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/


Is Your Inner Team more than the sum of its parts? 

by Peter Hawkins

Is Your Inner Team more than the sum of its parts? 

 In coaching teams over the last forty years in many parts of the world, I have realised that one of the teams that most needs coaching is our own ‘inner team’.  Each of us has many different roles which are matched by different sub-personalities.  We think we have just one ‘I’, but we have many ‘I’s.  Sometimes these different parts of ourselves complement and support each other: other times they disagree and fight together.  The great 20th century Sufi teacher Gurdjieff would point out in his teachings, that the ‘I’ that goes to bed determined to get up in the morning to get a job done before breakfast, is not the same ‘I’, as the one who wakes up tired in the morning and wants to rest in bed. 

We can start developing our inner team by discovering more about each of the team members. Each of these is cocreated in the space between us and the worlds we inhabit.   I have in my team, the teacher, the writer, the organizational consultant, the coach,  the gardener, the husband, father, and grandfather.  Then there are the less prominent members, such as the avid reader, the one who loves good food and wine and entertaining, the humorous one, the meditator, the one who loves young children,  the poet, the friend, the walker, the one who watches cricket and sport. Then there is the integrating and orchestrating ‘Self’, who witnesses these different roles and sub-personalities and who needs to play the role of the team leader. 

The next step in helping this team to be more than the sum of its parts, is to find the team purpose.  This work can be done by addressing the questions:  

  1. what can this team do through collaborating together, that they cannot do by working separately in parallel?   
  1. who and what does the team serve, which require their teamwork? 
  1. what are the top priorities that they all share? 

Only then can we turn to explore how the team members need to collaborate better to serve the collective purpose. We can inquire into which of these support each other and which ones compete for attention?  We can look at our own inner diversity and inclusion – which team members get all the limelight and demand attention, and which ones easily get overlooked and ignored? 

One way of addressing this is to use the method I developed for feedback between team members and the wider team, entitled “Team Contribution Grid” (Hawkins 2022, pp.376-377), for each of your internal team members.  You fill out a separate grid for each member.  Here is the grid I created for each of my team members to complete. 

Three ways I currently contribute to Team Peter 

 

 

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Three ways I could contribute more fully to Team Peter 

 

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Three ways I receive value from team Peter 

 

 

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Three ways I could receive greater value from team Peter 

 

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Once they have all been completed, then If you can, put each separate grid on a different chair and imagine them all sitting there, and one by one giving feedback, as you stand in the middle representing the whole team. 

If this is not possible, stick them all up on a wall or white board.  Arrange them in clusters, with those who get on well together, close to each other, and those who are disconnected at a distance.  Think how they would respond to each other. 

Having listened to all the parts, as the team leader, where do you need to coach and facilitate better connections between members?  Which team members need more attention and time in the spotlight?  Which need to be less prominent and move into more of a support role? 

Now compose the message you want all your team members to hear and take on board. Completing the following seed sentences might help you do this: 

  1. Our biggest collective challenges, which requires help from all of you are……… 
  2. Together we could achieve so much more in………  by……….. 
  3. To achieve that, the help I need from all of you is……. 

 

Once you have written this, try reading it out loud imagining all the different team members in different places in the room. 

Then compose individual messages for each of the individual members. 

  1. What I value about your contribution is…… 
  2. What I find difficult about you is…… 
  3. What the difference I need from you going forward is….. 

In response to each of these, write the commitment that you need each of these roles and sub-personalities to make.  Try and be as specific as possible. 

As team leader we need to love and appreciate every member of our inner team, and not be ashamed of any one of them.  If there are any, we are ashamed of, we need to find a way of developing them to change or help them successfully leave the team.  Our biggest challenge is to help the team to be aligned to the collective purpose and key future challenges; to work together so the team becomes more than the sum of its parts. 

 

Peter Hawkins April 2023 


Leading by Nature – Giles Hutchins

by Peter Hawkins

Leading by Nature by Giles Hutchins

Foreword – Peter Hawkins

I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with Giles since his first book The Nature of Business was published in 2012.  I remember so well reading it with excitement and resonance, so pleased to see a fellow author addressing the big questions of our time.  Questions such as:

  • How can organizations function the way nature operates?
  • How can we learn through biomimicry, not just ways of making our products more natural, but also the whole way we organize and collaborate as humans?

Here was a truly radical thinker and writer, taking us back to our roots in the ‘more-than-human’ world of the earth we live, not on, but from.  Again, in his latest and now fifth book Giles is both inspirational and radical.  Inspirational in showing what leaders and organizations need to do to be future fit for what the planet now requires, and radical in the true sense of taking us back to the roots of life.

read the full forward here/…


David Clutterbuck’s and Peter Hawkins’s Best Reads of 2021

by Peter Hawkins

David Clutterbuck and I both enjoy an eclectic mix of books and have enjoyed many wonderful titles this year. Here are our top 10 reads across a number of topics.

As always, we have both enjoyed an eclectic mix of new titles this past year. Here are our top 10 reads.

First, three books about how we think and make decisions

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The author brings together the teachings of her Native American heritage, her life as a single Mother of two girls and being a professor of Botany to gently help us see the world more ecologically and indigenously.

Think Again, by Adam Grant & Noise, by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues. Two tours de force by giants in the field of human cognition, taking different perspectives on how and why individual and collective decision-making is so often flawed.

Thinking the Unthinkable by Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon. Explores how and why we tend to avoid dealing with difficult issues and what to do about it.

Next two books on systems and systemic thinking

Coaching Systemically by Paul Lawrence – explores systemic thinking from multiple perspectives.

Upheaval by Jared Diamond draws on case studies of how nations coped with crisis to draw conclusions about how organisations and societies can learn to adapt and thrive.

Two on aspects of awareness

The Body in Coaching and Training by Mark Walsh – a useful overview for anyone working with Gestalt, ontology, or mindfulness; or wanting to use themselves more in their coaching practice.

Supersenses by Emma Young. If you thought there were just five or six senses, you’d be wrong. Young identifies and explores 32 human senses. I found it broadened my mindfulness dramatically to experience consciously such a wide range of sensory inputs.

One general title on coaching

WeCoach by Passmore et al – the biggest collection yet of coaching tools and techniques in one volume.

One on teams

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff – “being human is a team sport”. Rushkoff argues cogently that the impact of much technology has been to undermine our instinct for collective endeavour. He helps us in ’Understanding humanity as one big, interconnected team.’

And three intriguing outliers

The Handshake by Ella Al-Shamahi. The handshake is something we take for granted, but the meaning and impact of handshaking varies dramatically from culture to culture. A gripping read (yes pun intended!)

Becoming Mandela by Trevor Waldock.  Trevor moved from being a UK coach to developing young community leaders across Africa.  These are letters to his sons and a great guide in how to be an Elder, rather than a Leader.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings (Netflix founder and CEO and Erin Meyer Instead Professor.  Not an exemplar for others necessary to follow but many provocative ideas for how to run a company like an elite sports team.

And also this year we both enjoyed reading new updated editions of each other’s books on Team Coaching:

Coaching the team at work. (Second edition, 2020) by David Clutterbuck

Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership (fourth edition, 2021) by Peter Hawkins

What books have you enjoyed reading this year and can recommend to be added to our 2022 reading list?


Forward to Work not Back to Work

by Renewal Associates

Forward to Work not Back to Work

“Let’s think together how you can get individuals and teams ‘forward to work’ rather than ‘back to work’ and use this opportunity to create more value-creating ways of working.” – Peter Hawkins

As we have been helping many organisations manage the transition out of lockdown to the ‘new normal’ of hybrid working, I am making available the key aspects of best practice and things to avoid in my most recent blog on the Renewal Associates website

This blog also draws on the new chapter on working virtually in the recently published 4th edition of Leadership Team Coaching, which is available with a 20% discount (AHR20) buying directly from Kogan Page.

Kogan Page Forward to Work – Peter Hawkins Article

 


EMCC Supervision Champion

by Renewal Associates

Last week I was delighted, honoured, and humbled by being given the EMCC Supervision Champion 2020 award.

This was in recognition of the long journey I have been engaged on to establish and promote coach supervision.  I first wrote about the importance of supervision over 40 years ago and have been busy in the development of coach supervision for over 20 years, through talks, books, research, and training coach supervisors in many parts of the world.  It is very rewarding to see how coach supervision has rapidly taken off and is becoming accepted as an essential part of the life-long development of practising coaches and team coaches.

A big thank out to my fellow collaborators, co-authors, my supervisors, and hundreds of supervisees all of whom continue to teach me so much.   This award is much an honouring of the collective contribution of all these people, as it is of my individual efforts.  I am also pleased to be alongside the other coaching supervision award winners and pioneers, Lily Seto, Tom Battye and Felicia Lauw.

The book I wrote with Nick Smith in 2006 and then in 2013 “Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision, Skills and Development.” Maidenhead:  Open University Press/McGraw Hill, continues to be used by many coach supervisors all around the world.

You can read about new developments in Coach Supervision in both the 2020 book I wrote with Eve Turner Systemic Coaching: Delivering Values Beyond the Individual. London: Routledge.

and about supervision more generally, in 5th Edition of Supervision in the Helping Professions: Maidenhead: Open University Press McGraw Hill, which I co-wrote with Aisling McMahon.


Privilege and Pride

by Renewal Associates

When I was young and ambitious I thought I could earn privilege and that it would buy me freedom; as I have now grown much older I have slowly come to realise that privilege does not buy you freedom, but responsibility.

Privilege is, by definition, un-earnt – something bequeathed to you by the happenstance of your birth, genes, gender, colour, place, and class.

I did not earn being born in a country beginning to recover from two world wars and at a time when I would be saved from having to do military service.

I did not earn my native country being one of relative great affluence and with a climate that avoided major droughts, floods, or plagues of locusts. A country which had recently launched a National Health Service and where there was a welfare net.

I did not earn having state paid education for 20 years – yes 20 years! at a time when, in other countries, many had no years of classroom education, only what life and their family could teach them.

I did not earn the privileges that came with being white, male, and a part of a country still living off the dividends of slavery and colonization – a wealth extracted from the sweat and oppressed labour of others.

I was taught to take pride in ‘my’ family, ‘my’ town, ‘my’ nation; also ‘my’ clothes, ‘my’ house, and ‘my’ garden. But I did not make or build them, just acquired them or better still to say I became the temporary steward.

Like my Father before me, I took pride in ‘my’ children’s (and later grandchildren’s) successes, at school, in sport, in work and in their offspring.  As patriarchal men we saw this as ‘our legacy’.

——–

When Edward Colston was iconoclastically dragged by a noose from his pedestal in central Bristol, history was not so much re-written, as false history was unwritten. The statue had been erected (sic) to make Edward Colston a role-model of white male success and philanthropy; to show how Bristol took pride in Edward Colston and he took pride in Bristol; to show how he shared ‘his wealth’ with the people of this privileged city. But the plaques on the pedestal that declared One of Bristol’s ‘most virtuous and wise sons’, failed to mention whose wealth it was. The riches had come from the Royal  African  Company and the rich triangular trade that took slaves at gun point, and then chains, to America, and then brought back sugar, tobacco, cotton and cocoa which was manufactured in Bristol and Britain and sold back to Africa and elsewhere. This company played an active role in the enslavement of over 84,000 Africans (including 12,000 children) of whom over 19,000 died en route to the Caribbean and America. I was particularly moved by this event as my family were Bristolians, going back several generations, I had relatives who gone to Colston school and I had gone to concerts at Colston Hall. As such my family had benefited from Colston’s legacy to the city.

But beware symbolic one-off moments of iconoclastic fervour, for they alone do not change a culture. We can fall into false relief that we have toppled the ‘evil one’. But it was not Edward Colston alone who invested in this Royal Company or benefited from British slave trade and gun barrel colonization, or reaped privilege flowing from the sweat of slaves. It was all of us, born in so called ‘Great Britain’ or Western Europe, who have lived off the financial and cultural dividends of slavery and colonial oppression, and still do.

We all need to be pulled down from our plinths of privilege and our pedestals of pride.

But how, for we have to also do the pulling? Well it all starts with me, with each of us, as all social change does. These are just a few of the first small steps I have discovered with the help of many.

–        From pride to giving thanks for each and every blessing.

–        To realise that success is never mine alone, it is always co-created with others, and with the wider ecology and is supported by the happenstance of my privilege.

–        To awakening to the realisation that racial and sexual liberation are what white men need to engage in, as we are the perpetrators and beneficiaries of Euro-patriarchal oppressive systems.

–        To rewriting history with others that engages all voices and perspectives, not just those of the victors, the violators, and oppressors.

–        Apologizing for what was done by our ancestors, our race, our gender, and ourselves and finding ways to make reparation.

Small things do make a difference but are never by themselves enough.

Professor Peter Hawkins will be teaching with his colleague Nick Smith for the fifth time their very popular and successful  three day advanced course in “Transformational Coaching” on December 9th -11th 2020 in Bath, UK, which will address how to work with difference and privilege in coaching. Details are to found on https://www.renewalassociates.co.uk/events-training/transformational-coaching/


We need to move beyond ‘High Performing Teams’

by Renewal Associates

I need to start by apologizing. For many years I have written about the importance of high performing teams, created models of them and written and taught about how to lead, coach, and develop them (Hawkins 2011, 2014, 2017, 2018). Over the last two years I have woken up to how, like nearly all writers about teams and team coaching, I was caught in what is an out-dated paradigm. I now believe that the term is not only beyond its sell by date but is problematic and leading team development and team coaching in the wrong direction.

There are four ways that I see that the term causes problems.

A mechanistic rather than a living organism metaphor

High performing teams is a concept that grew out of 20th century mechanistic linear thinking. High performance was a term used for manufacturing machinery, or cars that could accelerate fast from stand still to 60mph. It was about achieving greater productivity and efficiency out of a fixed system, so that it creates more, faster, and cheaper. High performance is unconcerned about whether what is produced is of beneficial value. It is focussed on efficiency rather than creating benefit for all stakeholders.

Sub-optimisation

Some teams I have worked with over the years have been motivated to be the ‘best team on the block’, the standout region in their company. When they have succeeded they have often done this at the cost of other parts of the organisation and not through creating benefit for the whole organisation and all its stakeholders Their achievement has been built on by being the most successful at gleaning joint resources, such as marketing, HR, sales support; and the least willing to share knowledge and to second staff when other teams and regions were struggling. The team member’s loyalty has been to their local team. not the rest of the organisation.                                                                                         

A Place of arrival and a tick-box exercise.

For some teams, becoming a high performing team is the next thing on their development agenda. Last year it was becoming a ‘Lean organisation’, the year before decentralization and empowerment. They ask me: “What are the top things we need to do to be a high performing team?” They want help with creating a check list, that they can tick off, step by step. Often team leaders request a clear timetabled plan and ‘Gant chart’ including a date and place of arrival. But team development is not a pre-planned journey you can buy off the shelf. Being a successful team is never a place of arrival. As Bill Gates wrote: “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” A team that thinks it is now ‘A High Performing team’ often slips into complacency and arrogance. Successful teams and organizations are often the last to notice the world is changing around them.

Claiming the success as your own

Let me tell you an imaginary story, that could come true in the very near future.

It is a future gathering of the top team at Zoom. They have just received the annual performance figures for the organization and are celebrating a record year. Revenue, profits, and reputation have all risen sharply. In the midst of the champagne toasts, and congratulations echoing around the room, one team member says, “I think we should pause and thank the team member who made the biggest contribution to our record success. A team member who only joined us this year.” She is greeted by blank and questioning faces. The CEO eventually says: “Who are you talking about? The reply comes: “Corona Virus.” There is a stunned and awkward silence

All evolution is co-evolution all development is co-development and all success is co-created.

The success is co-created between a team and its wider organization, between the organization and its business eco-system, between a species and ecological niche. All evolution is co-evolution – a species and the niche co-adapt and respond to each other – so does a team and its context.

 High Value creating teams

To move from an outdated mechanistic concept of teams, we need to find concepts and models rooted in systemic and organismic ways of seeing the world; approaches built on collaboration and co-adaptability, rather than competition and sub-optimisation of parts of the larger system. We need team development that is part of creating a wider ‘team of teams’ as Genera McCrystal discovered while leading the Allied forces to try and create sustainable peace in post war Iraq and finding they were constantly out manoeuvred (McCrystal et al 2015).

We need to support and coach teams that can ‘continuously co-create beneficial value with and for all their stakeholders’, both human, and the ‘more-than-human’ stakeholders of the wider ecological environment, which is always the largest contributor to all human success.

What is beneficial value? That which improves quality of life, diversity, well-being, and sustainability, at all the nested systemic levels that our life is living and breathing within.

I again apologise for taking so long to move away from writing about high performing teams and promise my next books will be about the practical ways we can create and sustain high value creating teams.

References

Hawkins, P. (2011, & 2014 & 2017) Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership. London: Kogan Page.

Hawkins, P. (2014 and 2018). Leadership Team Coaching in Practice; Developing High Performing Teams. Philadelphia: Kogan Page Publishers.

McChrystal, S., Collins, T., Silverman, D. and Fussell, C. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. New York: Penguin. 

Professor Peter Hawkins June 2020

Peter Hawkins will be running the next face to face Systemic Team Coaching certificate December 15th -17th in London. Meanwhile AoEC have places left on the Systemic Team Coaching taught by Peter’s colleagues as a 3 day virtual replacement program from 21-23 July 2020 – for full details for both trainings and to book a place, click here.

The Global Team Coaching Institute led by Peter Hawkins and David Clutterbuck, is about to launch the second level Practitioner program starting in October. Peter will be leading the Systemic Team Coaching course with a global faculty of his most senior colleagues. For full details contact Kirsten@wbecs.com

My next Blog I will publish next weekend 12th July on “We are all in this together: Coronavirus, Climate Emergency, Collaboration and Consciousness Change.”

There are more blogs and other free resources on https://www.renewalassociates.co.uk