Today is World AIDS Day, an awareness raising event stimulating global media coverage and opinions ranging from critical to hopeful.

Rather than asking what your opinion is on World AIDS Day or AIDS as a global issue, this post instead questions where you’re getting details on the story and in what ways they’re influencing your opinions.

Where do you get your news? And how much does your information source and the channels you use to access information say about the assumptions and foundations upon which you base your leadership decisions?

Today’s leadership practice is about widening your peripheral vision and looking at an issue with a fresh perspective.  As Albert Einstein said:  “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Try out the practice below, write a comment on this blog to share your reflections, thoughts and questions from your learning experience. You can also broaden your understanding by reading other people’s comments to see what they took from trying this practice.

Current Affairs

Choose a current news story you are interested in. Read about it from different media sources you wouldn’t normally refer to, for example an on-line journal or blog, an entertainment magazine, a different newspaper. Then:

• Write down the differences you you noticed in how this media source presented the story
• How did it affect, challenge, change or reinforce your point of view?

To lead you need to be able to take a different perspective, hear messages from different people and consider your judgement and actions as a result.

Understanding how current affairs can be seen from so many different angles, and how people have varying opinions on one issue, helps us see where our own bias lies.  This is the first step to learning to suspend judgement and become more curious, tolerant and understanding of others.

Common Purpose

Common Purpose gives leaders the inspiration, the knowledge and the connections they need to produce real change. Through our unique leadership development courses, a growing number of people around the world are making a difference in the industries and places where they work, in the communities where they live and in wider society.

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This provides us more of an end game for our programme delivery. I feel it will enable us to state more clearly up-front what leadership development we are heading for. The recent book by Julia has allowed us to describe the attitudes a leader has to show, some of the attributes and beliefs of a strong leader but not to signpost clearly the piece about what abilities and behaviours they have. e.g. we know it is important to be aware that change can take time, sometimes be slower than we think, however the attibutes of a leader in this situation are patience and the behaviours are…… willing to listen, ability to see all sides of a situation etc.

These competencies will allow us to signpost upfront what participants are heading for. They may not get this on our programmes, but they could do multiple programmes.

Practically we need a written list with explanation, pointers to which elements of our programmes help a person to identify and then develop these.

Oliver Mack