US – Alan Scheffer “Hanging the Mirror”

Alan Scheffer, founder of Management Associates, recently received a review from Kirkus on his book Hanging the Mirror: The Discipline of Reflective Leadership, almost 900 copies sold to individuals and organizations. Management Associates has been helping top management re-frame the way they look at underlying values, everyday behaviors, and the surrounding systems so as to tap and channel the human spirit in businesses.

In the past 25 years, the team have been delivering public workshops, writing blogs (http://www.hangingthemirror.com/blog/), and working with clients in healthcare, public, retail, finance, technology and manufacturing sectors. They learned that the top management need to be the first to change rather than providing support to the changes as an outsider. Therefore, all projects, lasting either one day or several years, started from the CEO taking an active role in self-reflection. The team also learned that in order to generate genuine energies to grow it is imperative for an organization to have profound and meaningful vision and the common understanding on what to contribute and what kind of culture to develop. When the top person clearly articulated the vision, mission and culture of the organization, the understanding evolves and grows into a clearer picture through collaboration. The dialogs with VP-level executives moved beyond mere job description and extended to the meaningful context of the work. Experiences have shown that when the leadership team became more open, attentively listened to and valued different voices, there have been dramatic improvement of the performance and culture.

Currently, the team are reaching out to a broader circle and as well exploring various ways to use the book such as using it as a course material in business schools for further dialogues.