Articles

These articles are organized by topic. Topics are organized alphabetically. Clicking on the active links will take you to that topic. All articles are free pdf’s that you may download.

Career-Life Management
Leadership
MBTI and Personality Types
Multiculturalism-Diversity-Inclusion
Other Essays
Personal Growth
Teams
Women-Gender

 

Career-Life Management

Interest Inventory. This is a list of interests you might have and some suggestions for how you might find the themes that link your interests together. (download Interest inventory)

Life Balance Wheel. This exercise asks you to rate your subjective satisfaction with 8 areas of your life and why. If you are less than 100% satisfied with an area, you are then guided to imaging a 10 for you in that area of your life, and to consider some actions you could take, now, to move you towards 10’s and life balance. (download Life Balance wheel)

Mentoring Functions – Definitional Tools by Audrey Murrell. These two pages briefly chart the career and psychosocial functions of mentoring, define each function, and provide key activities associated with each function.  (download Mentoring Functions)

Mentoring Plan Grid by Audrey Murrell. This is a worksheet for you to use in defining and designing your personal mentoring network. (download Mentoring Plan)

Message from Mentaur: Get mentoring through a strategically designed network. This is a short note about why you need, and how to structure your developmental relationship network. Ideally you would read more by downloading Mentoring Functions, the Mentoring Text, and the Mentoring Plan Grids. (download Mentaur)

Values Inventory. This 100-item inventory provides you with a range of values to select, including personal, sub-cultural, and international values. Knowing what is important to you and living in ways consistent with your high priority values will change your life. (download Values Inventory)

Your personal credo worksheet. The personal credo, or mission statement, combines your top values, skills and interests into an easy to say statement about what is important to you. The credo keeps you focused on who you are and what you want. This is a compass that will point you in the correct direction when you feel confused by other people’s wants and needs, and can serve as a decision matrix for choosing between career options. (download Credo Worksheet)

 

Leadership

Charisma Quotient: A Self-Awareness Questionnaire. Charisma means gift of grace. Some call it star quality. Some people seem to be born with IT! that shining something that makes people want to be like them, be near them, follow them. Yet, we have learned from watching charismatic leaders from all walks of life that you can make the most of what you were born with. If you were not born with IT! – Charisma – you can construct IT. This questionnaire will help you assess how charismatically motivating, charismatically envisioning, and charismatically enabling you are. The questionnaire items are also behaviors you can use to brighten your charismatic shine. (download Charisma Quotient)

Dance of Leadership. This is the first chapter from my book. In the book I use dance as a metaphor for leadership, noting that leadership is more than position, charisma or power over others. Dance of Leadership is about knowing your style -- what moves you -- and achieving a shared goal by using the right style with followers in appropriate situations effectively. Dance of Leadership puts forth a broad, inclusive definition of leadership, describes 5 different leadership styles using Gabrielle Roth’s five rhythms (Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness) with appropriate situations for using each style in order to be effective, and provides developmental activities for becoming more effective using the style that resonates most with you and your situation. (download DoL Ch.1)

Dance of Leadership Style Questionnaire. Take this shorter version of the quiz provided in the Dance of Leadership book to identify which of three common leadership styles you might use based on the five-style leadership typology in my book, Dance of Leadership. (download DoL style quiz)

Heard in the ivory tower: What academic researchers are saying about gender and leadership. One researcher looks at transformational and transactional leadership and finds that women are more likely to use effective transformational leadership. In a cross-cultural study of gender and management another researcher found that the ‘man’ in management, so to speak, was a barrier to conceiving of women as managers. (download Ivory tower)

Leadership Research and Theory Basics. In this text I summarize current thinking about what leadership is, how leaders differ from managers, important leader traits and skills, situational leadership challenges, and leadership styles. I specifically address transformational vs. transactional leadership, the leader-follower relationship, male-female leadership. This paper is a great primer when you gain insight into your own leadership by combining the reading with the Charisma Quotient, the Leadership Trait Questionnaire, the Dance of Leadership Styles Questionnaire, and the Values Questionnaire. (download Leadership Basics Text 41 pages)

Leadership Trait Questionnaire. This questionnaire will help you assess your propensity to A.C.T. – to seek and use Authority-position power, Competence-expertise power and Trust-relational power. It also includes information about three different types of trust.  (download LTQ)

MBTI and Personality Types

Assessing group process effectiveness using MBTI function and attitude.      I describe an exercise in which I give groups a set of function-by-attitude index cards to structure the conversation about group process. Each card lists a behavior that is either an effective or ineffective use of each of the MBTI cognitive functions, plus each of the function-attitude pairs. (download MBTI and Teams)

 

Multiculturalism-Diversity-Inclusion

Diversity Awareness. In this article I define diversity and social identity, and address perceptions and attributions that may have the unintended impact of distorting our views about others. Perceptions affect how people relate to each other and their work. So we will discuss the power of perception. You will see how selective attention, stereotypes, and other attitudinal distortions are formed and may contribute to group dynamics, interpersonal conflict and inequity in the workplace. Understanding the fundamentals of perception and identity dynamics can assist you in managing and maximizing diversity, coaching employees and teams, and reducing stress in the workplace. This article includes a popular exercise I use in my diversity training – The Social Identity Diagram. (download DivAware 23 pages)

Diversity Change Process. Diversity-Inclusion management is a change process, not a one-time program. At least four sets of activities are required for success. The four sets of activities are:
1. Selecting relevant dimensions of diversity for your organization.
2. Managing differences including effective conflict resolution.
3. Linking diversity to customer and performance management systems.
4. Learning with-from diversity to enhance organizational effectiveness.
This paper describes how each of the core activities builds upon and supports actions in the others. And because change is usually resisted, I describe the types of resistance typically associated with each set of activities. (download DCP 19 pages)

Pioneering the development of diverse leaders: UCLA Leadership suite helps with recruitment and retention. This article describes the rationale behind the suite of leadership development programs targeted for LGBT, Women, African-American, and Latino leaders. (download UCLA Leadership Suite)

Other Essays

Soul Cook’n Counseling: Counseling tips from a Not-by-the-book-cook. This is an essay that uses cooking as a metaphor for different approaches I use in counseling my clients. (download Soul Cookn Counseling)

Why “I” wrote dance of leadership: Autobiographical musings. People often ask why I decided to write that book and I answer that question in this one-page essay. (download YDoL)

Transformational Listening. I teach listening in almost every session I do. If there was one skill that I believe would make our world better were we to practice it regularly, it would be listening – the underused side of communication. Listening demonstrates respect for others. Listening is the key leadership-diversity-conflict-communication skill. And listening improves with practice. This note describes how to improve your listening skill. (download Listening)

 

Personal Growth

The Work of Byron Katie: Worksheets. Katie says “all war belongs on paper”. The work sheets are a way for you to write about your internal wars – the warring voices that tell you what you should or should not do, think, feel against a reality that doesn’t match those shoulds. You can also write about the wars you are having in your key relationships – the people you think ought to do and be different than they are. Writing these thoughts is an essential first step to increasing your awareness of both the content of your thought wars, and the intensity of those thoughts. You are then ready to do the work – to enquire into your thoughts, to feel their impact on your life, and to decide whether or not to keep them. (download the Worksheet)

 

Teams

Assessing group process effectiveness using MBTI function and attitude.       I describe an exercise in which I give groups a set of function-by-attitude index cards to structure the conversation about group process. Each card lists a behavior that is either an effective or ineffective use of each of the MBTI cognitive functions, plus each of the function-attitude pairs. (download MBTI and Teams)

 

Women-Gender

Work and Family. This is a one-page description of some of the Programs, policies, and practices designed to help people manage the boundary between work-professional life and family-personal life. I discuss the reasons why professionals are interested in this issue, bring to light some of the gendered assumptions behind various approaches to work-family issues, and question the entire notion of a work-family boundary. (download WorkFamily)