Month: January 2015

In my conversations with women leaders one of the common threads I hear is that their colleagues don’t listen to them.  Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant wrote about this in the New York Times on January 12. Their article is entitled “Speaking While Female: Why Women Stay Quiet at Work”.  I highly recommend it.  Since then Kathleen Edison has published a graphic to address this situation.  Her graphic, 7Ways to Combat ‘Manterrupting’ can be found at behance.net.  The steps are

1. First acknowledge gender bias
2. Establish no interrupt rules for everyone in a conversation
3. Practice bystander intervention
4. Create a buddy system
5. Support female colleagues

I encourage you to see the graphic for the smart and funny way it addresses this factor of Manterrupting.

For the women readers, what methods have you found effective in combating Manterrupting?

For my male readers, what experiences have made you aware of this factor?

In the Taos Institute January newsletter,www.taosinstitute.net,  David Cooperrider talks about Relational Leading.  In this piece he quotes Peter Drucker, “‘Leadership is about creating an alignment of strengths making people’s weaknesses irrelevant.’ This, it seems, would require an appreciative eye…”  Cooperrider is emphasizing appreciation as a fundamental element of Relational Leading.  In my experience it is a necessary factor in developing strengths.  A focus on appreciation and the development of strengths builds individual capacity within the context of a network of relationships.  It is never the individual that makes the difference.  It is always the relational context.

What is your experience being appreciated?  When that happened, how did it affect your development?