MOR Insight

When discussing leadership we tend to focus on good leadership practices. While this is important, I personally have learned a lot over the years by observing bad leadership practices which I then actively avoid. The recent MOR Tuesday Readings on asking questions made me remember one of these examples of bad leadership, which I call: “Questioning Questioning.”

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Gratitude, is a reflection written earlier this year by Jaime Thompson.  Jaime supports IT in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and is a participant in the Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) there.
 

Today’s Tuesday Reading, More About Questions, continues our discussion from the past two weeks.  As we’ve noted there, being able to ask good, well-formed questions is as important to a leader as being able to listen well.  Today, we’ll focus on crafting our questions, on asking questions, and finally on those terrible questions we should avoid.

I have come to enjoy and value the weekly reflections as well as Jim Bruce’s Tuesday readings.  A few weeks ago in the Tuesday reading, Be Still, I was struck by the truth and simplicity of what was written in that piece.  I thought to myself, why not use “being still” as the foundation for everything that is big or important, (or trivial for that matter) in order to contemplate the next step.  After all, don’t we often do this in many other areas of our lives?   I do it when I need to have an important conversation with a family member, before deciding whether to spend thousands of dollars

Today’s Tuesday Reading begins a short series of readings on the subject of asking questions.  It was Voltaire who said,
 
“It is easier to judge the mind of a man by his questions rather than his answers.”

Today’s reading, IMPACT, was written by Bruce Barton, as a reflection in one of the Leaders Program cycles.  Bruce manages the Shared Development Group of the General Library System at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Something I've been thinking about:

Last week Mary Jordan’s post on the Linkage Leadership Blog showed up in my Inbox.  She is a Principle Consultant and Co-Leader of the Change and Transition Leadership Practice at Linkage, an international consulting practice focusing on developing organizations.
 

I suspect that we all have heard enough about Secretary Clinton’s decisions, first to use a non-government email server for both her government-related email as well as her personal email, and subsequently about the processes followed to preserve or delete emails.  And, that you like me want to be done with it.