Everything You Need to Know About the Bloom Approach to Leadership

Leadership

May 10

If you’ve read my work before, you know that my passion is to create opportunities for women with a focus on diversity and inclusion on the executive floor. You may also know, that while this is my primary focus, I also strive to open lines of communication to improve things for both men and women at all levels.

All of this is centered around the Bloom Development Approach.

The Bloom Development Approach aims to abolish the myth that there is a solid line between work and life outside of the office. Let’s face it, a bad day at work carries over into your evening at home. A bad day at home can impact your work. Your goals, dreams, and values all overlap with your professional and personal life. So why would we focus on just professional development when trying to develop our leadership? Doing so causes us to miss the bigger picture.

The Bloom Development Approach

The Bloom Development Approach looks at the six aspects of a person’s existence and addresses the fact that true personal satisfaction stems from having congruence in each area. The six areas of the Bloom Development Approach are:

Emotional Intelligence – How you understand yourself and others; it’s everything that you’ve experienced in life that gives you better perspective or experience. It’s also the effort you make to guarantee you understand other people and where they’re coming from. Remember, it’s important to understand before you are understood.
Physical – Simply put, it’s your health, wellness, physical fitness, food practices and emotional well-being. It’s how you fuel your body and mind.
Spiritual – Whether you realize it or not, you’re on a spiritual quest. Your quest may have to do with your faith community, like your church. Alternatively, it could be learning to listen to your breathing through meditation, music, or words of inspiration. It’s ultimately about connecting with a higher power.
Social/Fun/Lifestyle – Social has three focuses: fun, relationships, and giving back. Relationships pertain to how we interact with colleagues, friends, and family members. It's how we build connections with each other, communicate, and grow together. Fun/lifestyle is how we give to ourselves with time with others and ourselves. Giving back is about how we contribute and pay our success forward. It’s our opportunity to have a social impact and help our community flourish.
Psychological/Love – Your relationship with yourself and your self-perceptions. It’s not what you post on Facebook or Instagram about your life, but it is about you being truly happy with who you are when you look in the mirror. This also touches on the love you have or looking to have or develop further with your partner.
Professional/Money/Finances – This is your career, your education, and your goals. It’s everything you’re doing to define and pursue YOUR success. This area also touches how you view money and your finances and how they align with your goals.

Many times, someone will excel in certain areas while others fall behind and need development. Other times people feel like they are failing in all areas, and need an overhaul. While our ability to excel in each area may fluctuate due to external factors, the goal is to achieve balance between all for optimum personal satisfaction and joy.

Audits and Assessments

Before you can give your leaders direction, you need to know where they are currently and where they want to go. You may discover that some people in your business don’t know where they want to go. This speaks to a deeper issue of being completely out of congruence with their authentic self.

Have your people list the six areas, and brainstorm what they do well and what needs work in each area. From there, they should be able to set goals surrounding the areas that need work while defining bright spots that become a point of positive focus. Don’t forget to do the work yourself as well!

My specialty is creating the framework for action plans surrounding development of the whole person, as well as within a business to accommodate this forward-thinking approach and improve their communication, organizational culture, and bottom line.

The Bloom Development leverages scientific methodology to provide clarity around values and create alignment with goals. It helps identify strong points in your current existence and highlight gaps that need further work. As your self-awareness increases, so will your passion and fulfillment which allows you to be more effective in all elements of your life.

Are you ready? Let’s get started.