Adaptive Leadership Network

Happy 2019. It is hard to believe that we are entering our 4th year of monthly dinners with the Adaptive Leadership group here in NYC. We are incredibly grateful for all members who have been so generous in presenting cases, opening up your apartments & workplaces to host, and engaging in thought-provoking conversations. Here's to another great year, where we look forward to seeing both old and new faces at our dinners.

Authority, Leadership and Standing Up

Finding Our Footing in an Off-balance World: An Experiential Group Relations Conference in the Tavistock Tradition

The conference is designed to provide members, together with administrative staff and consultants, an opportunity to create and study a temporary institution, giving participants the chance to experience, examine, and understand systemic processes – overt and covert, conscious and unconscious –  encountered in the exercise of authority, leadership and power. The learning method is experiential, and members learn through action and reflection on their experience in the conference.  This method distinguishes this conference from other events where faculty provide didactic information for learners.

Conference Participants will have opportunities to:

• Learn about both covert and overt group processes through participating in groups that vary in size, structure, and task.

• Discover aspects of group life that create vitality and goal fulfillment and those, which lead to resistance, complacency, inertia, and decline.

• Identify underlying patterns of group interaction by forming groups, establishing leadership structures, and relating with other groups and the institution as a whole.

• Recognize personal and collective reactions to well-defined authority and clearly delineated boundaries.

• Experiment with familiar and unfamiliar roles and with various social behaviorsincluding isolation, autonomy, affiliation, collaboration, and coalition building. 

• Learn how varied aspects and perceptions of individual identity such as race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and education level are used by groups with and without the conscious awareness of the individuals involved.

• Understand the difference between the stated task of a group and the task it actually appears to be pursuing.

• Deepen participant’s awareness of their own capacity and responsibility to lead or advocate in their home organizations and social contexts no matter what their formal authority roles.

• Apply what has been learned and experienced to choices in back-home work and social contexts.

Learn more here: https://www.weekendcsgss.com/ or read the brochure.

This conference is for anyone wanting an opportunity to learn through immediate and direct experience about group dynamics and influence, about overt and covert actions involved in the exercise of leadership, authority and power, and about standing up. No particular background or experience is necessary to participate.

Case-in-Point is an interactive and experiential teaching method in which you, the practitioner, use a class or team as the case study for learning about leadership. Developed at Harvard University by Ron Heifetz, Marty Linsky and others, Case-in-Point is a defining feature of The Art and Practice of Leadership Development, a course taught by Heifetz at the Kennedy School of Government. Because Case-in-Point is challenging for both teacher and learner, it can be hard to find a space to practice and learn through trial-and-error. KLC’s own rigorous experience equips leadership development practitioners like you to incorporate Case-in-Point in your teaching, training or consulting. You’ll connect with like-minded professionals from around the world and find a strong support system of Harvard-trained master-practitioners, Tim Steffensmeier, Jill Hufnagel, Lynette Lacy, and Peter Cohen. KLC’s five-day intensive gives you the skills and assistance you need to make full use of this powerful tool for leadership education.

https://kansasleadershipcenter.org/intensives/#caseinpointintensive

Marty Linsky, co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates and co-author with Heifetz of the best-selling book, Leadership on the Line, highly recommends this program. “KLC is the perfect place to perfect your case-in-point delivery skills. Using the class as a case is a challenging and powerful method of enhancing people’s leadership capacity . . . and for me at least, doing it well is a life-long learning journey.”