Recent workshop for 40 Director and above

1. Leading through Ambiguity Debra Carpenter, Wild Grass Consulting

2. Wild Grass Executive Coaching Agile Teambuilding Process Improvement Facilitation/Training wildgrassconsulting.com

3. Who are you? Intros and howdys

4. Business today … it’s ambiguous What types of ambiguity you are seeing in the workplace and in your job search? What are the particular challenges you face as a leader?

5. Leaders are still asked for “The Plan” Organizations and cultural norms continue to expect leaders to have a proven plan which will lead to a successful end result. Loretta White, for HRPA · Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010

6. Tool #: Self Awareness What is a bank? What did you use to figure out the answer to that question? Ambiguity is a condition where information can be understood or interpreted in more than one way

7. Self awareness: How does ambiguity hit you? High stress reaction Avoid it Create new certainty through technology or research Build teams to mitigate it and control risk Examine it, often using teams to look at it from different angles Learn from it Innovate from it

8. Self Awareness: Your Mode Mode One - Technical Leadership. These leaders usually deal with ambiguity by denial or creating their own certainty. They are also more dictatorial and are very risk averse by nature. Mode Two - Cooperative Leadership. The aim of mode two leaders is to make the ambiguous clear and to build teams around them to mitigate risk. Mode Three - Collaborative Leadership. Mode three leaders have a tendency towards consensual methods of leadership. They prefer to work towards aligning team members values and getting agreement. Their approach to ambiguity is for the group to examine it. Mode Four - Generative Leadership. These leaders use ambiguity to find opportunity. They tend to be inveterate learners and innovators. Heifetz, R.A (1994). Leadership Without Easy Answers. Belknap Harvard University Press

9. Self Awareness: The Right Way Right as in not incorrect, or right as in not left? What are your top strengths? If you are uncertain of your strengths, go to strengthsfinder2.com How can you use your core strengths to work with ambiguity?

10. Tool #2: Building Your Board "It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." -Ralph Waldo Emerson Who’s Got Your Back? Who do you have in your network who you can be completely honest with? Make a list. How can these best friends reduce ambiguity? Where can you find more friends like this, and cultivate more of these relationships?

11. Building Your Board: Using it In small groups, draw a picture of how “boards” can most effectively help you lead in ambiguous times. What should they do first? Then what? Then what? What should the never do? What should you do or not do? What keeps you from using your own “boards” in this way? How can your boards help you overcome this?

12. Tool #3: Taking Action When right is not right and a bank is not a bank, how do you know when to do something? The bane of perfectionism

13. Taking Action: Agile Style Deming’s simple 4-part process can help us run our job search or ambiguous situations as “experiments”

14. Taking Action: Agile Style Fail fast. Discuss.

15. Taking Action: Agile Style Avoid batch processing Life is not a jar of jam Discuss

16. What are your next steps? Self Awareness Build Your Board Taking Action, Agile Style

18. Diverse

19. ResilientIf you need more of this as a leader or in your team, please call! 408-667-1022 wildgrassconsulting.com