June 11-13 , 2004
At different times, we’re all called upon to be leaders, and leadership is never easy. The follies and foibles of our fellow humans often drive us to distraction. It’s no wonder the command-and-control leadership model has predominated for so long, but its effectiveness is limited in solving modern problems. Throughout his successful business career, leadership guru Mel Toomey has been fascinated by two questions: What keeps things from working? What elements of leadership come together to make things work? He has answers.
Organizations at their inception are all creative systems. Imagine a start-up company – everything has to be created from scratch. Even if people have experience from the same industry, it likely has to be modified and altered to fit this new situation.
Over time, companies become preservative systems. Management is about reliability, predictability, and certainty. Managing is the task of stewardship, bringing efficiency and effectiveness to the affairs of the business. That’sw why the very nature of most organizations seems to discourage change and innovation. Even most R&D is directed toward brand and product extensions rather than revolutionary new products.
In most organizations, Leadership is not differentiated from Management. In Mel’s view, Leadership is about bringing forth new possibilities, creating new futures, and forging new paths for people and companies. It’s a very distinct realm from management. Mel has also identified a third realm — development — the task of fostering and nurturing the new possibilities to feasibility, until the possibility is sufficiently defined and resolved that it can be managed. All three roles are critical to the successful operation of a team, division, or company.
Generative Leadership, the distillation of Mel’s genius, is a way of thinking and being that embraces creativity and change as a way of life. It allows people to generate new futures and fulfill visions that would previously have seemed impossible. Leadership can become an exciting adventure.
Mel believes that people are fundamentally committed to making a lasting and sustainable contribution and want to be appreciated for their efforts, but don’t always see the way to make this happen. The leader’s job is to help everyone express his or her commitment in their own style, reframe competing voices as unique contributions, and focus the group on the larger purpose. “We have to stop ascribing all our problems to bad people who can’t understand, or evil systems just out to make money,” Mel says. “Those are superficial assessments of a far more complex system.”
Mel suggests we begin by “learning to listen generously, taking listening further and fully receiving what another person is saying in a way that allows you to see the possibility of change. Listening like this creates all kinds of new opportunities. Listening for the commitment in what people are saying changes the way we hear. How we listen can predetermine the results and consequently the future.”
Mel Toomey is passionate about having people and organizations realize their potential, and he’s committed to establishing leadership as a profession. In the 1960s he designed mortgage-backed securities and introduced methodologies that reduced time and cost by more than 50%. During the ‘70s and ‘80s he designed automated financial systems and developed award-winning housing communities. Then he began documenting his extraordinary results. This led to his founding of Generative Leadership Group in 1990, which helps organizations and their people produce extraordinary, measurable results. He is co-founder of The Center for Leadership Studies, which together with The Graduate Institute offers an accredited Master of Arts degree in Organizational Leadership. His overarching vision is to have leadership take its rightful place as a profession.