A possible scenario:

Through affiliation or providence, we may enter a conversation.

If your current interest and needs guide you into further exploring the possibilities of a coaching engagement, we may proceed to inquire into

what your goals are, personally, professionally, and socially,

what you may need in light of your goals,

what may benefit you in your current situation and context, and

if there is a fit between my ways and your ways of being.

To gain the most benefit from the coaching program, you must be a willing participant, open to change, and take action.

If you commit to a coaching program, you will receive a Welcome Message with a link to an Onboarding Resource List, which contains links to a series of documents to prepare you for the journey ahead.

If you are interested in developing your positive capacities, you might consider engaging in a self-study to learn and practice the foundational ideas of positive psychology. Click here to take you to the navigation for the self-study course.

My Approach to Developmental Coaching in the Workplace

What do we work on in our coaching?

A general approach is to start with a business issue that appears to be a problem or a potential growth area.

Through inquiry, practices, and fieldwork, what reveals itself will guide steps and plans to improve and develop relevant skills, acquire new knowledge, and change behaviors.

Three Aspects of Your Business

One way to approach a change effort or any intervention would be to look at the enterprise from three interconnected perspectives;

the business,

the organization,

the leadership.

Broadly defined, these map onto the four quadrants of the integral model as

individual external and collective external (UR & LR),

collective internal and collective external (LL & LR),

individual internal and collective internal (UL & LL).

All these are interconnected, such that an initiative in one area or aspect impacts each and all aspects, as well as is influenced by processes of each and all other aspects.

The outcome you want is an integrated system where;

task achievement furthers business goals,

all tasks are aligned with the strategic intent,

tasks do not contradict goals and objectives in other departments and groups,

and achievements in one area do not diminish results in other areas.

Direction, Alignment, and Commitment are achieved through dialogue, team learning, visioning, and systems thinking.

The Outcome you look for in your Business is a good fit with your customers, a reasonably well-managed and predictable sales cycle, and financial wellbeing.

The Outcome you look for in your Organization is a good fit of role complexity and employee accountability; for this, you need to know how to define and measure complexity and accountability; Assessments are available.

The Outcome you look for in your Leadership is a well-formed leadership pipeline, a leader pool with potential and talent, well-defined pathways connecting growth assignments and learning experiences to strategic capability development, matching experiences to learning, development, skill, competence, and mastery needs.

To operationalize the model, you put what you know into action, following a map, such as the “be – know – do” map.

In dialogue – we meet

I see dialogue as the essence of a reflective learning process. I ask you to enter the dialogue space with the intention to stay open and the readiness to learn and grow.

You may have had an encounter where you felt a full appreciation of one another as unique, genuine beings, the experience of a true turning to one another. Dialogue is the place for such encounters.

Our meeting in dialogue provides the medium of transformation where new thinking can emerge; thinking with awareness of process and relationship in context leading to transformations; thinking that is adaptive and complex enough (with requisite complexity concerning the issue at hand) to take current knowledge and maps of reality as base concepts to build on creatively for the sustainable pursuit of goals and ends, and sustainable use of means.

Dialogue is the space wherein we give birth to our selves, the self of yesterday, making of history, of what was, giving meaning to and making meaning of the past; the sense of self in presence, creating intimacy with the world, bringing our whole to the encounter; the birth of new or future self whose time has come to take over the newly acquired meaning-making and sense-making tools to create reality and deal with greater issues more completely and more capable.

A platform to practice a new attitude and a new way of being in relationship, a discovery of how you think, what you want, and how you relate in grace. Learning in this space becomes a natural process that you can hopefully carry over to your daily encounters.

In our dialogue sessions, you develop the sensibility to pay attention to the flow of meaning in interactions and everyday situations where antagonism, opposition, critique, and hidden motives may prevail in relationships.

The learning you create will deepen your observational powers to notice the source and emergence of thoughts, giving you power and influence to shape how you think and, in extension, to shape what you can think of and make sense of in new and creative ways.

Dialogic Process Consulting

Our dialogic process consulting takes three perspectives concerning the client’s presenting problem.

The social-emotional development perspective comes to focus in the client’s quest of “what should I do and for whom”;

The cognitive development perspective bears on the client’s question of “what can I do, what are my options, and what can I know”;

The psychological, behavioral perspective is concerned with the expressed needs, values, and aspirations presenting at this moment in this environment as the quest of “how am I doing” which is a performance view in contrast to the other views which are developmental.

Who I Work With

I work with business managers who want to grow or scale their Stratum III business, function, or department and who have issues or challenges with integration. They have successfully systematized Stratum II work processes and standardized Stratum I work tasks.

Integration is the aim of Stratum III Work;

Systematization is the aim of Stratum II Work;

Standardization is the aim of Stratum I Work.

The first three strata are the operational layers.

The mandate for a manager of managers to integrate their domains of responsibility is a stratum III task, with the central process being commitment.

At stratum IV, the main duty or mandate would be strategic implementation and alignment, with organizing and assigning accountabilities as the central process.

At stratum V, strategic intent, which flows from vision, purpose, values, and principles, is the mandate requiring setting direction, setting up communication channels, and designing organization, role, and task requirements.

Beyond stratum V, i.e., stratum VI, VII, and VIII, the mission is the center of attention; questions of who are we, why are we here, what do we stand for, what kind of society do we want to create, and foster; what are our beliefs of the human, of the world, of life; what is meaningful and desirable, what should the future look like; the main process would be creating culture, infusing culture with values, philosophy, doctrine, ideology.

Vertical Development of Coach and Client

Vertical development entails two aspects:

one is to manifest potential capabilities available at present, and

the other is to facilitate emergent capabilities to form, build up, and show up.

Both aspects are related to the individual human operating system embedded in the organization context.

The coming together is the medium where the process unfolds; the coming together in dialogue to explore with courage and commitment to a psychologically safe space, bringing our beliefs, assumptions, hopes, dreams, and fears to the open.

My work supports your thinking process; in our coaching and consulting, we mainly work on thought.

The work on objective reality (doing the change work) is the concern of the client (you); our concern (as coach and in the coaching) is the thinking of the client.

You may ask: how can you help me with my thinking? Doesn’t that imply you should be a better thinker than I am?

Thinking is about epistemic stance and using thinking tools, which we call Thought Forms. The helper can support a client only up to the point or place they themselves would be able to navigate, i.e., their own level of development.

This poses a demand on the developmental level of the helper.

Developmental coaching is as developmental for the coach as it is for the client.

Challenges of Managerial Leadership

I aspire to work with managers engaged in multiyear transformation projects who are struggling with the complexity of the task and are overwhelmed trying to make sense of the complexities.

The struggle with the human side of such a project can create confusion about the meaning of it all.

Sometimes people start to question the purpose of their work and the demands put in front of them. Without a say in shaping or creating the vision, one can easily disengage from the work and become alienated from the workplace and the people around.

All these demands of the new world have an impact on our identity and our sense of self.

Stepping up and creating some clarity, taking an active part in shaping our identity, attending to our sense of self, and creating some order out of chaos all require creating resources suitable for the issue at hand and using them optimally.

How do we develop the creative capacity in the organization to meet the challenge of reinventing the business as the market shifts and moves regularly?

My Client at Stratum III

My client could be VP of Production and Engineering of a manufacturing, engineering, or construction company;

they manage a team of design, production, and service engineers (at stratum II);

they are trying to manage the needs of the boss, their peers, and their direct reports;

& the needs of the market, and customers;

concerned with competitors, price pressure, cost reduction, and quality of output;

& also the quality of living standards and wellbeing of employees;

being pressured into using ever more off-the-shelf solutions that are cheap and ready-made in place of “in-house design and develop” solutions that demand intellectual capital.

Expected to

innovate, lead the next great product creation team;

capture value created from growth, generate demand, improve customer experience, find loyal customers;

be tech-savvy, data-driven;

adapt to shifting market rules while wondering how to keep pace with increasing workloads;

wanting to create opportunities to influence strategy, and make the leap from managing the next crisis, solving the next problem to leading to vision and developing with insight and discernment;

align with strategy and give clear messages about the priorities of the company and prospects;

thinking, decision making, relating and communicating.

You might be looking for support to deal effectively with complex challenges, manage complex systems change, create buy-in for a new project, get group members to assume responsibility, or be frustrated with engagement levels in staff meetings.

You might be looking for strategies to help with these issues

Members of your team are reluctant to accept accountability;

You want to empower your team members, but they put up unrealistic demands;

You endorse or espouse the idea of participatory decision making but have not been able to create the right atmosphere or setting in which people are encouraged to express their ideas freely;

You want team members to take on new tasks or assignments but are not sure how to encourage them to buy in and commit fully;

A culture shift initiative does aim for participative processes and you are not sure or are uneasy about major shifts in power arrangements this will put in motion;

You believe the wisdom and knowledge inherent in your team members are deep and valuable but don’t have the ways to evoke that wisdom;

Bring diverse perspectives together in a cross-functional environment but encounter resistance to open dialogue and sharing;

Dissolve boundaries and facilitate dialogue among multiple stakeholders but encounter challenges from the first move;

You have studied models for bringing about lasting system change and are now faced with the need for a change of your self-system before you can hope for a change in the world system to succeed.

In short, you have leadership dilemmas intersecting with your strategic and tactical agenda.

My Work – An ongoing exploration

As an independent professional, my work activities and present moment attention reside in one of three plus one broad areas:

Prospecting,

Serving,

Administering.

The plus one is the theorizing about these three.

My service is a holistic development program consisting of multifaceted, multilayered processes unfolding in four phases over a multi-year time span.

What does the program contribute to your life?

You may aspire to

lead the organization or other environment to a more compassionate place conducive to human flourishing;

move toward more harmony and balance in your endeavors;

reduce the stress created by all the unknowns of the world;

have a more accepting stance toward ambiguity and uncertainty;

learn ways to connect in deeper ways with important people in your life;

(you can expand the list if you wish, use the four quadrants of AQAL to get a complete picture).

What does development contribute to life? What is the promise? What am I committed to?