Do you practice "Appreciative Leadership"?

In today's competitive world, its difficult to sustain a organisation with high performance - a system which satisfies both intellectual and emotional needs. Such place definitely allows room for imagination as well as rational thought. SRIJAN is a work-place where, I feel, leaders look forward to create this unusual domain.

Once I got an opportunity to attend a workshop on "Appreciative Inquiry (AI) by Uma Arora" and could frame out during that session, this is one of the key practice being followed at SRIJAN.

Appreciative Inquiry(AI) is an art of focussing on strengths, positive experience and moment of excellence. It helps organisation to grow by identifying collective hopes and dreams and then creating a process for realising them. AI is a great problem solving approach that circulates around four steps:

1. Best of "What-is": The identification of processes and factors that causes the organization/team to work well.

2. Dream "What might be": The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future. Determine solutions to the problem. Create a vision of what the team and/or organisation plans on doing in the future that will cause it to be successful.

3. Consent of "What might be": Planning and prioritising processes that would work well. Create structure, processes and relationship that will support the dream.

4. Experiencing of "What might be": The implementation of proposed design. Appreciation creates alignment of strengths, making weaknesses irrelevant. It is very true that what we focus on becomes our reality. When organisations or teams capture positive energy from each other and make it visible, it starts to drive change in an individualistic, self-directed way.

Such an environment provides freedom to be positive, freedom to choose, freedom to act with support, freedom to dream ; affecting people's perception of their power within an organisational context.

Thus, it has a greater capacity for transforming personal and collective realities than many other organisational process changes. Just think, what is likely to be more useful: Demoralising workplace by concentrating on their failures or helping them over their last few hurdles by building a bridge with their successes?