Leadership Development

“Leadership is more and more a distributed phenomenon that lives in the in-between of human interaction. Much like a rhizom or the network of mycorhizza fungi in a forest connect the single trees to a coherent whole.”

The context for leadership today includes dealing with global forces such as diversity, interdependence, and continuous change. To take advantage of these forces, leaders must build adaptive capacity. This requires ongoing practice with deep learning, personal growth, and developing new competencies.

We help cultivate these competencies by using innovative and integrative leadership development practices that foster generative impact for leaders, their team, their organizations, or the community.  We offer to coach and deliver training in the following domains:

• Leadership skill development on all levels
• Leadership effectiveness
• Communication & feedback
• Formal and informal decision-making processes
• Real-time decision-making support
• Complexity thinking and vertical development
• Teaching coaching practices (HR and Agile Coaches/ Scrum Masters)
• Team development
• Integrating reactive tendencies in relational workplace development
• Insight training and innovation for teams

The developmental approach

We work with developmental models and find them helpful in many ways, especially when working with leadership development. We draw on models from different researchers, such as Susanne Cook-Greuter (ego/self-development), Bill Torbert (action logics), Robert Kegan (orders of consciousness and immunity to change), or Theo Dawson and her team (Lectica/LDMA). We use science-based practical top diagnostic and formative assessments to support optimal and robust learning and development.

(Lectica.org, published in Theodawson.net) 

However, our focus is not on “developing people” and teaching people to think at “higher levels”, but on providing solid ground for growth as an emergent outcome. “Higher levels of performance emerge when knowledge is adequately elaborated and the environment supports higher levels of thinking and performance. We focus on helping people to think better at their current level and challenging them to elaborate on their current knowledge and skills”  (Theo Dawson).

We support leaders and teams, through capacity building of fundamental skills, like the ability to feel, the ability to direct one’s attention, to dis-identify from previously held viewpoints and identities, and the ability to integrate projections and shadow material. This work is directed inwards, bottom-wards, lateral, around, but not necessarily “up”. In this sense, vertical development, just as happiness, can be a peculiar by-product and result of this kind of work. Often we have found that an over-emphasis on vertical development as “growth” is often both counter-productive and partial. This is why we hold “developmental logic” lightly.

At the deeper end

“An organization can’t outperform its leaders”

Our approach to enabling leaders and teams at any level to gain awareness around their personal patterns and the ability to shift away from un-reflected blind spots or unwanted reactive tendencies proves a key for leadership effectiveness.

This work spreads to organizational development and systemic change work.  We work with our clients to enable them to work in and with human systems and manage complexity and uncertainty. We work building capacities that enable them to participate fully and authentically in value creation and organizational life with emergent outcomes and behaviours. We also work with approaches that engage employees and staff members of entire teams, departments, companies, or communities.