COACHING FORLEADERSHIPDEVELOPMENT 135
Our twentieth-century management and leadership vocabulary, with
its now-antiquated images based primarily on military, hierarchical, and
production-line concepts, has become too impoverished to allow us to see re-
ality, think possibility, and communicate with significance. A leadership
workshop for women executives provides a case in point. I opened the week
by inviting the women to define “power” and their relationship to it. Each
group’s discussion immediately descended into an over whelmingly negative
vortex. These senior executives saw “power” as masculine, manipulative,
Machiavellian, and overly hierarchical. As the group verged on the edge of re-
jecting entirely their leftover notions of misused twentieth-century power,
one very senior executive from a prominent global organization confronted
her colleagues: “Unless you can tell me that the world is perfect, your com-
pany is perfect, your community is perfect, and your family is perfect, don’t
tell me that you’re not interested in power.”
For this group of executives, the vocabulary of leadership had become so
corrupted that we couldn’t discuss one of the central tenants of leadership:
power and inf luence. To shift from the limitations of twentieth-century per-
spectives to the type of vocabulary we need to discuss and enact twenty-
first-century leadership, we need to shift our very understanding of core
words and concepts. Without such a shift, seeing reality, thinking possibility,
and communicating significance would remain impossible.
For me, one highly effective means for creating that shift is by using the
arts and artistic processes. For example, after my initial failure to create a
twenty-first-century discussion of power using the traditional approach—
words—I decided to try an alternative approach: visual images. This time I
started by writing the word “Power” on a f lipchart and asking everyone to
respond with what first came to mind. The now-expected barrage of nega-
tive connotations ensued. Next, I invited them to use new tools, a mountain
ofart supplies, to create their own image of power. The only rule was that
the process had to be nonverbal. They could neither talk during the exercise
nor use any words in their artwork. After completing their power images, I
asked them to sign their name, as artists, so they would own their visual def-
initions of power.
As we discussed each image, the most robust, positive, and owned defini-
tion ofpower emerged that I have ever witnessed. By changing the vocabu-
lary—from traditional words to artistic images—we had changed the nature of
the conversation, and with it, our very understanding of each leader ’s relation-
ship to power.
Most coaches are well versed in chaos and complexity theory because it
has been so helpful in allowing us to understand the turbulent, not com-
pletely knowable world in which we live and work. Using those principles, we