Page 33 - Appreciative Leadership

6 Appreciative Leadership

through forests and towns. Volunteer fire departments made

up of families, friends, and neighbors in the small mountain

communities simply didn’t have the fire protective clothing or

equipment to adequately fi ght off a threat of this magnitude.
Seeing this, a charitable foundation quickly sent representa-

tives on site with checks in hand to offer support. Founda-
tion representatives weren’t prepared for the reaction they
received. Rather than accepting the full amount, many fi re
chiefs accepted only a portion of the funding and asked that
the remaining funds be given to neighboring fi re departments
also in need.

Relational capacity does not mean, as is so frequently taught,
that you must therefore go out and “make relationships,” as if they
don’t already exist, in order to work or to live well. Instead, it means
that you must accept relationships as always present, as here from
the beginning, as surrounding us, and as infusing us with their pres-
ence. Your Appreciative Leadership task is then to become relationally
aware, to tune into patterns of relationship and collaboration—that is,

to see, hear, sense, and affirm what is already happening in order to

best relate to it and perform with it.
We experienced a deeply moving example of this a number of
years ago, at a Taos Institute conference in Belgium. Th e “polyphonic”
singing group Capella Pratensis performed Gregorian chants in a his-
toric chapel. We were enchanted by the group’s music and later by their

description of their process: They arrive early to the space where they

will perform. They listen to the sounds already present, and when they
sing, they sing into and in relation to the sounds of the space. At that
moment we could not imagine a more beautiful sound or a more rela-
tional process.
The relational capacity of Appreciative Leadership, to tune into

positive relational patterns—what we call the positive core of any