Page 38 - Appreciative Leadership

Appreciative Leadership Now 11

He has written, “The appreciative leader enlarges everyone’s knowledge
and vision of the appreciable world—all the strengths, capacities, and
potentials—not by having solid answers but with expansive questions.
It is precisely through inquiry itself that appreciative leaders realize and
8
unleash not their own but other people’s genius.” Indeed, by engaging
with people in communication, inquiry, and collaboration, you can
unleash potential, generate performance, and ensure the creation of
worthy results.

Appreciative Leadership Sets Positive Ripples in Motion

Through their words, actions, and relationships, appreciative leaders

start waves of positive change rippling outward, often to destinations
unknown. You know how this goes: someone at work stops you and
tells you that you did a great job, that he or she would have missed

his or her delivery date without your contribution. It lifts your spirit.
When you go home, you tell your son, thanks for recycling the trash,

something you don’t often say to him because it’s his job and he’s just
supposed to do it. He nods at your approval. The next day aft er lunch

at school, he offers to put his friend’s empty soda can in the recycle
bin. His friend also says thanks. Your son is on his way to a habit of
environmental consciousness that will last a lifetime. Positive ripples
keep magnifying and multiplying through relationships in meaning-

ful, and often surprising, ways and directions.
One of the most extraordinary positive ripples of our time got
started by Professor David Cooperrider and his colleagues at Case
Western Reserve University. When their team gave birth to Apprecia-
tive Inquiry in the mid–1980s, they had no idea that it would ripple
out and wrap the world in positive possibilities. A few of the notable
ripples have included the following:

• From the university to the world: In 1990 USAID funded the Global
Excellence in Management Program (GEM) at Case Western Reserve
University to promote organizational excellence and capacity build-
ing among development organizations working worldwide. Appre-
ciative Inquiry served as the foundational theory and practice.