Leading with Sense: The Intuitive Power of Savoir-Relier (Stanford Business Books (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

Gauthier, Valerie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804786259 ISBN 13: 9780804786256

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Today's business environment demands a new approach to leadership, one that effectively connects individuals and organizations in the midst of change. Leading with Sense offers a new, practical approach to meeting this challenge. Drawing on her experience as a poetic translator and her expertise in cross-cultural leadership, Valérie Gauthier outlines the tenets of savoir-relier: a framework for building sensible, trustworthy, and lasting relationships that enables leaders to value difference, work across boundaries, and navigate complex systems.

Savoir-relier teaches leaders to tap into their senses in the midst of strategizing, allowing them to act intuitively and rationally at once. Few leaders dare to claim that their "gut feelings" are critical to their decisions. But, by engaging their intuition, they are able to draw on experience, better appreciate their environment, build confidence, and summon the courage to tackle the task at hand.

Leading with Sense trains readers to be poets and translators in the business context. With savoir-relier, we can write our own stories, deciphering the challenges that we face with acumen, humility, and respect. Using real-world examples of this pioneering approach, Gauthier provides readers with methods and tools for cultivating a savoir-relier mindset to build positive relationships, nurture diversity, drive mindful innovation, and foster success.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Valérie Gauthier is Associate Professor at HEC Paris where she was also Associate Dean of the MBA program; she has been Visiting Professor at MIT Sloan and NYU Stern.

Valérie Gauthier is Associate Professor at HEC Paris where she was also Associate Dean of the MBA program; she has been Visiting Professor at MIT Sloan and NYU Stern.

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Leading with Sense

The Intuitive Power of Savoir-Relier

By Valérie Gauthier

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8625-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Foreword by Warren Bennis, 
1. Savoir-Relier: A Sustainable, Sense-Based Approach to Leadership, 
2. The Savoir-Relier Leader: A Portrait, 
3. Sense and Complexity: The Building Blocks of Savoir-Relier, 
4. Building Sense by Embracing Complexity: A Core Capacity, 
5. The Savoir-Relier Organization: Generating Performance and Sustainable Growth, 
6. The Savoir-Relier Protocol: How It Works in Practice, 
7. Translating Poetry: A Metaphor for Leading in Complex Times Parting Thoughts, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

SAVOIR-RELIER

A Sustainable, Sense-Based Approach to Leadership

My first official leadership experience in a business setting began the day that I was elected to become associate dean of the MBA Program at HEC Paris, the leading business school in France. I had spent the previous ten years as a professor of English and communication there, developing partnerships with U.S. schools to help HEC become an international player and recruiting professors and assistants, but I had never really led or managed a program or a team. My new position placed me at the head of a dramatically failing program with angry students, demoralized staff, and a drop in international rankings. From that starting point, I had to turn this MBA into a program that would be respected worldwide.

My plan was to recruit internationally, redesign the curriculum, and reach out to the companies that would recruit our graduates. My success would be judged on progress in these areas, but the real challenge lay elsewhere: I could not achieve any of these objectives alone. I was going to lead a team, a demoralized team. And I had no leadership or management training, just a sense of mission, and a drive to improve the lives of the students who would be recruited to and graduate from our program.

My first instinct was to listen and observe. I met with each member of the staff, empathizing with the stories and feelings that they were willing to share. As I learned the history of the program and heard about the tensions that had driven it to its current, difficult position, I began to comprehend the magnitude of the challenge I was facing. The only solution was to fight with courage and patience and, step by step, to rebuild the morale of the people involved by introducing a sense of purpose, a direction, a rationale, and a lot of common sense into our day-to-day activities. Taking account of the students' concerns and the staff's perceptions of the situation, I was going to build sense and recreate positive relationships. I was going to use savoir-relier.

SAVOIR-RELIER: AN ACT, A CAPACITY, A MIND-SET, AND A PROCESS

I believe that leadership is not a technique: it is a state of being that translates into acts. It is in his or her acts of leadership that the leader exists.

Savoir-relier—pronounced savwa? ??lje—is an expression that I came up with in 1994 as part of a project to define new paradigms for the education of twenty-first-century leaders and managers. Savoir means "to know" and "knowledge"; by extension, it means know-how, to know how to be. Relier means the capacity to connect, relate, link, and, by extension, rely on other people and on oneself. The expression can be roughly translated as "relational intelligence," although the original French also captures notions of knowledge and capacity.

Savoir-relier is a way to work from tensions by taking critical dimensions of leadership such as trust, resilience, agility, intuition, courage, and complexity and leveraging them to enhance our capacity to navigate the increasingly complex and highly relational world we live in. It is a type of leadership that is marked by humility and intuition, recognizing the importance of human relationships and the value of diversity as a means to drive innovation and performance. It is a tool for approaching and managing complex problems at individual, interpersonal, organizational, and institutional levels.

Savoir-relier is an act: the act of generating sensible and sustainable relations between different or divergent entities to build sense for individuals and organizations alike. When developed at the individual level, savoir-relier is a capacity. Savoir-relier leaders use their analytical and emotional capacities to build stronger, better connections among members of an organization. They build sense from existing patterns by creating new ones and encouraging initiative and autonomy. When it is adopted across an organization, savoir-relier becomes a mind-set, which generates a collective identity.

Applied to problem-solving or decision-making issues, savoir-relier underscores a process called the relational circuit, which can be used to generate and regenerate the vision, sense, and energy required to keep pace with today's challenges. The relational circuit serves as a guiding tool. It helps leaders reorganize the relationships between different elements in a system in order to uncover innovative solutions to problems. It takes the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and rearranges them, even adds some new pieces, to create a coherent and consistent—and renewed—whole.

Managing the Challenge of Change

Savoir-relier in all its incarnations can empower leaders to rise and face challenges, which so often come as calls for change. The disastrous state of the HEC MBA meant change was a necessity. I was ready for it and thought I could take everyone with me to meet the challenge.

This was my first mistake. Some people would not—or could not—embrace the adaptation, stress, uncertainty, and new horizons before us. I had to make difficult decisions and help members of the team who preferred safety and stability to move into departments that weren't making an active and urgent shift to an international way of thinking, working, and behaving: language, technology, and diversity were our main drivers for change. Students were arriving from all over the world. Competition from other programs was becoming tougher. We were working in an environment of raised expectations and increased professionalism while also struggling to become more international.

My second set of mistakes came along as I recruited new people to the team. Sometimes I rushed and simply recruited staff with the wrong profiles because of the pressure to improve services as quickly as possible. Sometimes the integration phase for a new person on the team worked so well that I completely let go and lost contact and control. During my eight years in charge of the program, I came to realize that for the team to work well, every person on it needed attention and care. I understood that success was not just about the results but also how each individual member of the team took part in the process and felt about that success. Success was about how people engaged in the process of change. In this second lesson, I found another use for savoir-relier: it served as a lens I could use to understand the dynamics of my team.

The more we move toward a service society, the more human capital becomes the source of corporate success. Savoir-relier focuses on human relationships and human diversity as a means to drive innovation and collective performance. It helps managers use...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804786259
• ISBN 13: 9780804786256
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 200
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar