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In this issue:
Columbia Business School Sees Leadership
Presence a Critical Component of its Prestigious Executive
Development Program
Most experts
agree that successful leaders need to communicate effectively
to other managers and to employees. And yet, while many top
executives possess the kind of business knowledge that enables
them to rise to the upper echelons of their organizations,
they often lack the ability to convey critical information
to others.
Discovering
this skill gap was a revelation for the faculty at Columbia
University's prestigious business school, according to Dr.
Schon Beechler, Associate Professor of Executive Education
and Director of the Columbia Senior Executive Program (CSEP).
"One
of the things that we found, and it was a big surprise to
us, was that even at the senior level, where our program is
aimed, executives were not particularly proficient at communicating,"
Beechler said.
Ranked
the number one executive education provider worldwide by the
Financial Times, CSEP teaches innovative approaches
to topics including leadership, strategic thinking, change
management, individual development, and action planning. Executives
from multi-nationals such as Boeing and Deutsche Bank consistently
send their executives to the twice-yearly sessions.
In-residence
faculty members from Columbia's business school teach all
of the courses in CSEP with one exception, the Leadership
Presence workshop taught by a group of facilitators from
The Ariel Group.
Beechler
said that she decided to bring Ariel into the CSEP curriculum
because Columbia is committed to incorporating as much experience-based
learning as possible into its four-week seminar. In Ariel's
workshop, she saw how the group's troupe of actor-facilitators
integrates engaging exercises into the sessions to teach people
how to use techniques such as story telling to deliver messages
much more effectively.
Greta
Cowan, an account executive and facilitator with Ariel who
has worked in the Columbia program for the past four years,
noted that Ariel's focuses upon getting the executives to
expand their comfort zone of leadership presence.
"These
are CEOs, CFOs, presidents, and senior vice presidents of
organizations who are quite willing to take risks around something
such as a business strategy," Cowan said. "However,
most of them are not as comfortable taking risks that involve
stepping outside their usual modes of leadership communication.
We catch them off guard because we are actors and performers
and we come at them through the lens of theater and acting."
The Columbia
program ties Ariel's work to the session's ultimate goal of
delivering what it calls the Leadership Credo, developed by
Columbia professor Michael Fenlon. Mike's definition of the
credo includes three parts: who I am as a leader; where we're
going, including strategic priorites; and shared beliefs and
behaviors required to get there. Ariel helps the participants
understand how to prepare for their credo delivery by moving
them beyond their normal mode of presentation, which can often
be flat and uninteresting.
"We
ask them to think about a time in their life or a story from
their life experience that connects to that value in a way
that will be compelling and engage the hearts and minds of
their audience," Cowan explained. "As a result,
their presentations become three-dimensional, interesting,
and vibrant."
By any
yardstick, the Ariel approach has been enormously effective.
After a recent session that included 42 participants from
all over the world, feedback on the four-week session yielded
a perfect score: five out of five on everyone's questionnaire.
Follow-up feedback has been equally positive.
"We
track, through follow-up interviews, what had the largest
impact on these executives and what kind of financial success
they were able to realize as a result of the program,"
Beechler reported. "From those interviews and from e-mail
exchanges three elements of the program come up again and
again and again as having had the most impact. Ariel is always
one of those three."
Beechler
cited the experience of an engineer from South Africa, as
a prime example of the success of Ariel's approach. He didn't
consider himself to be a "people person" and wasn't
particularly comfortable expressing emotion.
"At
the end of the Ariel experience he told me that he was a changed
man," Beechler said. "He said that he never been
aware of his emotional side and had never used it in his career.
Now he realized that he had so many more personal resources
for effectively motivating and leading his organization."
Beechler
also commented that the Asian participants in the program
who had, in the past, felt intimidated about speaking in groups
had similar experiences in their organizations.
"I
think that one of the things that we try to do throughout
this program is to really transform people's mindset,"
Beechler said. "Ariel's approach enables us to do that
through the different perspective or different frame of reference,
very, very effectively. There's a real 'ah ha' moment when
the participants realize that all these things that they've
been talking about as related to their temporary role as actors
really apply to them as decision-makers and leaders in their
organizations."
Community
Presence:
Prison Inmates Gain Self-Awareness and Confidence Through
Ariel Work
As
part of our "Serve the Server" program, The Ariel
Group dedicates 10% of our post-tax profit to delivering programs
to underserved communities and service agencies. Over the
years we have delivered our work to groups such as The Initiative
for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), Reach Out to Schools,
Jumpstart and The Jewish Organizing Initiative. In this space
we will be describing our experiences working with these wonderful
organizations.
In recent
months Ariel facilitators have been working with inmates at
the Suffolk County House of Correction as part of a national
emotional literacy program called Houses of Healing, sponsored
by the Lionheart Foundation based in Needham. Lionheart works
nationally to help incarcerated men and women improve their
chances of succeeding once they've completed their time "behind
the wall". We have used Ariel's experiential, theater-based
techniques to teach inmates how to identify, manage, and express
their feelings in a constructive, mature manner both within
the prison community and "outside" following their
release.
The work
was initiated by Nat Warren-White, a senior consultant with
the Ariel Group for over 8 years, who said, "This was
by far the most inspiring work I've done in all my Ariel days.
In this difficult moment for the world, it feels great to
be able to make a real and tangible difference close to home.
The Ariel affiliates who have contributed to this effort all
agree that they have learned as much, or more, from this remarkable
group of men as they may have learned in our workshops."
Half a
dozen facilitators delivered Ariel experiential workshops
to the inmates to allow them to develop life skills that will
serve them as they rejoin the Greater Boston community. The
impact of Houses of Healing has been profoundly moving for
all involved and we hope that the increased self-awareness,
coupled with growing confidence and strengthening communication
skills, will play a part in improving the lives of the men
with whom we have worked.
One of
the prison participants put it this way, "We were doing
something we wouldn't normally do because of our image. Daring
to let down walls to experience or feel something different.
My heart is smiling."
Ariel
facilitator Pete Kovner tells about what touched him when
he expressed that he felt he might have done more for the
men in his session. One of the men spoke for the whole group,
saying, "You don't know how important it is to us to
know that someone outside cares about us."
We would
like to recognize and thank Nat Warren-White, Jeffrey Korn,
Pete Kovner, Liz Callahan, Kenny Raskin and Chris von Baeyer
for the time they dedicated to this project.
Practice
Your Presence:
Story Telling
The June
2003 issue of Harvard Business Review contains a fascinating
interview with screenwriting coach Robert McKee in which he
makes the following interesting points:
"A
big part of a CEO's job is to motivate people to reach certain
goals. To do that, he or she must engage their emotions, and
the key to their hearts is story."
"If
you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told
story, then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous
applause instead of yawning and ignoring you."
For the
complete story see this month's HBR or log on to www.hbr.org
Here
are some simple exercises that will help you develop and deliver
compelling stories:
I Can
Relate: Stories may be the most effective way to convey
information to an audience while also building a relationship
with them. When we tell stories, especially personal stories,
we can show our vulnerability as a leader, and move our audience
to take action.
Make
it Powerful: Storytelling "best practices" include:
- Re-experiencing
the event (e.g., by using present tense)
- Using
descriptive/sensory language (sound, sight, taste, smell,
feeling)
- Being
succinct (e.g., by using bullet phrases and few ands)
- Emphasizing
emotional content
- Playing
different roles in the story
- Using
vocal variety and body language
Make
it Personal: We have seen how even stories from our childhood
can contain universal themes relevant to our organization's
or our clients' key issues. We can leverage the archetypal
nature of stories by cataloguing some of the significant moments
in our personal and business lives, as a resource to draw
on when planning any presentation (The River of Life is a
great source of stories!).
Make
it Teachable: As Noel Tichy writes in The Leadership
Engine, the fundamental role of leaders in any organization
is to create more leaders. How do they do this? By conveying
their hard-won experience, through stories. Tichy has coached
top leaders such as Jack Welch at GE and Jacques Nasser at
Ford in telling stories. Tichy makes sure that the point of
every story is conveyed unambiguously -- what he calls having
a "teachable point of view."
Everyone
Loves a Good Story: It's true. In fact, the best business
presentations are often simply a series of stories, each one
making a strong point.
|
Founders'
Spotlight
online newsletter. For those of you who are unfamiliar with
The Ariel Group we hope you find the information enlightening.
For those of you who have experienced our work we hope you
will be renewed and refreshed by the contents of the newsletter.
We encourage you to forward this newsletter to anyone you
think might be interested in our theater-based approach to
leadership development.
Techniques
to Reach Out, Motivate and Inspire,
the book will be published by Gotham Books and will be available
in bookstores and online starting October 13. 
