Center for Purposeful Leadership

Transformational highlights from the 12/2 Transformational Leaders Circle (TLC)

by Patricia Neal

Innovation and Transformation to be on the Right Side of History: Purpose, Profit, Planet

Session Archives
Did you miss the TLC in December? Here are some highlights:

Minnesota’s largest energy co-op, Great River Energy, brought a story of courage and transformation to the December TLC. The story involved a rough patch in 2013 regarding the movement from dependence on coal to a more renewable energy approach in electricity. GRE executives took a potentially huge risk to include their stakeholders - customers and regulators - by reaching out and asking for their engagement and advice on the next steps to come out stronger and more successful in the future.

Hearing all the voices* to gather a variety of perspectives allowed Great River Energy (GRE) to take initiative in crafting a strategy to grow their leadership and their business.

Leadership is Convening

Leadership is Convening
Excerpt from Community: The Structure of Belonging, by Peter Block
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, May 2008
 
In communal transformation, leadership is about intention, convening, valuing relatedness, and presenting choices. It is not a personality characteristic or a matter of style, and therefore it requires nothing more than what all of us already have. 
 
This means we can stop looking for leadership as though it were scarce or lost, or it had to be trained into us by experts. If our traditional form of leadership has been studied for so long, written about with such admiration, defined by so many, worshipped by so few, and the cause of so much disappointment, maybe doing more of all that is not productive. The search for great leadership is a prime example of how we too often take something that does not work and try harder at it. I have written elsewhere about reconstructing leader as social architect.

The Art of Convening