This summer I was tasked with illustrating Floricane’s leadership philosophy. Before I arrived, I honestly didn’t know what that meant or what it would look like. After a summer of conversations with clients, partners, and friends, conversations with all of the Floricane team, observations, research into Floricane materials, and personal “expertise,” I had a little bit better of an idea. So off I went creating a Floricane leadership model with the Floricane team. Last week, I had the opportunity to test drive this model during my final leadership conversation of the summer.
I’m so glad I did.
I received very insightful and important feedback from that conversation that culminated in two areas of clarification:
There is a lot to “leadership.” It’s hard to summarize the extent of everything that goes into leadership development clearly and succinctly into one image or even onto one page. There are a significant number of tools, behaviors, and techniques that are central to Floricane’s leadership practice that did not make the cut. Though important, adding everything to the illustration would have resulted in an illustration that would have looked a little something like this:
The study of leadership has been around a long time. Creating a Floricane “model” did not mean creating a completely novel idea about leadership that didn’t already exist out there in the world. The Floricane practice of leadership was not developed in a vacuum. It came from years of study, practice, and influence from other principles and approaches.
That being said, the Floricane framework is not a brand new way to understand leadership. Rather, it is the illustration of the values and ideals that Floricane works to cultivate in other people. The illustration is some part transformational leadership, some part emotional intelligence, all part of what makes Floricane, well, Floricane.
It’s the place Floricane starts and the place Floricane comes back to. The illustration is the very core of what Floricane believes in terms of leadership.