"Crafted Leadership in Action" highlights examples from the Architecture of Inspiring Leaders in professional contexts. Val Taylor is Vice President of Community at Veracity Solutions. He shares how the team's work with Crafted Leadership on giving and receiving feedback has improved their collaboration and creativity.
Issue
We are a software development consultancy with a 50+ person staff managing multiple ongoing client projects with multiple people on each project with multiple moving parts. We rely on good collaboration within our team in order to move projects efficiently. In our quest to continually improve, an area I was interested in was feedback. Specifically, was feedback flowing through the team, could we be better, more effective in how we dealt with feedback to improve our collaboration?
Shift Move
We hired Crafted Leadership to work with the team on giving and receiving feedback. Their training gave us a structure, helpful language and an inner awareness about giving and receiving feedback. Their aim is to make feedback an ongoing part of a healthy system. We practiced with each other to get comfortable with both parts.
Impact
I’ve noticed clear changes. Crafted Leadership is big on the power of language to unite or separate, and our team has adopted shared language around facts vs. stories. I catch people frequently saying “this is a story in my head” and “are you open to feedback,” which creates more collaboration and ease right from the start. Our leadership team, in particular, is modeling the skills we learned. We’ve shifted more towards an ally mindset, with collaboration and creativity at an all-time high.
If YOU have stories of inspiring leadership in action, we'd love to hear them; email Nancy.