Leadership Metaphor Explorer: Creative Conversations for Better Leadership Facilitator's Guide

Horth, Palus

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781604911428
• eBook ISBN: 9781604917062
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

The Leadership Metaphor Explorer Facilitator's Guide provides a facilitator with helpful instruction to use the Leadership Metaphor Explorer Tool - a compact tool for enabling creative, insightful conversations within and among groups of people.

Leadership Metaphor Explorer Applications

In this section, we introduce a variety of uses for Leadership Metaphor Explorer that facilitators can apply in different situations and for moving toward specific outcomes. The applications cover all levels of leadership development: individual, group or team, organization or community, and society.

Individual

Self-Coaching

One-on-One Coaching

Group or Team

Team Coaching

Business School Classroom

Organization or Community

Leadership Strategy

Innovation Leadership

Leadership Culture

Talent Management

Society

Boundary Spanning

Scenario Creation

APPLICATION: SELF-COACHING

Personal reflection is important in gaining insight and clarity about your own development as a leader and follower. Leadership Metaphor Explorer can support these inner conversations by combining images and metaphors that focus your thoughts.

Facilitation

Simple questions can lead to deep insights: What kind of leader am I now? What kind of leader do I want to be in the future? What are my strengths? What do I need to develop to be that future leader?

The individual can ask questions related to any level of leadership, including reflection on his or her group, organization, and society: What does leadership look like in my team? My organization? How can I begin to positively change the communities in which I live?

Keep the Leadership Metaphor Explorer deck handy for moments of impromptu self-reflection or to elicit coaching from others. Invite others to choose a card that represents how they see you at your best and another that represents how they see you at your worst.

Benefits of This Application

• Empowers self-coaching

• Taps into personal experiences and passions

• Surfaces individual and group assumptions

• Creates new metaphors

• Elicits new questions and alternatives

• Generates alternative futures for wiser planning

• Legitimizes intuition and emotion

• Helps people move from ineffective positions

• Produces tangible images that can be reused in paper and digital forms

Additional Resources for This Application

King & Altman. Discovering the leader in you workbook.

King, Altman, & Lee. Discovering the leader in you.

Van Velsor, McCauley, & Ruderman. The Center for Creative Leadership handbook of leadership development.

Example of This Application in Action

Our colleague Dave Lewis keeps a Leadership Metaphor Explorer deck on top of his desk where visitors see it. He looks at it occasionally when he is thinking about his projects and needs a fresh idea. “I’ll take a break from the computer screen and flip through them. It helps me think about why other people act the way they do and why I respond the way I do. The drawings are interesting, and it’s kind of relaxing to just browse through them.”

Visitors are often curious about the deck on Dave’s desk and pick it up.” Leadership Metaphor Explorer is a social lubricant. It’s good for a laugh, and sometimes they really get into it and talk about work, their frustrations, or their coworkers. They talk about particular people or a situation they’re in.”

APPLICATION: ONE-ON-ONE COACHING

CCL’s approach to one-on-one coaching uses a framework called RACSR, for relationship, assessment, challenge, support, and results. This framework calls for establishing, building, and maintaining a relationship with the coachee; using assessments to help the coachee make sense of his or her challenges as well as strengths and development needs; challenging the coachee to develop; supporting the coachee throughout the coaching engagement; and helping the coachee get such results as committing to developmental actions and being accountable. Leadership Metaphor Explorer supports the assessment, challenge, and results part of the coaching framework.

Facilitation

The facilitation for this application is much like that done in group work and other individual leader development work. The facilitator offers the coachee a deck of Leadership Metaphor Explorer cards and asks him or her to select a card that generally describes how he or she presently sees himself or herself. The coach asks follow-up questions: Where would you like to be in order to resolve the challenge you are facing? How might you develop in addressing the challenge?

Benefits of This Application

• Improves interpersonal understanding and trust

• Promotes self-reflection

• Elicits new questions and alternatives

• Generates alternative futures for wiser planning

• Taps into personal experiences and passions

• Surfaces individual and group assumptions

• Helps people move from ineffective positions

Example of This Application in Action

In this example, the coachee was the CEO of a company in the construction industry. The CEO had set a challenge for the organization to become more innovative. After three years of emphasizing this in the organization and even declaring a substantial budget for innovative projects, there had been no movement; no one had stepped up to offer a project that might possibly lead to an innovation for the company and potentially for the industry. The CEO talked with his coach about the culture of the company—in particular, the leadership culture. The coach offered the CEO a Leadership Metaphor Explorer deck and asked him to sort through the cards and select two: one for the leadership as it appeared to him currently and a second one that characterized the leadership culture needed to sustain the company as an innovative company.

The CEO went further. He selected a card to represent the culture in place immediately before he took the reins, several cards for the current state of the company’s leadership culture, another card representing a move toward an innovative organization, and two more cards: one for where he believed the organization could get to during his tenure and one for an ideal culture that he didn’t believe could be achieved during his tenure but for which the organization should strive. The ensuing coaching exchange explored the stories behind each of the CEO’s selections (see Figure 9, page 38, for a portion of the storyboard). After this session, the CEO shared the storyboard and initiated a dialogue with his executive team and, in particular, with the senior VP of human resources.

Additional Resources for This Application

McAdams. The stories we live by.

Palus & Drath. Putting something in the middle.

Palus & Horth. The leader’s edge.

Sewerin. Leadership, teams and coaching.

Ting & Riddle. A framework for leadership development coaching.

Whyte. Crossing the unknown sea.

Wilber. Integral psychology.

All of this process can be classified as challenge, in that it provided a different way for the coachee to make sense of and explore his challenge. Assessment comprises the selection of the cards covering where the company came from and how the leadership culture is currently. Results are seen in both possible and ideal futures.

Figure 9. A portion of the CEO’s storyboard.

APPLICATION: TEAM COACHING

Effective team coaching combines action and reflection (O’Neil & Marsick, 2007; Rimanoczy & Turner, 2008). But it can be hard to reflect as a team. One approach is to use powerful questions to drive an open dialogue. Leadership Metaphor Explorer is an effective tool for framing and exploring these questions, as it allows groups to “put something in the middle” and so defuse an otherwise difficult conversation.

Facilitation

Because the basic instructions for Leadership Metaphor Explorer are oriented to small-group situations and team coaching, facilitation follows those guidelines.

Benefits of This Application

• Creates shared understanding about the challenges at hand

• Creates fresh, memorable metaphors and stories about a complex challenge that engage people in finding solutions

• Builds safety for self-disclosure and vulnerability

• Improves interpersonal understanding and trust

• Elicits new questions and alternatives

• Helps people envision a better future

• Helps people see their environment and their organization with fresh eyes

• Generates alternative futures for wiser planning

• Encourages fun, playful, yet serious dialogue

• Taps into personal experiences and passions

• Produces tangible images that can be reused in paper and digital forms

• Helps people move from ineffective positions

Example of This Application in Action

Here’s a field report from Tom Hickok. Tom is an adjunct professor in the School of Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech, as well as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense in the areas of IT strategic planning, program oversight, and workforce development.

“I used the Leadership Metaphor Explorer cards yesterday in a team-building off-site. The group th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Using Leadership Metaphor Explorer
• Preparing for a Leadership Metaphor Explorer Session
• Conducting a Leadership Metaphor Explorer Session
• Leadership Metaphor Explorer Applications
• Combining Leadership Metaphor Explorer and Visual Explorer
• References and Resources
• Frequently Asked Questions
• What Do the Metaphors Mean?
• About the Designers