Practices for leading together
Concrete, tried-and-tested exercises from the research workshops. Some take five minutes on your own, others are structured processes to facilitate with a group. 18 practices.
Daily embodied practice
This daily practice can help you get in touch with your body and become aware of your feelings and thoughts, just like a morning coffee/ tea ritual for slowing down, a walk or yoga/meditation practice. As you sit on the chair, notice your breathing. You might want to close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose, breathe out through your mouth. Imagine fresh air entering your head, your chest, and
PracticeChapter 2Core Quadrant
The Core Quadrant helps us explore our core qualities or personality strengths and their dynamic relationship with our challenges, pitfalls and allergies. This method helps us increase our self-awareness, an important aspect of self-leadership. Mapping out our natural positive qualities, like being punctual and tidy, and understanding how they can become pitfalls if we go too far with them or how
Movement scoreChapter 2A Core Quadrant exercise
In the centre of the room, apply two pieces of adhesive tape on the floor in the shape of a cross so that you end up with four squares. In each of the squares, place a piece of paper that you have respectively labeled Core qualities, Pitfalls, Challenges, and Allergies. Invite participants to spend 10 – 15 minutes writing their Core Quadrant qualities on sticky notes and placing them in the corres
PracticeChapter 2Personal Canvas
The Personal Canvas is a practice that invites you to reflect upon and visualise your core values and passions. It encourages you to formulate the purpose of your work and the impact you would like your work to have on others and the world around you. It also asks you to consider which ways of working in your team and with other colleagues would support you – enabling you to work according to your
PracticeChapter 2My Dream Work Week
While Personal Canvas is a tool that helps us raise self-awareness and direct ourselves towards value and purpose-driven work, My Dream Work Week is more of a practical tool. It not only helps us to plan and design our time and work processes in a way that prioritises work according to our values and purpose, but it also helps us find the right flow and balance in our work. Before designing your d
PracticeChapter 2Weekly reflection practice
One aspect of work that participants in our research projects often overlook is dedicated time for slowing down, just being, and opening up to reflection and new ideas. Reflection instigates self-regulation. If we don’t stop and look at what’s happening from a distance, we will be less likely to notice what we need to change and how we want to do that. Therefore, we invite you to develop your own
PracticeChapter 3A practice for psychological safety
Evaluate: Review the four dimensions of psychological safety described above – inclusion, supporting each other, taking risks, and open conversations. Together with colleagues, discuss each dimension: how developed is each one in your team? One approach is to rate your group on each dimension, either as a whole or individually, using a traffic light system (green,yellow,red) to identify areas for
PracticeChapter 3Dialogue practice
In dialogue practice, as described by David Bohm (1996), a group intentionally practises dialogue to learn this new way of being together. Continuous practice is essential – dialogue is a skill that develops over time through repeated experience. For instance, a group might set aside two hours weekly to practise dialogue.
Movement scoreChapter 3Group morning exercise on dialoguing
As you walk through a space, notice the walls, objects, and other people. Notice your breathing and relax your shoulders and neck and jaw. Release your feet to the ground. Stretch your body parts as you walk. (5 min) Find a partner. Your partner will move through the space and also up and down. Your task is to follow the height of your partner’s pelvis with your own. That means that when your part
PracticeChapter 3Practices for feedback and coaching
Karin Tenelius, an advisor in one of the research projects this book is based on and whose voice you hear from in “Voices from the field”, started the consulting company Tuff Leadership Training. The consultancy helps organisations transition towards self-managing principles and has developed training programmes for coaching, conflict, relationship repair and feedback conversations, offering proce
PracticeChapter 3A practice for exploring different forms of power
Review the model on power (Starhawk, 1987). Individually, reflect on examples for each type of power – how does each one manifest in your life and work? An embodied practice can deepen this reflection: write each power type on a piece of paper or sticky note and place them on the floor. Stand on each paper in turn – how does it feel to stand in each type of power? This embodied layer can add anoth
PracticeChapter 3A practice for developing team agreement
With your team, discuss your shared purpose and values, and identify which behaviours support these. In the previous chapter on self-leadership, we introduced the Personal Canvas practice. Look at that practice and build upon it, progressing from individual reflections to reflections on team level. After each team member has created a personal canvas with their own reflections about purpose, value
Movement scoreChapter 4Self-leadership / shared leadership
Walk through a space and observe the shapes, colours and objects that you see. Find a detail you haven’t noticed before. Turn your gaze towards other people and look them in the eyes. Maintain awareness of your breathing. As you breathe out, release your neck, then your jaw, your feet. Release your weight to the ground. (5 min) Shake hands with people and, as you do so, say your name. You can meet
PracticeChapter 4Redefining my own role
This tool is used to help people reflect on how they could expand their current job role by trying out new roles, through which they can contribute to shared leadership in their team or organisation. The first section of the Re-thinking My Role Canvas asks you to reflect on the different new roles you could assume to contribute to leading together, defining the purpose of these new roles. The seco
PracticeChapter 5Participatory meeting roles: purpose driver, facilitator and documenter
One practical way to make meetings more participatory is to explicitly assign key meeting roles. This approach, drawn from sociocracy and other collaborative governance methods, ensures that necessary functions are fulfilled while preventing any one person from dominating. Purpose driver: This person holds the meeting’s purpose and content. They have proposed the meeting because there’s work that
PracticeChapter 5Decision protocol
The Decision protocol exercise helps teams identify and redesign their decision-making processes. First, ensure that participants understand the various types of decision-making processes. To create a protocol, participants begin by writing down the different kinds of decisions they make – whether in their work, team or organisation. Each decision should be written on a separate sticky note. Once
PracticeChapter 5Consent-based decision-making process
Consent-based decision-making offers a middle path between one person making the decision (mandate) and everyone having to agree (consensus). It’s based on the principle, “Is this good enough for now, safe enough to try?” The consent question: Instead of asking, “Does everyone agree with this proposal?”, the consent process asks, “Does anyone have a principled objection to this proposal?” A princi
PracticeChapter 5Participatory budget practice
When moving towards a more participatory budget process, one of the first steps a team or department can take is to remove salary costs from their yearly budget (since this will be hard to influence) and make the rest of the budget open for different proposals. Different groups responsible for specific initiatives, projects or tasks can estimate their budget needs and submit proposals. Proposals c