Supercharging your leadership forums

by Renewal Associates

Supercharging your leadership forums.

Just recently I was meeting with a senior leader in Organizational Development in a very successful American led global organization.  He was telling me how they had introduced Director forums for the 75 directors in his region, who were the vital engine room of their business. They were well attended, and they were led and organized by the directors themselves and he was keen to explore how they could get more value from these events given employment costs of tying up 70 plus leaders for a couple of hours as well as the opportunity cost for the business.

I shared with him some of our top advice based on over 40 years of helping organizations make their leadership meetings and conferences and town hall meetings more impactful and value creating.

  1. From Topics to Current Challenges

The senior leader shared how the directors chose the topics and agenda items for the next forum.  I suggested he changed the language and instead of discussing possible topics, he asked the working group of directors, what were the top collective challenges that this group could collectively impact.

  1. Focus on challenges that can be only dealt with by this group of people.

We then explored what were the challenges that this collection of middle leaders were best placed to address, rather than waiting for senior leaders to decide, or dealing with them in their separate silos. Most of these were challenges concerning horizontal partnering and learning across the business.  Barry Oshry points out that the top leaders need to focus on the external and the future, while the middle leaders take responsibility for joining up and integrating the organization.  We teach how this middle cadre of leaders are key to creating a team of teams that is more than the sum of its parts (Hawkins and Carr forthcoming).

  1. Facilitate real time strategizing

A good leadership forum should engage all the brains and creativity in the room, and the best way to do this is to focus on real collective challenges for the organization that require new collaborative thinking.  Senior leadership need to articulate why these challenges are important for the future of the organization and ask for help from everybody in finding a new original response.

  1. From breakouts as discussions groups to task groups with well-defined outcomes.

It can be useful to split a large leadership forum into small working groups, but it is important that each group is not just given a topic to explore but is commissioned with a clear outcome that they are asked to bring back to the main plenary.

  1. Ensure all breakout groups have a well briefed facilitator

Each workgroup needs an appointed facilitator with clear process guidelines.  Their job is to:

  1. Reiterate the outcome the group need to achieve
  2. Get everyone’s voice into the room within the first 3-4 minutes
  3. Use techniques like brainstorming, collective build, people stepping into the shoes of different stakeholder groups, etc., to maximize creative thinking
  4. Manage time
  5. Return the group to core focus if they get stuck or wander off track.
  6. Ensure the group comes to a collective output which is summarized.

If necessary, they could delegate one or more of these roles.

  1. Ban reporting back from breakouts on their conversation

For many years I sat through large leadership gatherings where each small group would have one member feedback to the main plenary, and it became increasingly boring.  I called it ‘death by serial feedback!’  I changed the process, which now included all members standing and jointly presenting their output, in a way that was starting a new live engagement and dialogue with all the other small groups.  This included being clear about what they were asking other participants to commit to, in order to take this proposal into action.  This inter-group dialogue needs skillful facilitating to ensure the groups are co-creating better thinking and more energized commitment that the small groups did by themselves.

  1. End with commitments not vague intentions.

Agreement to a good idea is made with the cognitive brain, but real change is always embodied. If the change does not start in the room, it is very unlikely to happen when people are back at work, bombarded with e-mails, meetings and demands, and falling back into their past engrooved habits.

What does this look like in practice.

At a recent annual gathering of the top 120 leaders of a large global organization, we redesigned the format.  We said there would be no platform, podium or presentations! Instead, the large room was set up with 12 tables of ten leaders. Each table was facilitated by one member of the top team who has been given brief training and guidance on how to facilitate their table team. Each table was selected to have a maximum diversity of countries and roles.  In the middle of the circles of tables, was a large theatre in the round, for real-time interchange between groups and the whole gathering.

The 3 day gathering started with the song ‘Surfing USA’ (we were hosted in Huntingdon Beach California!).  The music got louder and louder till everyone had taken their seats, and then suddenly stopped and the room went dark.  Onto the screen came two important clients saying what they appreciated about the work of this organization, but also what they were going to need different from the organization over the next three years. This signaled that the conference was not going to be inward looking, but instead, starting ‘outside-in’ and ‘future-back’.

Many of the attendees were anxious as they had not been given the usual timetable agenda for the three days.  So, we followed the client presentations by telling them the agenda was:

Day One: discovering how the organization could double the beneficial value they created in the world, within the next three years.

Day Two: to collectively workout the roadmap to achieve the 2027 vision and outcome.

Day Three: to start the transformation process live in the room and create clear joint commitments across the organization before everyone returned to their own countries and functions.

Despite much pre-skepticism of how this would work, the event was extremely engaging and high energy from start to finish.  Transformation happened in the room, at personal, inter-personal, inter team and function levels.  It also created a lasting legacy of new ways of doing events both internally and externally.

 

If you are going to bring your best brains and key leaders together either virtually or in person, start by working out what the cost is to your organization, and how you are going to get a measurable high return on that investment. Once you have been through that exercise, I hope the above guidance and examples helps you design how to make this happen.

If you want to know more and explore this further, we help many organizations around the world; plan, design, and facilitate their major leadership and engagement events.

Contact us at www.renewalassociates.co.uk.

This material will also appear in our next book “Coaching the Team of Teams” by Peter Hawkins and Catherine Carr.  Kogan Page 2025

 

Peter Hawkins September 2024

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Renewal Associates with Coaching.com are leading the next global virtual training in Systemic Team Coaching® Certificate (Practitioner ), 9th October 2024 . 

Renewal Associates are also hosting the next in person Systemic Team Coaching ® Certificate (Practitioner) in Toronto in November 2024.

Along with Dr Catherine Carr, Peter Hawkins  is completing a new book called ‘Coaching the Team of Teams’ based on global research around the world.  This will be published in spring 2025 by Kogan Page.

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Beyond Psychological Safety to Collective Psychological and Relational Maturity

by Renewal Associates

Revisioning Psychological Safety: An Introduction

Kahn (1990: pp708) defined Psychological Safety as: “being able to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career.”
Since then, Professor Amy Edmondson (1999,2012,2013) has done important pioneering work to develop the concept of Psychological Safety and its importance in creating the right culture. Many times, Amy Edmondson has made it clear that psychological safety has to be combined with accountability and with our individual and collective responsibility to speak up, make our unique contribution to the team, and take leadership. To grow and develop we all need feedback, challenge and healthy conflict as well as experiences that, at the time, will take us out of our ‘comfort zone’ and feel risky.

We have also built on the important work of Dr Timothy Clark, who in 2020, outlined four stages of Psychological Safety: 

  1. Inclusion safety 
  2. Learner safety 
  3. Contributor safety 
  4. Challenger safety 

We recognise these development phases, but now believe that every stage needs the right mix of support and risk, care and challenge.  

Gradually, psychological safety has become popularised and generalised and has been understood by many to be a fixed state that every team must have. It has become too easy for team members not to take responsibility or speak up, by blaming others or the team or organization, for not making them psychologically safe. 

Like many terms in the lexicon of leadership and organizational development, the term ‘psychological safety’ began by usefully in pointing to an area that had not been attended to, but over time has in places become a generalised cliché, an unhelpful ideology and an artificial goal. (see Hawkins 2023: “Beyond High Performing Teams”) 

Psychological safety is neither a thing nor a goal.  There is no leadership act without psychological risk, for to speak up, and to state your truth and unique perspective, will mean that others will disagree with you, may criticize you, tell you that you are wrong.  

 Collective Psychological and Relational Maturity 

At Renewal Associates we now believe that we need to change from focussing on psychological safety in leadership teams to helping teams explore collective relational and psychological maturity.  If a team is experienced by the majority of its members as unsafe, the level of contribution and risk taking diminishes and the collective team fails to mature. However, if a team is experienced as too cosy and comfortable, then the amount of challenge and creative conflict diminishes and the team becomes a mutual admiration society, often projecting all negativity on to the external wider environment.  Once again, the team fails to mature. Real psychological and relational maturity come when support and challenge are not polar opposites, but a team has a culture of openness where support and challenge are mutually intertwined, and flow in all directions 

From our work with senior teams around the world and across many different sectors, we have discovered that the key factors that help teams to collectively psychologically mature are: 

  1. Encouraging full engagement from all team members,  
  2. Promoting active listening and the building on each other’s comments, 
  3. Developing the collective skill of generative dialogue and creative conflict, where different perspectives and proposals are welcomed and worked through, 
  4. Ensuring that the conflict does not become personally antagonistic, and work to find ways of drawing together the opposing views into a higher order alignment, 
  5. Having regular feedback, not just vertically from the team leader to team members, but also horizontal peer feedback between the members. 

Here are the 15 Steps we have discovered that teams go through from being dysfunctional to collectively psychologically and relationally mature, but not necessarily in the same order. Sometimes teams leap a couple of steps and sometimes go back and address earlier steps.  Even when all steps are accomplished, they need to be constantly maintained or the team when under pressure will slide back to less mature levels. 

The Fifteen Steps 

  1. Team members gossip and complain about the team and other team members outside of the meeting but avoid addressing issues in the meetings. 
  2. Team members are fearful of speaking up and contributing to team meetings. 
  3. Team meetings are ‘hub and spoke’ with conversations happening between the team leader and different team members. 
  4.  The meeting is dominated by a few powerful people that are actively engaged. 
  5.  All team members contribute to team meetings, but some much more than others. 
  6. Difficult issues are referred to obliquely in meetings rather than specifically and directly. 
  7.  Everyone receives 360 feedback from all team members. 
  8.  Feedback is given regularly and directly to all team members. 
  9. The team has a clear collective purpose which everyone recognises can only be achieved through collaboration.  
  10.  The team regularly reviews its dynamics and functioning and commits to new behaviours, protocols and processes 
  11.  The Team ensure that every team member contributes in the first 5-10 minutes of the meeting and welcomes every contribution. 
  12. Team members actively build on each other’s contributions. 
  13. The team regularly addresses collective challenges where no individual has the answer, but the team has ‘generative dialogue’ which generates new thinking between them, which no one had thought of prior to coming together. 
  14. There is healthy creative conflict in the team, which does not become personally antagonistic and in which the team collectively addresses how to connect the wider conflicting stakeholder needs.   
  15.  All team members and the team as a whole, is continually learning and developing, through a healthy mixture of supportive challenge and challenging support, in service of the team’s wider stakeholders. 

Conclusion 

It is important that in team and organizational development and coaching, we stop seeing psychological safety as ‘a goal to be arrived at’, but as one step on the maturational journey in developing the psychological and relational maturity that is needed to be a high value creating team, which I have defined as ‘a team that continually co-creates beneficial value with and for all it stakeholders’. (Hawkins 2021) 

Peter Hawkins  August 2024 

 

Bibliography 

Clark, T.R. (2020) 4 Stages of Psychological Safety New York: Berrett-Koehler Publishers 

Edmondson, A (1999) Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44 (2) 

Edmondson, A (2012) Teaming, 1st edition, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 

Edmondson, A. C. (2013) The Three Pillars of a Teaming Culture. https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-three-pillars-of-a-teaming-culture.  Accessed August 13th 2021 

Gawanda, A (2010) The Checklist Manifesto, Profile Books, London 

Hawkins, P. (2005) Wise Fool’s Guide to Leadership: Short spiritual stories for organisational and personal Transformation. London: O Books   

Hawkins, P. (2020) Beyond the High Performing Team.  Blog:  www:renewalassociates.co.uk.    

Hawkins, P. (2021). Leadership team coaching: developing collective transformational leadership. 4th edition. London: Kogan Page. 

Kahn, William A. (1990-12-01). “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work”. Academy of Management Journal. 33 (4): 692–724.  

———–

Renewal Associates with Coaching.com are leading the next global virtual training in Systemic Team Coaching® Certificate (Practitioner ), 9th October 2024 . 

Renewal Associates are also hosting the next in person Systemic Team Coaching ® Certificate (Practitioner) in Toronto in November 2024.

There is also free Practitioner Workshops on Systemic Team Coaching® on 9th September 2024 at 4:30pmUK/11:30amET, 10th September 2024 at 10:00amUK/5.00am ET, 10th September 3:30pmUK/10.30am ET. (registration details tba)

Along with Dr Catherine Carr, Peter Hawkins  is completing a new book called ‘Coaching the Team of Teams’ based on global research around the world.  This will be published in spring 2025 by Kogan Page.

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Exciting News! Systemic Team Coaching Website Launch

by Renewal Associates

 

 

🚀 Exciting News! 🚀

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new Systemic Team Coaching website, a hub that brings together all the fantastic work we are doing around the world, both in person and virtually 🌍✨

In partnership with Renewal Associates, the AoEC, and Coaching.com, we are committed to ensuring that everyone has access to learning how to work with this ground-breaking approach to coaching. The website offers a variety of programs and certifications designed to help coaches, leaders, and HR professionals develop their abilities to work with teams systemically.

🔍 Explore the innovative programs and certifications available at systemicteamcoaching.com and discover how you can take your coaching to the next level. This approach focuses on viewing the team as a whole, considering its systemic context and stakeholders, and applying models like the Five Disciplines.

Join us in transforming the way teams work together and achieve success. Let’s make a significant impact together! 💪🌟


Transformative Learning: A Journey into Systemic Team Coaching® Supervision

by Renewal Associates

 

In 2021, Peter Hawkins and I launched the Systemic Team Coaching® Supervision Training Program (STC® STP), aiming to provide a transformative learning experience. The program featured Peter’s renowned 10-eyed model, a favourite among supervisors worldwide. To our delight, participants found that the training not only enhanced their systemic team coaching skills but also completed their systemic team coaching training or supervision training in unexpected ways. They elevated their practice and became more reflective and systemic practitioners. 

Many participants went on to pursue full supervision training programs and became Core Faculty in our Global Team Coaching Programs. This unique niche of combining Systemic Team Coaching® experience with supervision training has proven invaluable both in leading trainings and in coaching practice. 

Recently, I had the pleasure of supervising a pair of team coaches who had completed the STC® STP. It was encouraging to see them grasp parallel process, understanding how their dyad’s dynamics mirrored those of the team and organization. The next step for each of them to consciously ‘hold the whole’ system even when they coached different parts. Another takeaway was their surprise at discovering how they could step out of their comfort zones while remaining authentic—being bold yet encouraging, directive in one moment and supportive in another. John Heron’s styles introduced them to a new way of working, allowing for a fuller range of emotional expression in both directive and non-directive approaches. It’s akin to using the entire piano keyboard rather than just the 12 key octave you see in front of you.  

For those not familiar with John Heron’s styles, here they are: 

  1. Prescriptive: This style involves giving specific advice or instructions
  2. Informative: Providing information and facts to the coachee
  3. Confronting: Challenging the coachee’s assumptions or beliefs
  4. Cathartic: Allowing the coachee to express emotions or feelings
  5. Catalytic: Encouraging the coachee to explore new perspectives or ideas
  6. Supportive: Providing emotional support and encouragement.

 

Heron’s model underscores that we need to bring the fullness of who we are to support the full potential of who the team can be.  

A couple of questions for consideration: 

  • How do you match for rapport and mismatch for change, at the right moment, with the right skill?  
  • Are there any styles that you find challenging to utilize, or do you prefer certain styles over others? 

Our Systemic Team Coaching® Supervision Training Program has not only enhanced participants’ supervision skills but has also transformed their approach to team coaching. It’s gratifying to see our graduates apply their learnings in diverse settings, becoming more reflective, systemic, confident, and fully capable in their practice.  

 

Dr Catherine Carr, June 2024

 


Supervising Systemic Team Coaching

by Renewal Associates

In chapter 16 of the 4th edition of my book “Leadership Team Coaching Developing collective transformational leadership.” (Kogan Page 2021), I write about the need for more trained Systemic Team Coaching Supervisors.  This year Dr Catherine Carr and myself, supported by a global faculty, are leading a training for those who want to increase their coaching supervision skills to be able to supervise Systemic Team Coaching.  To book on this course click here.  

 

“Effective team coaching requires someone who can maintain the difficult boundary position of working closely with the team while remaining relatively independent of the team dynamics and culture, and who can be aware of the systemic dynamics both within the team and between the team and the wider systemic levels that the team is nested within. To be able to sense and make sense of these complex system dynamics is almost impossible if one is working alone, but it becomes possible with good quality supervision. 

What is supervision? 

“Supervision is a joint endeavour in which a practitioner, with the help of a 

supervisor, attends to their clients, themselves, as part of their client–practitioner relationships, and the wider systemic context, and by so doing improves the quality of their work, transforms their client relationships, continuously develops themselves, their practice and the wider profession.” (Hawkins and Smith, 2013: 169) 

Coaching supervision has three elements: 

  • qualitative: providing an external perspective to ensure quality of practice; 
  • developmental: mentoring the coach on their development in the profession; 
  • resourcing: coaching the coach on their coaching practice and work life 

to ensure they are adequately resourcing themselves  

(Hawkins and Smith, 2013: 173–74). 

 

Coaching and mentoring have been areas of enormous growth in the last 20 years (Jarvis, 2004; Berglas, 2002; Hawkins and Turner, 2017; Hawkins et al, 2019). Despite this, coaching supervision was noticeable by its absence in the first 20 years of this new profession. In the early part of the 21st century very few coaches were receiving supervision (Hawkins and Schwenk, 2006), and those who did so were going to supervisors trained in psychotherapy or counselling. It was not until 2003 that the first specific training was offered for coaching supervisors and 2006 that the first research was published (Hawkins and Schwenk, 2006) and the first book specifically on coaching supervision was published (Hawkins and Smith, 2006). 

In the years since the research, we have seen a significant growth in the practice of coaching supervision (see Hawkins and Turner, 2017; Hawkins and Turner, 2020). All the major professional coaching bodies now recommend supervision as an essential aspect of continuing professional practice and development, and more companies are now requiring supervision for all their internal and external coaches. There has also been growth in the amount of training for coaching supervisors; the UK has led in this field, and such training is now being seen in other countries. However, the growth in specific supervision for team coaching and training for supervisors in this area is still lagging behind, although it is beginning to be available in one or two places. 

Supervision is even more essential for team coaching than it is for individual coaching, as it is nigh on impossible for a coach to be aware of the many levels of the team dynamic as well as the wider systemic context of the team. Additionally, the team coach has often been brought in by the team leader or a sub-section of the team, and may struggle to be accepted by the whole team and the team sponsors in the wider system as someone who can be trusted to work in the interests of the greater whole. For the coach to build and maintain a working alliance with the whole team and in service of all the stakeholders requires constant vigilance. Often, I have found that one can be doing perfectly adequate team coaching but be undone as a coach by unseen team and organizational politics outside of the sessions one is attending. 

I have written elsewhere (Hawkins, 2008, 2010, 2011b, 2011c; Hawkins and Smith, 2006, 2013) of the potential dangers of coaches going to psychologists or psychotherapists for supervision and how this can accentuate the danger of the coaching over-focusing on the individual client and underserving the organizational client. There is now a new challenge, which is that those who are practising team coaching are going for supervision to coach supervisors who are individually oriented, and this accentuates the danger of the coaching over-focusing on the personal and interpersonal dynamics of the team and under-serving the collective aspects of the team in its systemic context. 

There is a shortage of skilled supervisors who are trained not only in coaching and coaching supervision but also in systemic team coaching and the supervision of team coaches. 


Working from Source

by Renewal Associates

Working from Source
By Peter Hawkins, March 2024

In October my new book “Beauty in Leadership and Coaching: and the Transformation of Human Consciousness” will be published by Routledge. In the final chapter I write about how we can work from ‘Source’ rather than from effort.  This will be once again one of the key themes and practices we will address on the Advanced Retreats I run each summer at Barrow Castle, on the outskirts of Bath, surrounded by gardens, woodlands and hills. To book for these click here.

Here is a passage from the final chapter of the book.

We need to learn how to live and work from source, rather than from effort and goal driven will.  On the advanced retreats I run each summer, we carryout collaborative inquiries into the different experiential phenomena of working from effort and working from source.  In pairs I ask one of the pair to adopt the position they are in when working from effort, and for two minutes, to report out to their partner:  “when I work from effort I……..” and to keep discovering new aspects of how this shows up within them.

When both partners have done this, we then invite them to find the physical bodily state they occupy when they work from source, and this time to continually repeat and complete the sentence: “When I work from source I…..”.  I have found that everyone who has taken part has a deep-felt sense of the difference between these two states and knows them from the inside.  Only when these have been deeply accessed, do the pair go on to explore how they can let go of ‘efforting’ and let source flow through their lives more fully.  

I have discovered that when I am working from source, I can work a week of long hours and end the week with more energy than I started it.  It is as if I am using renewable energy, rather than burning up stored fuel.  I am in-tune with my bio-rhythms, rather than working to the clock-time of forced labour.  Since the Industrial Revolution we have created this life versus work split, where we have to use the short time away from work to replenish all the spent energy from being a ‘wage-slave’ throughout the working week.  Even the concepts of ‘work – life balance’, has built into it the notions of work as draining energy and non-work life as replenishing it.

In the chapter on Grace we explored the whole notion of flow. How we can be in flow in our self, our head, heart, and body; our thoughts, feelings and actions.  How we can be in flow with others in our teams and families, our organizations and communities.  How we can be in flow with our work, our art and our craft, and the wider human and more-than-human world, with which we are inextricably entwined.

We are born out of Beauty, sustained by Beauty.  When we awake and become the beauty we love, we return home, to the home we have never left. 

 


How can you lead, support and coach High-value creating teams?

by Renewal Associates

How can you lead, support and coach High-value creating teams?

Dr. Catherine Carr, MCEC, PCC, RCC and I are very excited to launch our new program, that takes more than twenty years of work developing Systemic Team Coaching around the world and translates it into an on-line program not only for coaches, but for team leaders, HR business partners, consultants and everyone who needs to develop effective teamwork directly as a team leader/member or indirectly through those they coach.
This can be the beginning of the journey to become a professional Systemic Team Coach; or it can be a stand alone training to help you coach individual team leaders and team members, or make a difference to the teams you lead or as a team member.
Supported by a great global faculty from right around the world including
Sue Coyne PCC, Inge Simons, MCC, Pau Lim, Michael Cooper, Ingela Camba Ludlow, Fenneke Tjallingii-Brocken, MSc., PCC, CPCC, Monica Callon, Jonathan Sibley, Axel Klimek, Bob Gibbon, Christophe Mikolajczak, Daiana Stoicescu, Coach Trainer, MCC by ICF 🚀, Dirk Nieuwoudt, Dumi Magadlela PhD PCC, Harriet Dodd PCC, Julie Stockton, Karen Yanqun Wu, Kathryn Adams, Lesley Garrick, Lilia Dicu, Lucy Shenouda MCC, ACTC, ESIA, Michael Cooper, Nathalie Lerotić Pavlik MSc, GMBPsS, Pamela Maguire, Susan Douglas, Ph.D., ACTC, PCC, ESIA, Tjessica Stegenga 🌎 and many others

Join us for a FREE 90 minute Masterclass when we launch our new program!

Programs running on 5 dates between 26th February and 11th March

Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to learn from the best! Secure your free seat here: https://www.coaching.com/team-development/


Please share this post with your fellow leaders, coaches and mentors who want to unlock the power of high-value creating teams


13 NEW CHRISTMAS CRACKERS FOR SYSTEMIC TEAM COACHES

by Renewal Associates

Introduction

This is the seventh year that I am sending out a range of Systemic Team Coaching Christmas Crackers to the wide and growing global community of team coaches around the world.  Each year I take one-line aphorisms that I have found myself using on my various trainings and make a short collection.  Like mottos and jokes in Christmas Crackers, they are there to both amuse and help us see the world differently.  I hope you enjoy them.  Previous years aphorisms are published in the 4th Edition of “Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership” (2021) published by Kogan Page.

  1. We need to coach the connections, not the person
    For coaching to move beyond very expensive personal development for the already highly privileged, we need to coach the connections: the connections between the leader and their team; between the team and the team of teams; between the organization and all the stakeholders; between the various functions and between the organizational issues.
  2. Turn blame into need and complaint into request
    The biggest loss of energy and time in team meetings comes from spending time on polluting BMWs. This stands for Blame, Moan and Whine. We can make a big difference by turning every blame or complaint about the present or past into a clear request about the future.  See also my blog on “Grumble to gratitude”.

  3. Discover the extra team member beyond the persons in the room; she is called synergy
    Many teams tell me how pressured and over-worked they are. To one leadership team of 6 who expressed this, I said, ‘You are not making use of the 7th member of the team.’ They asked who the seventh member was.  I said, “she is called synergy.”

  4. Team coaching requires a team of team coaches
    To work systemically it is often more effective to co-coach a team, with two systemic team coaches.  In that case, it is essential for the co-coaches to turn up as a team, one that is more than the sum of its parts and not as a relay-race.

  5. The team is not your client but your team coaching partner
    When team coaching, the team is our coaching partner, and the client is all their stakeholders that the team serves and co-creates value for.

  6. An effective team takes responsibility for each other’s performance, learning and well-being
    I learnt this from my colleague David Clutterbuck, which I think captures very well the movement from individual accountability to collective mutual accountability.

  7. Is your inner team more than the sum of its parts?
    I wrote a blog on this earlier in the year. We all play many roles in life and how we work as a team makes a big difference to both the quality of our lives and the positive difference we can make in the world.  Do your internal team members collaborate or compete with each other? Is your inner team more than the sum of it’s parts 

  8. A purpose without a plan is a dream
    We discover our purpose by discovering what we can uniquely do that our stakeholder’s world of tomorrow needs, if we do not turn this purpose into a plan, it remains a dream, and we are surrounded by unmet needs.

  9. When we are in the spotlight, only the ones behind us can see our shadow
    Carl Jung said that the greater the light, the darker the shadow. This is particularly true for nearly all strong and charismatic leaders.  We all need help from those who are behind us and in our shadow: our team members, followers, our children and our partners.

  10. When the rubber hits the road, the road nearly always wins
    Reality is stronger than the best developed strategies and plans of any individual or group.  As one of my teachers said, “Those who do battle with the reality of what is, never win.” So, we need to welcome reality as our teacher and partner.

  11. To work from source is to realise that the source is not only inside you nor only outside you.
    When our work is in flow and we are working from source, we are not doing the work by ourselves, but in partnership with the world beyond us when the inner and outer merge.

  12. We are not our emotions but the space in which they happen
    The more we can witness our own emotions without identifying with them, the greater our ability to witness the emotions of others with compassionate empathy, without becoming collusive or reactive.

  13. “Beauty is love made sensate.”
    Let me end with this wonderful quote from my friend and teacher Elias Amidon, as it captures in five words much of what I am writing about in my book which is to be published by Routledge in 2024: “Beauty in Leadership and Coaching: and the transformation of human consciousness.”

Happy Christmas, Hanukah, Solstice, Dōngzhì Festival, Yuletide, Saturnalia, or December holidays to all my friends, colleagues, and Blog followers everywhere.

There will be a new program with www.coaching.com.  called Team Development Essentials and Practitioner program in 2024.

I will also be running a number of Systemic Team Coaching® Practitioner Certificate 3-day intensives in 2024.
Houston, Texas, USA January 22-24  
Singapore, March 13-15
Paris, France, April 24-26
Milan, Italy, May 15-17
Prague, Czech Republic November 4-6.   For more information visit the website

In addition, I will be holding Advanced Retreats for Coaches and Team Coaches during June and September in Barrow Castle, Bath UK, and an on-line programme on Supervising Team Coaching and Transformational Coaching.
For more information visit: Advanced Retreats

Peter Hawkins
21 December 2023
©Renewal Associates 2023


Love your work more in 2024

by Renewal Associates

My first Sufi spiritual teacher always said – “You can always love more.”  By this he meant more in terms of depth and breadth.

What would you need to do, to love your work more in 2024?  For too long we have talked about work -life balance in ways that portray work as a burden we then have to recover from.  In contrast I aim to leave each week of work more energised, alive and creative than when the week began.

So, what have I discovered enables this to happen?

  1. Discover the deeper purpose in your work. Work out who and what your work serves, for whom your work creates value and benefit. Love what you do and love those who benefit from it.
  2. Being in love with learning. Every person and team I coach and every person I train and/or supervise, I see as my next teacher. I have made a commitment that if I ever teach a course or workshop and do not: a) learn something new; b) teach something new; and c) upgrade the program, it will be the last time I teach that course.
  3. Teach what you are learning. I believe that we do not learn by being taught, only when we turn what we have read or heard into our own enacted practice. Also, that we learn most by teaching what we are learning to others, as then we need to be clear in understanding the learning and have to embody it.
  4. Always be curious. Be fascinated by everyone you meet; they all have an interesting story to tell.  Also be curious about new places, their history and culture; new subjects and ways of working different to yours.
  5. Surround yourself with great colleagues and partners. When I was in my mid-twenties and running a therapeutic community, I realised that my boss could not supervise my work, so I formed a peer supervision group and recruited people from many different organizations. My learning and love of the work quickly multiplied. Create a group of great colleagues, compatriots with a shared purpose.  Help those already in your team, by discovering their passion and helping them to develop it more fully at work.
  6. Treat every difficult person and situation that you encounter as a ‘generous lesson life has sent you.” Our most difficult clients, colleagues, bosses or teams are potentially best teachers, so rather than getting frustrated by them, ask yourself what they need you to learn.
  7. Work from source rather than from effort. Each summer I run advanced retreats at Barrow Castle near Bath UK and we explore how to work from source and renewable energy, rather than ego effort and energy that is not renewable. This entails letting go of believing it is you doing the work, and having to perform and get it right, and realise you are always working in partnership and just a channel for the work happening.
  8. Create teams that are synergistic and are more than the sum of their parts. Teams that enjoy being together, but even more love what they are collectively and collaboratively achieving together for the benefit of those they serve. Teams that have a collective purpose, remembering it is the purpose that creates the team, not the team members who create the purpose.

 I invite you to think of three easy ways you could love your work more in 2024.

I will be starting the year by teaching a Systemic Team Coaching 3-day training in Houston USA 22-24th January 2024, assisted by Steliana van de Rijt-Economu and meeting up with as many of our North American alumni who can join us on the evening of the 23rd January. I will love learning from each new trainee and how our alumni are taking the work into new worlds.  If you would love to learn with me visit https://www.renewalassociates.co.uk/stc/stc-certificate-houston/


From Grumble to Gratitude – four steps to align with life’s agenda

by Renewal Associates

 

From Grumble to Gratitude – four steps to align with life’s agenda

 I was working with an action learning group of very senior partners in one of the world’s leading professional services firms.  They were all sharing how “Time-poor they were”, how their week was over-filled with meetings and incessant e-mails and messages.  Inside me I could feel a small inner urge to join in the competition of who was the winner in being most time-poor!  However, I soon realised that the conversation was creating a joint downward spiral of helplessness, in privileged leaders who are very senior, powerful and very well paid. so decided I need to intervene.  I said: “I have been sitting here listening and wondering how any of us can be time poor, as far as I know we all have the same number of hours, minutes and seconds every day as everyone other being in the world.  What we are all privileged to have is great range of challenging opportunities, so what would happen if instead of talking about being time-poor, we discussed how we were opportunity rich, privileged to have more possible things to do every day, than we can fit in.”  The energy changed and the dialogue changed to how to make better choices among the multitude of possible activities.

I was delighted when they came back a few months later and told me how they had intervened when their staff had complained about not having enough time and told them they were “Opportunity rich.”.

One of the major ways the energy within a  team is dissipated is through time spent in what I have termed BMWs.  This does not refer to the make of well-known car, but the letters stand for  “Blame, Moan and Whine”.  As problems mount up and challenges get bigger, all of us can fall in feeling victims and hard done by and look for someone to blame.  However, the short-term relief that this may give us, is soon negated and then negatively surpassed, as individual and collective victimhood and helplessness sets in.

Often do I hear the following statements as I  work with many senior leaders and leadership teams around the world:

“Our Board are so unhelpful and restrictive.”

“We just don’t have the time to attend to looking at the really big challenges coming over the horizon.”

“Our CEO is so controlling and never empowers us.”

“We lack the resources to do what is required.”

“Our customers keep making impossible demands.”

“If only I could get rid of X, we would have a great team.”

I am sure there are many examples you could add to this list from your own experience as a coach, or as a leader.  Every minute we listen to a person ‘BMWing’ we are supporting their descent into greater victimhood and feelings of being powerless.  Our job as coaches and team coaches is to help people move to ecological BMWs which stand for “Breath, Move and Wonder”.  To help intervene  supportively in this process I have gradually developed a four-step practice, which I have found very helpful in overcoming both personal and professional difficulties and traumas.

 

  1. Whenever a problem arrives in your life or in another’s story, reframe it not as a problem but as a challenge
    Just play back what you have heard but substituting the word challenge for the word problem
    Example:
    A: My Boss never listens
    B: I hear you have a challenge in finding a way to get heard by your Boss

 

  1. Locate the challenge not in a person, or a part or a system, but in a relationship or connection
    Challenges are always relational, for example between two people, or a person and a task or between two conflicting needs
    Example:
    A:  We can’t make a profit by meeting all the customer’s needs
    B: I hear you have not yet found a way to meet the needs of customers and investors

 

  1. See the challenge as the latest generous lesson that life has sent you, to take your learning and development to the next level
    Challenges take us to the edge of what we know and what we know how to manage or respond to.  This is the learning edge which requires us to expand our repertoire of responses, develop new thinking, new being and new doing
    Example:
    A: I never get heard in meetings
    B: It sounds like life is requiring you to  find new ways of engaging with your team to get your message across

 

  1. Find the gratitude in your heart for being given this lesson, no matter how awful and shocking it maybe at the time
    This is the hardest step of all, particularly when we are faced with a major trauma, difficulty or setback.  But it is very helpful in restoring our equilibrium and resilience
    Example:
    A: As a company we are just recovering from the Covid Pandemic
    B: Perhaps we can explore the gifts, lessons and new opportunities that Covid brought to us

 

Professor Peter Hawkins  May 2023