Introducing The GRACE Framework™️
The Regenerative Leader's Toolkit: Essential Skills and Strategies
The GRACE Framework™️ helps individuals and teams work together better to avoid the significant costs of misalignment, miscommunication and conflict.
At The Elevate Partnership, we use the GRACE Framework™️ as a catalyst to support game-changers to become comfortable in the skin that is uniquely theirs and to act with equanimity, courage and conviction.
We made the case for the need for the GRACE Framework™️ in this post.
The GRACE Framework™️ lies at the core of our leader and team development work and works in concert with many of the tools we use, such as the Leadership Circle Profile, Marshall Goldsmith’s Stakeholder Centred Coaching, Co-Resolve and Rethinkly.
We believe that the act of grace creates something unique: a quiet space for people to be seen and truly heard, a space where unbridled creativity, freedom and choice naturally emerge.
The GRACE Framework™️ teaches your people how to work together better with emotional balance and to stop the profit erosion caused by misalignment, miscommunication and conflict within the team.
This article provides an initial overview of the framework. The acronym GRACE will be broken down into component parts over the next five posts.
The New Emotional Quotient (EQ)
In 2024, more voters will participate in elections worldwide than at any other time in history. It is estimated that around 49 per cent of people on the planet will vote.
How will you feel if a person with a different ideology and viewpoint from your own is elected?
What if that person challenges your system of values to its core? Will you be able to act in a manner of compassionate goodheartedness toward them once the results have been verified and declared?
It can, in some contexts, be a very tough ask.
The temperament of fear and anger in our organisations, institutions, and media has led us to believe that much-needed change is unlikely to materialise. Today, our clarity of thinking, courage, and civility are being tested like never before.
There are many scenarios in our working and wider lives that, if we choose them, fray our nerves, trigger our reactive tendencies and test our courage and civility to their current limits. For example:
The boss demands a return to the office and requires you to relocate within a commutable distance.
The outstanding invoice remains unpaid due to in-house processes designed to maximise cash flow for the business
The recruiter doesn’t respond promptly (or at all) to your application that you worked hard to put together
The co-worker who behaves in ways - from the trivial to the not-so-trivial - that rub you up the wrong way
The ‘elephant in the room’ that everyone knows is there continues to be ignored, causing unnecessary tension that induces a loss of focus and goodwill
The person in a position of responsibility who proves themselves to be human through words and behaviour that does more harm than good
The organisation you admired and thought you could trust turns out to be flawed
The driver who cuts you up at the exit on the highway, causing you to brake hard
…the list of potential triggers goes on…
While emotional intelligence is consistently cited as THE must-have skill for those in leadership roles, how to create our emotional quotient (EQ) - to select a mature response - is missing from leadership literature, education, and practice.
The GRACE Framework® provides a path to practise developing a new EQ, one suited to creating a more compassionate and more human, productive workplace.
The GRACE Framework™️ offers a pragmatic, whole-person, context-driven approach to enable leaders and teams to embrace the much-talked-about gap between a stimulus and a response1.
It helps individuals contemplate how to develop the quality of their ability to think. Our thinking is an ongoing top-down and a bottom-up process.
GRACE speaks to our ‘inner operating system’,2, which determines the quality of our relationship with ourselves and works towards minimising and potentially eliminating the things that tend to get in the way of our operating to our full potential.
Its value stems from its ability to reveal the inner workings that drive our actions, and it enables insights that lead to a greater range of behaviour choices, so we become ourselves rather than act in ways others think we should.
“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It’s precisely that simple, and it’s also that difficult,” said Warren Bennis. Widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of leadership studies, Bennis was a University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and Founding Chairman of The Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California.
The GRACE Framework™️ encourages us to make a more conscious choice to learn how to have a better relationship with ourselves – more self-acceptance, self-compassion, and self-belief - and, in doing so, prepare the ground for a better relationship with others.
The GRACE Framework™️ offers a practical path to regenerative practices that create a step change in how individuals and teams work together better.
Design Principles
The GRACE Framework™️ design is based on the following principles. It is:
✅ non-directive in its approach and focused on helping clients connect with their own agency and creativity to experience generative change and personal growth.
✅ contemporary in that it develops and adapts to the process of each client in a given context in real-time, whether they are an individual or a collective
✅ accepting the fact that nothing is static but is in a constant process of change
✅ oriented to meet people individually and collectively where they are with their current and most pressing needs and without judgement
✅ informed by an eclectic mix of interdisciplinary insights, evidence and practices from both Western and Eastern science, thinking and traditions
✅ acknowledges that theory and practice move on over time. Today’s good practice may be superseded tomorrow by new insights and better ways of doing things
✅ is complementary to data-informed, conversation-led and outcome-focused approaches to professional and personal development
✅ is secular and apolitical in its design and application
Amazing GRACE
Former Head Coach of the NCAA championship-winning UCLA gymnastics team, Valorie Kondos Field, encapsulates Grace's essence in a helpful blog post on her website. She writes:
“Grace is illusive. One can’t buy it. One can’t acquire it through good deeds or random acts of kindness. One can’t earn it. And almost like magic you can’t use Grace as a chip to bargain with or it will disappear.
Grace is not easily explained but soulfully understood. It’s like a magnet that snaps with a powerful hold when an overwhelming positive comes into contact with a strong negative force.”
Grace wears many faces. We know it when we see it. It is everywhere, and it’s accessible to all of us at both an individual and collective level.
Over the next five posts, one a day, next week in A Week of GRACE, we will consider each of the five components of the GRACE Framework™️ and how these can guide us in our personal and collective leadership practice.
If you want to learn more about our work, email us at hello@theelevatepartnership.com for an initial conversation.