Adapted from Appreciative Leadership:
Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization
Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom and Kae Rader

People’s strengths, capabilities, needs, wants, hopes, and dreams are a readily abundant yet frequently overlooked source of positive power. Generally, unrecognized and very often underutilized, strengths are a deep well of potential waiting to be tapped. Appreciative Leadership puts strengths to work, transforming them from raw potential into positive results through the art of illumination.

The strategy of Illumination calls us to bring out the best of people and situations by actively:

• Seeking to discover unique skills, strengths and positive potentials,
• Seeing what works when people are at their best
• Sharing stories of best practices for learning and standardization,
• Aligning strengths for development and collaborative advantage.

It involves the conscious cultivation of positive dialogue, a commitment to discovering the root causes of success, and the practice of appreciative coaching to bring out the best in others.

Adapted from Appreciative Leadership:
Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization
Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom and Kae Rader

Inclusion—consciously engaging with people to co-create the future—is a foundational strategy for Appreciative Leadership, and an indispensable practice for unleashing the positive power of today’s multicultural, multigenerational, and multitalented workforce. Realities are crafted in relationship, through conversations and collaborations. In order for decisions and plans for the future to satisfy and serve diverse groups of people, all the people whose future it is must be invited into relationship and included in dialogue and decision-making.

The strategy of Inclusion calls us to actively invite diverse groups of people – with equally diverse thoughts, feelings and experiences – to coauthor their future in teams, departments and whole organizations. Since multiple ways of seeing stretch people’s thinking, Inclusion inspires innovation. And since people commit to what they create, this strategy fosters broad and deep commitment to shared visions, goals and paths forward.

Recognizing that Inclusion begins with them selves, appreciative leaders allow themselves to think broadly, feel deeply and regularly seek out multiple perspectives. They issue the invitation to a wide range of stakeholders, in a manner that fosters new relationships and conversations and empowers people to contribute their best in service of shared goals. Using large group processes like the Appreciative Inquiry Summit, they take Inclusion to scale, engaging hundreds or thousands of people in conversations that accelerate positive change and get results.

Adapted from Appreciative Leadership:
Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization
Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom and Kae Rader

Inspiration opens people to the source of life that moves through and among us all. It gives people hope and courage to shed habitual ways of living and working and move in new, innovative and more life-affirming directions. It moves people to action, and gives them something to work for and toward in service of a better world. It encourages people to learn and to do what it takes to realize their dreams, achieve their goals, and help others do the same. Inspiration sparks the fire of excellence. It is the source of all achievement.

The strategy of Inspiration invites us to “re-enchant” work by crossing over to the positive – both within ourselves, and in our dealings with others. This often involves sharing uplifting stories, being generous with appreciation, and encouraging others to do the same. Just as often, it fosters “visionary liveliness” by engaging people in inquiry and conversation about their hopes and dreams for the future … by helping them see how it will be achieved, and how they can contribute.

Through the strategy of Inspiration, Appreciative Leadership helps people transcend the harsh realities of the world, organizing instead to a life-affirming purpose that supports the greater good.

Adapted from Appreciative Leadership:
Focus on What Works to Drive Winning Performance and Build a Thriving Organization
Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom and Kae Rader

To be on the path of integrity is to be moving, growing, and evolving toward wholeness; and to be supporting and enabling others to do the same. Appreciative Leadership, wherever it is and whatever its purpose, holds a broad view. It is mindful of long and short-term forces; global and local forces; and human, ecological, technical, and financial forces. It employs holistic approaches involving mind, body, emotions, and spirit to engage diverse groups of people, to support the authentic expression of human potential, and to foster the design of life-affirming products, services, and organizations.

Integrity includes practices that bring competing, conflicting, and/or contradicting forces into awareness and harmony through inquiry, dialogue, and collective reflection. It establishes priorities and engages with others to design and build social habits, processes, and institutions that are life affirming and sustainable.

In particular, knowing that relationships are at the heart of our identities and communities, Appreciative Leadership willingly and consciously strives to foster right relationships, and to make conscious choices to empower self-love and “principled performance” in themselves and others. At a personal level, this includes such acts as expressing one’s creative spirit, making value-based decisions, making the most of mistakes, being honest, and keeping one’s word. At an organizational level, it involves measuring performance according to the triple bottom line and using resources, communication, money, technology, education, and social networks, to further the well-being of the whole.