inclusion 93

Issuing the Invitation:

Involving All Stakeholders

Consider all citizens as your citizens.

At the level of interpersonal interaction and relationship with others,
inclusion is about whom you invite into conversation. Every day you
issue dozens of invitations—to those you say hello to in the morn-
ing, to those you hire, to those you invite to a meeting, to those you
call on to speak in the meeting, to those you talk with at a party, to
those with whom you do business. All of these invitations of inclu-
sion say, “I value you and include you in my world. You are impor-
tant. I care about what you think and feel and about what matters to
you.” Relationally, inclusion is an act of interpersonal validation and
acknowledgment. Inclusion is a gesture of acceptance. By issuing the
invitation, you begin the process of engaging people in coauthoring
their future.
Appreciative Leadership practices are based on social construc-
tionist theory and the notion that the creation of meaning occurs
1
through collaborative activities. Relationships, conversations, and
social interactions are the sites of meaning making and world con-
2
struction. Th is suggests that who is included in a conversation
matters. Meaning depends on inclusion. My meaning and your
meaning, my department’s meaning and your department’s mean-
ing, will be different until we talk with an intention to cocreate

“our” meaning.
A conversation among executives, for example, sounds diff erent
from a conversation on the same subject among frontline employees.
Two such conversations on the topic of cost containment occurred
in an electronics manufacturing company. The conversation among

executives ended with the questions, “Why are our employees waste-

ful? Why are they not cost conscious?” The conversation among
frontline employees ended with, “Why won’t the executives tell us
what the materials cost? We know they want us to be more cost