Book – Don Broadwell

About the Books

A Handbook for Collaborative Leaders:

Millennials Assess the Workplace of today

My book is a developmental/incremental treatise on twin-poled problem solving. Readers will find that knowledge is added as a bolt-on to what has already been learned. Collaboration becomes the key piece of new information. Students of collaboration will learn how to collaborate, even in stressful situations, and also learn when to use one of 24 leader styles. In the final analysis, readers will each form their own models of leadership.
Leadership is not a one-size-fits-all concept.

Collaborative Leadership for the Classroom:

Leading Gen Z Students

Collaborative Leadership for the Classroom helps teachers prepare students for their highly interactive world. My original Bipolar design lets teachers design their own individual leader models. I have successfully married collaboration with the shopworn Top-Down design, a leftover from the Industrial Age. Readers will find my use of a building block scheme allows them to add knowledge to what has already been learned from the book. This developmental/incremental design creates collaborative practitioners out of readers in one 60 minute read.

As things stand today, mid-level personnel and below are not engaged in their work. According to Employment Engagement Statistics (June 2023), among their surveyed group, only 41% of Millennials reported being engaged in their work. Of the remaining faction, 38% felt disengaged and 21% felt actively disengaged. (One in five Millennials is a goof off!) Making matters worse, “78% of companies cannot pinpoint what makes their employees feel disengaged in work. A paramount question becomes, “How do we create an organization where people do not need to show up for work, but actually want to come to work? This calls for strong management, core values, purpose, flexibility, challenge, goals that lead to trust, and humanity over productivity. These objectives also lead to prosperity; firms that pay attention are eight times more profitable than the S&P 500 over the past 15 years."

People want more from their employers. They want to do meaningful work at companies that invest in their development. As a result, organizations must reevaluate their culture and employee experience to meet expectations. According to Hubert Joly, architect of Best Buy’s monumental rebirth, “Excessive focus on profits has to be a thing of the past. Business needs to be about putting people at the center. This means embracing all stakeholders – workers, supervisors, vendors, customers, service personnel, and the directors board -- in a purposeful effort to end productivity as the goal. Profit is merely an outcome.”

We can never go back to normal. Personal needs are meaningful. They lead to discretionary labor, and to investment in work because it is good for the company. At the end of the day, the company is a human organization, working together to connect with people’s needs.

Try to hold in your heart two powerful ideas: (1) every human being has the right to be involved in decisions that affect his or her life, and (2) with good process, people can generate more creative and better solutions collaboratively than they can by them-selves

It is children who will remind us to collaborate. Melita Clary’s students pounce on her if she overlooks their needs or if a classmate neglects their teacher’s needs. Kevin Hoonan’s students have learned what Tom Gordon taught; “Never vote. Voting creates losers.” Charlotte Kasl’s teenage daughter implores, “Tell me the sides." As adults, we forget our time will pass. The future belongs to the children. We want them to live without fear, to assert themselves squarely, to continue to listen, and to find a life of genuine community. This calls for more than the end to racism; it demands a shift from representative democracy to participatory democracy and the way to do that is to collaborate.

The love of power in high places compels us to call our adversaries out rather than calling them in. Can we learn to disclose ourselves on a more intimate framework. We can if we want more intimate connections. There was a moment on January 6th, when a little girl asked a D.C. policeman if he was going to shoot her father. The officer got down on one knee, hugged the girl, and explained he wouldn’t shoot. Jimmy Hendrix: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

Teacher Gloria Tyler

When students “partner” with their teacher and are allowed to join in the decision-making process – even the teaching process – they begin to “own” part of the classroom system. In that ownership they become less disruptive, instead, more relaxed and engaged learners. By now, my students defend their classroom guidelines if a classmate challenges my leading or interferes with learning.

Don Broadwell

The terms Leadership and Problem-Solving are interchangeable. The person in the group who solves problems will be looked upon as the defacto leader. When teams are collaborating, leadership moves about the group according to those who are moving from problem toward solution. In other words, the mantle of leader rotates, sometimes by milliseconds.

Don Broadwell

Collaborative Leadership for the Classroom introduces a twin-poled leader model to replace the accepted Situational Leadership of Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard. It argues that H/B’s traditional model, now some 60 years in use, misidentifies the situation as revolving around internal measures – knowledge, trust and closeness. The actual situation can rather be defined by outside measures -- chiefly, what is happening in the workplace and what problems does this external situation present. Bi-Polar leading reconciles authority-based leading with participatory styles as challenged by jurist Michael Josephson in 1989. Until now, that challenge has gone unanswered.

Teacher Steven Johnson

Since taking this class and implementing the principles with Nikki and Tonya I can now see that the authoritarian approach is counterproductive and negatively impacts team chemistry. By facilitating the process, the girls were able to communicate their needs with a neutral party and have them validated by the other person. I was initially surprised that they didn’t come up with solutions that the other would find disagreeable. However, after giving the process some thought, I concluded that the solutions suggested were reasonable and accepted because the girls first acknowledged the other’s needs. Finally, my stress level remains low as the participants become the problem solvers.

A note from teacher Debbi Wallace

David has a learning disability and reads at a low first grade level. David is learning to express his needs and to work through his difficulties, not ignore them. This was a giant step for him. Monica, obviously, had no idea about David's weakness in reading. She is bright and sometimes quiet in new situations. If I had told them what they should do, David wouldn't have communicated his needs and Monica would have missed out on the chance to understand.