Leadership Clinics

“While virtually every manager will tell you how important it is to foster belonging, far fewer are aware of the threats to belonging that shape the daily experience at their very own workplace. ”

— Geoffrey L. Cohen

Enhancing Leadership By Reframing Risk

Leading teams through volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity requires building psychological safety: a culture of belonging, learning and iteration in which members feel safe to candidly express diverse ideas, concerns, questions, and admit to mistakes. Essential to such cultures is clearly differentiating between types of risks and reasons for undesirable outcomes.

This experiential workshop begins by drawing on artistic processes, together with purposeful movement and group improvisation, to enable participants to clearly identify risks on a continuum: From those that test ideas, expand knowledge and are to be celebrated as agents of innovation even when they lead to unwanted results, to risks that harm collective efforts, often when an individual elevates themselves above the group, such in situations where a person decides not to carry their weight in a collective project.

We then examine the stories we tell ourselves about reasons for failure, with emphasis on probing the conditions underlying what has occurred — even when “blameworthy” — in order to guide team efforts with greater humanity, towards deepened understanding of all members’ needs and experiences.