The Triangle
Using Diversity Icebreaker and Host Leadership with teams to mutually enhance their impact
For some years now, I have been building my professional activity with, among others, Diversity Icebreaker and Host Leadership.
Diversity Icebreaker is a Blue-Red-and-Green tool used with teams when they want to engage with each other, collaborate better and, eventually, arrive at joint action towards progress. Host Leadership is a new pioneering concept and a practical approach to leading.
For some unknown reason, I have kept them in separate domains, thus inhibiting any flow of give and take between the two. Only recently have I started noticing that these two approaches with their focus on connection and co-participation share some fundamental philosophical assumptions. In addition to arriving at some insights myself, I ran a workshop with fellow Host Leadership and Diversity Icebreaker practitioners to find out whether they would support my sense of possibilities arising from applying the two approaches, when appropriate, in a connected way. We mapped out a massive territory of common ground which can be useful for the work we – coaches and facilitators – do.
Here follow a couple of important concepts which hold the ground together.
Engagement
Both approaches generate engagement and participation, foregrounding interaction.
In Host Leadership engagement is what really counts. If people are engaged – aware, committed, involved, participating, taking action – they get more and give more.
In Diversity Icebreaker, participants develop their own descriptions and create their own meanings through getting and staying engaged.
Connecting, meeting people in their resources
As connector, the host leader joins people together and creates the possibility of something emerging, that would not have happened without the connector. Meeting people in their resources first is a core Diversity Icebreaker process
Building productive and efficient relationships
It is the role of the host leader to connect people and then step back and allow relationships to develop. Through both the Diversity Icebreaker and Host Leadership we meet people anew and with possibility. And then the door is open for joint discoveries.
Emergence, Significance of bottom-up processes
Complex and shifting situations require flexible and contextual responses. Host leadership is an approach that involves roles, ways of acting and behaving in a social situation. Awarenesses change and shifts are made all the time.
Diversity Icebreaker seminar has a loose structure which holds the processes together but what will happen, how, who will do and say what – it all emerges
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