Dorrier Underwood

Most people think that a leader is the one with a particular title or someone who has at least been anointed by a person with a title.  That may not be true. This is the biggest dilemma I have always faced in my work life, how to TAKE leadership from the one who HAS leadership because of their position or circumstance, and I hear it from others in the companies with which we work. This week one of my clients brought up the leadership question. He wanted to talk about what he has been seeing about his team, and then himself. We have been talking about what his team needs to really be a team. And they aren’t a team so much as a group of individuals who get together with concerns of their own, that they need to have and the organization needs them to have.   And the ones who lead do so only when the issue is in their area. They easily take leadership when they have the most knowledge, not because leadership is needed and wanted. My client told me about his own leadership ...

“Listen, do you want to know a secret? Listen, do you promise not to tell? I am in love with you.” Listen, pay attention. There is someone there. Someone brilliant and you will see them if you listen and listen a little longer. At first and still, I have thought our new program on listening and love was about giving a gift, the gift of really listening without interrupting with your good idea or to make a joke or say what that reminds you of, etc.  Now, I think it is also about giving yourself that gift of discovery, that gift of seeing for the first time. What does this have to do with business strategy? With business success?  Except everything? At the end of the day no matter what the numbers, no matter how big the success was, it was the people. People that love to work together, think things through together, and pull together and celebrate a job well done or work out recovering from a failure together.  I got up this morning and ...

I am so used to looking at life as a mechanistic process, that the notion of life as “a complex adaptive system” requires me to give up thinking my usual way. It’s not that I find complex adaptive systems hard to understand or even illogical. I just notice that, left to my own automatic devices, I can be counted on to regard phenomena of all kinds in a linear, mechanistic fashion, whether or not the phenomenon in question is living or inert. Most of what we care about is in the realm of life (family, social systems, stock market) rather than the realm of machines (bridges, levers and dials).   We all went to college for levers and dials—even me, in the College of Education. As a student teacher in a classroom with 25 college-track seniors who just wanted the formula for getting A’s in English and were quite peeved I didn’t provide it, I was on my own when Miss Mallory, my supervising teacher, was out sick the last day of school. I had graded their compositions, and one...