Custom essays on Enlightened Power

While talking on equal partnership, it is stated that women and men need to get equal access to advisement and networks. It is highlighted that such an approach is helpful not only for the women themselves, but for the entire, which becomes more just, caring and family-friendly, as women produce “a more inclusive, enlightened approach to the use of power”. This results in higher individual execution, outstanding business achievements and more humanism in organizational and social structures.
Much in this book correlates with the theory of relational leadership which is usually seen as a model concentrating on dependence between effective work of a leader and positive relationships in the organization. Relational leadership requires five main qualities to be developed by the participants. They should be inclusive, purposeful, ethical, empowering and process-oriented. Their interaction is effective if they are active and careful while listening to others, look for solutions together and cherish common values. Moral standards and human rights are prevailing, and individual interests accounted, the synergy is achieved. The essay correlating with the theory most of all is The Power of Shifting Context: Becoming a Contextual Leader by Rayona Sharpnack. It is written that the new type of leadership gives birth to a new language paradigm. The words associated with power are now the following: consensual and inclusive, relational and caring, open and transparent. Rayona Sharpnack underlines that the important thing is what you personally think and what you believe, not what you do or what you are capable to do. She stresses that grace and ease are the new markers of successful leadership and that language is the key to changes, as “context lives inside language.” (Coughlin et al. 2005).
Here we can parallel it with the book Disappearing Acts by Joyce K. Fletcher “about the gender-related dynamics that drive this disappearing process”. They both present a piece of investigation on what challenges are faced by women who seek for positions of power in up-to-date world. Joyce K. Fletcher makes a research on how the aspects of gender and power in the new type of organization come into collision and influence and |the paradoxical questions this raises for organizations and the people – especially the women – who work in them.” (Fletcher 2001). She has interviewed has interviewed 6 female engineers and posed 4 relational practices including such effective activities as preserving the project, mutual empowering, self-achieving and creating a team.

According to the work constructed on the intersection of social sciences, psychology and feminist poststructuralism, relational leadership comes out to be a kind of strategy that requires interaction and empathy, mutuality and strong emotional basis. Similarly, in Enlightened Power there is a reference to the theory of emotional intelligence first introduced by Daniel Goleman. It is emphasized that “the essence of leading others is to develop empathy with them and to develop social skills that will persuade them to work toward shared goals.” (Coughlin et al. 2005). Meanwhile Fletcher also speaks of the significance of leader’s role in putting people together, overseeing differences and diversity, which are however igmored in practice. Linda Coughlin in the essay The Time is Now, relatively tells about different experiences when women are accepted and rejected, affirmed and isolated. Coughlin explores why women become less confident and less persistent while they get less credit than men and often fall apart in the competition, feel not comfortable in self-promotion and are more sensitive to criticism. Women are deprived of many routes traditionally free for men, and they have much more efforts to be taken to stay straight against the winds of prejudice. It is very much the same as Fletcher’s reasoning on system of formal and informal approaches, practices and tools working together with conservative standards and stereotypes due to which relational practices became disappeared (just invisible). But in both books the authors come to the conclusion that a new model is coming and absolutely necessary, as a technically skillful worker is prerogative no more. The organization requires a creative worker emotionally intelligent and effective in interacting with other.
Eventually, here and there we find a number of recommendations for women on how to cope with the injustice and how to live it out, how to become more competent and more competitive. Jove K. Fletcher develops a system of techniques including naming, norming, negotiating and networking (Fletcher 2001), while according to the essay Enlightened Power: Through Difficult Conversations by Bruce Patton, Michele Gravelle, and Scott Peppet, women are encouraged to reinforce their influence and power by “finding, rekindling and sustaining their passions” and improving their conversational styles. Communication skills are developed by means of being attentive to the intentions of others, comprehending their feelings and constructing a strong identity. It is very important to set a good reputation by “standing tall; maintaining eye contact; stopping self-deprecating remarks; getting rid of the tilted head; and stepping into the lime light.” (Coughlin et al. 2005).
The main difference between the two investigations regarded is that Joyce K. Fletcher has studied conditions of women working in the male-oriented spheres and has put more emphasis on problems they share, but the Enlightened Power has gathered material mostly on feminine traits and conclusions made there are not applied to some branches left aside. Anyway, all of them have conducted plentiful work the significance of which can’t be overestimated. Books of this kind are helpful to support women who themselves become the victims of the tends described in the books and they get to know that they are not alone in their experience and get sure that the way out is very close. What is more, such editions are worthy as they attract attention to broader circles of public who may not have thought of the matters described earlier but who may make their own contribution in looking for solution and making the social and economical processes more effective and innovative. All in all, these are the voices of people who in this or that way need to be heard.

References
Coughlin, L., Wingard, E., & Hollihan, K., Eds. (2005). Enlightened Power: How Women are Transforming the Practice of Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Fletcher, J. K. (2001). Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.