Page 87 - Appreciative Leadership

60 Appreciative Leadership

TABLE 4-1 (Continued )

Do you regularly listen to success stories and analyze them to understand
best practices? Do you trust intuition—your own and other people’s? Do you
facilitate dialogue about the root causes of success?
3. Sharing Stories of Best Practices for Learning and Standardization
Appreciative leaders tell stories of success. They spread best practices and give credit
to the people involved. They recognize people by name and describe their accomplish-

ments as specifically as possible. They know that the stories they tell teach others
what is expected. Recognizing that words create worlds, they choose their stories and
their words wisely. They set expectations for success by telling stories of success.
Do you collect success stories and share them every chance you get? Do
you acknowledge high performers? Do you encourage everyone to learn and
standardize processes based on stories of best practices?
4. Aligning Strengths for Development and Collaborative Advantage
Appreciative leaders optimize strengths by cultivating people’s unique skills and
talents. And they align people’s strengths—providing opportunities for people do
what they do well—and collaborate with others whose strengths are complemen-
tary. Recognizing that strengths combined with strengths creates collaborative
advantages and gets results, they reach out to engage diverse groups of people
in ways that make weaknesses irrelevant.
Do you work from your strengths and help others to do the same? Do you
analyze strengths and align them when assigning work or creating teams? Do
you engage diverse groups of people to optimize strengths?

From Criticism to Illumination:

The Path to Retention and Results

Making people feel valued makes them value
you and want to do more.

The pattern of interaction and relatedness in many organizations
today is defined by criticism. People who speak out do so at the risk

of prompting others—superiors and peers alike—to respond with