Page 36 - Appreciative Leadership

Appreciative Leadership Now 9

Appreciative leaders are affirmative by choice. They use positive
approaches to get positive results. A central measure of success is,
“Contribute good to the day.” What this means is that at the end of the
day, appreciative leaders can describe what they did that day to add
value to others, to bring out the best of people or situations, and/or to
set positive ripples in motion.

Appreciative Leadership Turns Potential
into Positive Power

Appreciative Leadership is more than a worldview. It is a way of being—a
set of strategies and related practices—that makes things happen and gets
results. Appreciative Leadership assumes that each person has a posi-
tive core, an implicit source of goodness and positive potential awaiting
discovery, recognition, and realization. Appreciative Leadership senses
potential and turns it into positive power—that is, into life-affi rming
results. Trusting that with few exceptions, each person has the capacity
to make a meaningful contribution, appreciative leaders see it as their
job to draw out and nurture potential and to ensure conditions for its
success. In so doing, they turn human potential into positive power.

Appreciative leaders often see potential in people and situations
where others do not. When they do see potential, they talk about it,
engage with others, and act on it. As the following story shows, appre-
ciative leaders see potential and bring forth positive power even in
situations of great distress:

After living and working in the United States for 20 years as
a successful beautician, Zemi Yenus returned to her home of
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to be with family. She quickly became
troubled by the numbers of child prostitutes she saw on
the streets and began to imagine what their lives would be

like if their outer beauty was used differently. Little by little
and child by child she transformed her home-based beauty