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Team Coaching Success: Improving Observable and Measurable Impact

Team Coaching is fundamentally an individual and collective process of learning and change, and as such, team coaches should have a clearly articulated “theory of change” that underlies their Team Coaching approach. Throughout the years with my Team Coaching clients, I have witnessed team members struggling at the beginning with systems thinking skills when asked to draw a picture in their mind of their working systems. I know the feeling, as most of us baby boomers/Gen Xers in the Western world have been (conventionally) educated and conditioned into thinking linearly, step-by-step in a continuous piecemeal approach and bringing with it a scientific one-truth avenue. The temptation is to look for facts rather than allowing patterns to emerge. Being a Frenchman, Descartes initiated a bit of this, and I should know a thing or two about the Cartesian dualism mentality because the French educational system is still overwhelmingly based on this mental construct. Nevertheless, this “mental map” has its benefits such as PMO, striving to standardize and introduce economies of repetition in the execution of projects with its deadlines, implementing and executing task-orientated work. However, in order to navigate the complexity of this VUCA world and its “wicked problems,” it is difficult to adapt to the rigidity, certainty and predetermined linear outcomes, as uncertainty is the new norm. My twelve years in the trenches designing and delivering team coaching programs have led me to conclude that the AQAL Integral Framework developed by Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute is, by far, the most precise map currently available for my “articulated” theory of change within a team coaching context. AQAL itself stands for “All Quadrants, all Levels,” which is short for “All Quadrants, all Levels, all Lines, all States and all Types,” which are the five dimensions or elements that Wilber uses to define reality. The AQAL map ensures that you are utilizing the full range of resources for any situation, with the greater likelihood of success because ALL experiences have both interior and exterior components in singular and collective forms. It’s a 5D multidimensional integral way of looking at reality, and as coaching practitioners, we can use this at different levels. For the simplicity of this article, we will map a change journey from a quadrant perspective using team coaching and the collective as a unit in the center of the diagram: Exercise evaluating impacts in team coaching using the AQAL model: Think of a recent team coaching client and imagine yourself walking into the first (UL) Individual-Interior quadrant of your client and circling right (UR) Individual – Exterior and back to bottom (LL) Collective – Interior and finally (LR) Collective Exterior, mapping this as a unit for the collective: As you enter each quadrant see, feel, sense yourself addressing the coaching alliance from each perspective: What are the individual patterns of competing commitments of the collective (UL)? What do you sense as their common individual beliefs/perceptions and as a collective unit? What would improve the collective emotional DNA of the team? What leadership competencies (i.e., managing conflict) have you established in the team coaching agreement (UR)? What are the key strategic activities that the team needs to allocate to individual team members? What is the purpose and desired values/operating principles of this team (LL)? What is the informal power structure and politics within the team? What rhythm does the team have? What are the interdependent measurable KPIs objectives as a collective (LR)? What are the key strategic goals that the team needs to own as a whole? What is your preferred team coaching quadrant? Do you always start with the (UL) – Individual Interior world of the team leader? Do you spend most of your time on the (UR) focusing on the “what” of team performance? Or, do you prefer to coach on the “how” of team process (LL)? Or, work on the team structure and design (LR)? As learning capability is critical to teaming and a big part of the role of team coaching is to accelerate learning, I find this change journey mapping a useful exercise in setting anchor points, co-creating the relationship and establishing the coaching agreement with my team clients. You cannot understand the experience of your client and fully facilitate learning and results through the lens of any other quadrant, and each unhealthy quadrant will have an impact on the other three as per the example below: In conclusion, one of the key set of capabilities of a team coach is to diagnose the collective team culture and dynamics and systemic patterns while feeding back in ways that create new insights and mindset shift in the team. The AQAL map is just one tool that helps you enhance your systemic capabilities and can be used to diagnose, contract (setting the foundation) and facilitate learning and results with your client team. #SystemThinking #TeamCoaching #AQALModel

Free Assessment Report on Your Organizational Capacity to Meet Your Ambitious Scaling Milestones

Today our times will be marked by how we navigate unprecedented complexity. This new VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) amplified context, with its pace of change and spaghetti bowl of problems to solve, requires new leadership capacity to prevent stagnation and leading effectively. Navigating through the continuum of the unknown/uncertainty as oppose to the known/certainty old paradigm becomes a must-have to scale the business model and its associated unit economics. Check out our latest assessment with a FREE report on: How to rapidly increase your organizational capacity to meet your ambitious scaling milestones. You will receive a pdf report and optional 30 minutes FREE no-obligation consultation call. Looking forward to our eCoffee! From your gap score, you can have what you want and overcome these obstacles if you upshift your organization’s capacity in four dimensions simultaneously. #AQALModel #Change #StrategicAlignment

Improve Group Problem Solving and Enhance Business Innovation

Lego Serious Play We are introducing a team facilitation tool that you will find hopefully fresh and interesting. If you are looking for a progressive; innovative; fun; right brain; creative; transformational; result-oriented facilitation day blended with coaching for your next leadership retreat then Contact Us about Lego Serious Play. Lego Serious Play is a powerful tool designed to enhance innovation and business performance. Innovation is a tool that every organization needs to improve on over the years in order to improve their business performance. Challenges in the work environment are becoming more prominent with the need for growth enhancement due to the fast pace of technology. This calls for unusual approaches to meet these issues in order to enable employees to think outside of the box and enhance innovation. Lego Serious Play does exactly this; allowing employees to communicate on a more open-minded level thus increasing better team dynamics. Breaking down professional barriers and allowing employees to respond in a more informal and natural approach encourages creativity to grow within a group. Lego is often a childhood nostalgia for many people and will stimulate memories of creativity from the past. This will, in turn, inspire employees to think outside the box just like they did as a child. Therefore, enables problem-solving to be more fun as well as motivating for an individual to produce authentic ideas. This kind of thinking is what creates a competitive advantage in an organization; the chance for employees to let loose and contribute more to solutions. Lego Play not only enhances creative solutions for daily challenges that are faced in the work environment but also creates a feeling of a whole team. This dynamic allows for strengthening employee relations and therefore increasing business performance. We can organise Lego Serious Play facilitation days for teams and groups starting from half-day sessions. Unleash your creativity and get in touch with us today to discover what's possible! #Innovation #TeamCoaching

How is the invisible gorilla impacting founders’ Investment Readiness Level?

Synopsis: There is a robust theoretical basis in entrepreneurship research regarding the impact of the founders’ top management characteristics on organizational outcomes and its key role in venture capitalists’ evaluations of venture proposals. The author is looking at this from different stakeholder lenses, and from he’s own lived experience partnering with start-ups who are facing challenges of growing productivity crossing the Death Valley, by increasing their transfer of learning. Should the evaluation of the Management Team due diligence be the norm with trending impact investment? We believe the top management team remains the invisible gorilla outside of finance in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Have you seen the ‘invisible gorilla’ on YouTube, one of the best-known experiments in awareness psychology? You have six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-passing a basketball around. The exercise is to count (silently) the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending ten seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla? When Harvard researchers conducted this unusual test in 1999, half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla that was visible onscreen for nearly ten seconds. It was as though the gorilla was invisible. This test has been repeated numerous times all around the world and the results are always the same and correlates with my own lived experience with clients during leadership workshops. Try it and see what happens* The experiment revealed two things from our perceptual awareness: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much - This phenomenon is called “inattentional blindness.” Inattentional blindness happens in business all the time and from my perspective in the human evaluation with investors’ due diligence and/or with entrepreneurs in their investor readiness process (IRL). When venture capital investors are doing due diligence, they focus carefully on the technology, marketability, business feasibility and management perspectives. Does the company have an interesting business model? How big is the addressable market? What are the growth plans of the company? They use advanced data tools and subject matter expertise to answer these questions to ensure their fund return (i.e. IPO exits) and thereby relationships with LPs. However, when it comes to evaluating the start-up team, gut feel, and intuition tend to be the main due diligence instruments that come into play with some exceptions with existing proprietary tools. As a Team coach expert since launching Belbin Ireland back in the days, working with hundreds of executive teams, I know this isn’t a great approach. Data shows us that 23% of start-ups fail due to matters of co-founding teams or 14-18% due to team problems (CB Insights 2021). With entrepreneurs, at each significant life-cycle milestone of their start-up, there’s a danger zone – a Valley of Death – that each company must get through in order to reach the next milestone. If you’re not prepared for growth, and you wade unknowingly into a Valley of Death, you may not emerge on the other side. In other words, do investors favour the jockey (entrepreneurial team) or the horse (strategy and business model) during their due diligence process? What about the founders – how much time do they spend aligning their senior team prior to a next round of funding? Latest research from HBR 2021 How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions, found that VCs believe both the jockey and the horse are necessary—but ultimately deem the founding management team to be more critical. From our experience of supporting management teams of fast-growing start-ups in the TRL 5-9 product-market fit phase, coaching 100+ Scale-ups across Europe with different accelerators, we believe it’s the jockey with limited scientific data on horse ‘matchmaking’. Every deal flow generation is different pending the investment thesis of the VC, and novice and experienced VCs may differ in their evaluation of start-up teams / human capital - some investors, as well as founders’, focused primarily on the entrepreneurial skills and market competences of the individuals, whereas others focused on the team as a unit. At BC Team Coaching we prefer to focus on the unit of the team as research states that Leadership has a 10 to 15% impact on financial performance and a 25 to 30% impact on market valuation. (Ulrich & Allen HBR 2017). What makes a successful start-up team? Characteristics that are frequently mentioned by VCs as desirable features of start-up teams are industry experience, leadership experience, managerial skills, and engineering/technological skills. In our own assessment of coaching hundreds of start-up teams across Europe, seeking to understand the linkage between leadership team performance and organizational performance, partnering with our clients on the ‘founder-market fit’ and using our systemic team coaching model with Team Data Instruments, it’s all the above with 22 executive factors shown to be highly correlated with fiscal efficacy. …etc VCs expect the companies they invest in to use data to improve their decision-making however, using an objective, data-driven process to evaluate teams is not common. With the surge of impact investments, where investors are trying to make a social or environmental impact through their investments rather than just make money for themselves, what is the role of the different stakeholders, entrepreneurs, private investors, public support bodies…etc in the S of ESG? Women and millennials, who are holding an ever-increasing percentage of the world's wealth as our collective values shift, are generally more likely to focus on social impact issues when making investment decisions, or partnering with investors, supporting the continued growth in this area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY (the monkey business illusion) Bernard Chanliau, an award-winning Master Certified Coach (MCC ICF), owner of BC Team Coaching Ltd, is a sought-after professional Executive Leadership and Business Start-up coach / advisor working from the CEO level on down. He has helped hundreds of senior leaders in the last decade (directors and above) accelerate their leadership careers and achieve business objectives in a wide range of industries. Bernard works at the intersection of organisational dynamics, systems thinking and integral psychology and helps you challenge everything – and reveal the core purpose of how and why you do business.

Is your Executive Team performing at the level it needs to be?

We’re delighted to introduce the Team Impact Builder® (TIB®) Financial Impact Assessment with a partnership consultancy from the US. It is designed to understand the risk that leadership teams create for the performance of their organizations. The TIB is a comprehensive team assessment and analysis of 22 leadership team factors shown to be highly predictive of fiscal efficacy. It has been validated with over 30 years of research in Entrepreneurial Top Management Teams. What is the problem we’re trying to solve? One in five startups fail due to team problems (CEB Insights 2021) Decision making weight of the functionality of the Entrepreneurial Top Management Team (TMT) in the Investment Readiness with potential investors Hidden issues in the Top Management Team that are hindering better financial performance. The link between TMT identity, decision quality, and functionality and organisational performance. How is the problem being solved now? Mentoring from VC portfolio services/ Due diligence process advisors Mentoring from Accelerators and knowledge/skills from serial founders (leadership gap analysis). Do you have the best leadership team possible to raise your Investment Readiness Level (IRL)? Is your executive team performing at the level it needs to be? Getting to know the top team and why they are exceptional to solve the problem at hand is possibly the most important consideration at the seed stage within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Understanding the “founder-market fit” or the “earned secret” are key in the IRL analysis and the weight of management perspective in the financial readiness assessments of investors can be significant outside of technology, marketability, and business feasibility perspectives. Over the years, there has been a lot of empirical research showing the critical importance of founding top management teams that shape entrepreneurial firm performance. Taken together, these early studies indicated a critical linkage among the characteristics of top management teams, strategic decision processes, and firm performance. BC Team Coaching is pleased to introduce the Team Impact Builder (TIB) online assessment that predicts with confidence your firm’s financial performance given top management composition and dynamics. The TIB is based on the largest study of its kind including 14 years of in-depth research by two Ph.D.’s involving 6,000 top management teams and nearly 20,000 top executives. We seek to understand the linkage between leadership team performance and organizational performance using our eCoaching systemic framework (see our blog) and this tool will validate this. The TIB assessment report is based on a comprehensive assessment and analysis of 22 executive team factors shown to be highly correlated with fiscal efficacy: Team composition benchmarks and fit indices (heterogeneity of education, function, cognition, industry experience, and managerial skills) - Your team will be compared to one of the four primary normative groups compiled from the TIB database of highly successful firms, depending upon which is most relevant to your own organization’s dynamics Leadership style of the CEO/Founder as it affects team dynamics Attitudes (the satisfaction and cohesiveness of the team) Agreement (the ability of the team to effectively manage agreement during decision making) Social networking (the extent to which team members build internal and external networks) Cognition (the ability of the team to think as a group) This tool puts science behind building an executive team. Uncover the problems with composition, dynamics, and functionality of executive teams and the critical skills that are missing. The process is easy to engage and we make it smooth and easy for you to engage. We have deep experience with teams and with the insight from the TIB your team could build a development plan that drives it into the future. This is reinforced by the surety of science and without the drag of more difficult to implement processes. In conclusion, the entrepreneurial ecosystem will be well served to develop more rigorous analytical tools to determine the quality of leadership within potential investment opportunities. Research states that Leadership has a 10 to 15% impact on financial performance and a 25 to 30% impact on market valuation. If you’re interested in discovering more, please contact us and we’ll be delighted to set up a free consultation. We also appreciate your feedback from Investment Readiness experiences on how did the investors evaluated your TMT from previous funding rounds or how did you as an entrepreneur assess your capabilities as a TMT?

The case for measuring the influence of business coaching in Start-ups – fade or evolution?

As the world shifts towards a more global start-up ecosystem, we will also need to see adaptation of the learning channels for entrepreneurs and the start-up ecosystem by creating healthier and less risky startup business environments. Europe boasts more entrepreneurs per capita than the United States, a country generally taken as a benchmark for entrepreneurial excellence (OECD, Entrepreneurship at a Glance 2016). The problem, however, is that European companies seldom grow to scale. At BC Team Coaching, one of our verticals, is teaming-up with High Potential Start-Ups (HPSUs) crossing the chasm, mainly the commercialization valley of death from the financial cycle of Seed to early-stage Serie A funding or technology readiness levels 6-9 (commercial maturity). In this ecosystem, a significant need among our HPSU clients is the transfer of skills, specifically business acumen and leadership in order to scale their innovation. Entrepreneurship requires multidisciplinary skills and competencies due to rapid market changes and competitive pressures and they depend upon the creation of a culture of continuous improvement and/or continuous learning conducive to reaching market performance indicators. Most entrepreneurs begin their journey through pre-seed/seed funding incubators and VC readiness programme accelerators where the preferred adult learning channel has been ‘mentoring’ initiated from the desire to start up with their minimum viable product (MVP) whilst preparing their VC pitching deck. This learning channel is also magnified from the deal rooms and client portfolio with venture capitalists/GPs looking for their 10X returns. Mentoring is usually defined as a formal process of advice or support given by a person who has experience and knowledge to another person who is lacking in such experience and knowledge with research telling us both mentoring and coaching are useful as a support function for entrepreneurs however with distinct learning functions. Over the years business coaching as a profession, has emerged from a combination of various fields such as adult learning and development, business and change management, psychology, systems thinking, consulting….etc. By its nature, the systemic approach of business coaching contrasts with executive coaching, which concentrates on individual performance and does not necessitate executive coaches having business experience. As a Master Certified Coach (MCC) I follow the International Coach Federation (ICF) definition of coaching as ‘partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential’ and this needs to be differentiated from the problem-solving functions of consulting or structured ‘advice’ from subject matter experts downloading such as mentoring. In the entrepreneurial context there is seldom a separation between management and leadership responsibilities, which is why entrepreneurial development initiatives should aim to develop entrepreneurs to face their unique challenges in order to cross the famous ‘valley of death’. Executives learn through experience and making sense of their experience through reflection and whilst there is a lot of similarities and confusion between the two modalities, at BC Team Coaching due to the unique nature of the start-up ecosystem, we use a hybrid directive/non-directive learning approach. The coaching model(s) or process that the business coach uses is often selected based on what is familiar to the coach and at BC Team coaching we have been using a holistic-systemic coaching approach based on Integral leadership, working at the inner/outer individual levels with senior team members (I - Consciousness/IT – Leadership Competencies), the senior leadership team (WE - Culture) and the wider organisation (ITS - Systems). The model is based on the interdependencies and balance between all the quadrants for the firm to scale (Founder and Leadership Team; Product/Service and Business Model; Go to Market Strategy and Sales Cycle Traction….) In other words, if one quadrant is unbalanced the whole system could be impacted such as the inner self mental emotional growth (I – Consciousness) of the CEO/founder - fear of not being good enough, fear of failure impacting the (IT – Leadership competencies) the visible behavioural doing mode of risk-taking, influencing stakeholders…etc leading to lack of trust in the leadership team dynamic tensions (WE - Culture) and lack of funding or strategic alignment (ITS - Systems). For TRUE learning and unlearning to take place and integrate at an unconscious level, an important emphasis is on how the problem is solved and not on the outcome. With this framework we transform intangibles into tangibles enabling the system to see from the whole with new lenses (see HPSU recommendations on LinkedIn or download our free 63-pages eBook - How to unlock successful scale-up growth or buy the Audiobook. Our main preferred adult learning channel remains coaching at the individual and team levels because of its overwhelming transformational results in assisting our clients to uncover their own knowledge and skills, whereas we guide, share and mentor them with scaling tools on their external systems quadrants – the comfort zone of the accelerators ecosystems. Coaching is a unique conversational space where whole hearted conversations take place for unspoken and maybe unknown wants, desires and change. A challenge for the founder/entrepreneur is to shift from doing the work to getting things done through others, and to allocate time to think about the future of the business as most entrepreneurial ventures fail because of a lack of business knowledge or learning, poor planning, a lack of appropriate skills, poor management or inability to reach goals…etc (see Pain in Framework i.e. team performance cycle). As a professional coach, it is important for us to remember we must coach the Whole Person, moving from the who to the what, and be adept at listening at a deeper level. We must be comfortable holding space for those who are conflicted, and we must also be aware of our own inner conflicts and biases so as to keep that space clear for powerful coaching. The best results for this modality are achieved in the UL/UR quadrants of the I-Consciousness and through performance coaching at the IT - leadership competency level. At the (WE - Culture) level pending on the scope of the engagement we practice team coaching providing we are collaborating with all senior team members or team facilitation (focusing on clarity and facilitating dialogue) if we’re only coaching the CEO at the individual level. (Source ICF Team Coaching competencies) In conclusion, we coach in three dimensions the personal – interpersonal and impersonal - the skills leadership development process (IT) combined with inner-growth (I) and ultimately (ITS – process efficiencies/ OKRs) to improve organisational growth and firm performance through leadership DAC alignment (Direction – what the team wants to achieve together – Alignment – coordinated work achievements and Commitment) from mentoring and coaching. As coaching is highly experiential, we know that 70 percent of the learning journey happens on the job, 20 percent through mentoring and 10 percent through training. The effectiveness of organisational learning is the most important competitive advantage for all organisations and, as organisational environments change faster, so the rate of learning must increase. At its core, our work can be summed up as improving the IRL ‘investment readiness’ especially management or team readiness and consequently about company enhancement and growth knowing research states that Leadership has a 10 to 15% impact on financial performance and a 25 to 30% impact on market valuation. This is not a quick fix, takes time due to its transformational nature, and as the VC ecosystem slowly shifts from an industry solely aimed at financial gains to one that works towards a positive outcome for people, planet and profits, we are still in the learning process, trying to figure out the best learning journey for entrepreneurs. In order to achieve the best results, we are open to hearing from other Scaleup accelerators, VCs and engaging in a discussion related to this learning journey. Thank you for reading this article.

VUCA Uncertainty and Coping with our anxiety-management system

Great video from Dare on Change (Ad for Clothing Brand Saga - "Dare" (Take it Easy Films) and facing our demons, our inner shadows, competing commitments that stop us from doing what we want to achieve in the first place. Most of the times, the reason why we are not achieving our improvement goal, whatever that may be, is that doing what it would take to achieve this goal, would be too uncomfortable. From experience, engaging this uncomfortable, hidden unconscious place through reflection is where coaching can be highly effective. Reflection is an ongoing practice that takes time to cultivate. We always recommend our clients to really take their time for this process in this ever 'doing' working life. *A mental process “by which an individual rationally examines their assumptions” with the outcome of clarity, reflection can occur simultaneously with action, or in arrears after an action has taken place. In the field of coaching, awareness and self-awareness have been shown to be both an outcome of and a process for enhancing outcomes in coaching. Identifying the worries/fears (beliefs & needs) that may be preventing you from achieving your goal helps to see your change-prevention system (how your competing commitments systematically generate the very behaviours that prevent progress on your goal) and your anxiety-management system (how generating these behaviours helps you ward off some of your worst fears). During these unprecedented times of uncertainty and ambiguity, dancing between the new and the old, between a hard rock and a place, managing complexity as well as ambiguity facing your demons as we all strive in simplicity and clarity, will have the single biggest impact on the way we work over the next years. This requires an adaptable brain that can respond with flexibility and creativity, while still being thoughtful and applying logic. Coaching helps people identify limiting beliefs and move into more open and responsive mindsets. Think of several commitments that are currently competing in your own (or client) organisation. How are people in your organisation currently dealing with the situation? What are the consequences, positive and negative, of this way of coping? Please leave a comment below or contact us for more information on working with your inner-self or your team in order to achieve a deep level of psychological reflection and understanding. *Hullinger, A. M., DiGirolamo, J. A., & Tkach, J. T. (2019). Reflective Practice for Coaches and Clients: An Integrated Model for Learning. Philosophy of Coaching: An International Journal, 4(2), 5-34.

How to Unlearn – the Art of non-attachment - What Got You Here Won’t Cut It Moving Forward

Lately, I stumbled upon an interesting article from one of my mentors on the practice of non-attachment and the roles we take-up in life “Non Attachment requires you not only to let go of your roles and your stories, but to also let go of the part of yourself that identifies with these dramas”. I remember an exercise we had to perform where the instructions required us to make a mandala in nature representing all the labels, stories, roles – our life cosmos - we’ve stuck to in this lifetime and burn each symbol in order to release the hook-up narratives. This implied all the identity roles our ego is attached, such as father, student, executive coach, brother, teacher, and the like…I had to let go of my preconceived notions about who I was, and found it difficult due to the numerous pigeon-hole descriptions of one’s life. Letting go is not an easy process and I experience this with our Transition Leadership coaching programmes, where executives need to embed new micro-leadership competencies (i.e. delegation, feedback, strategic skills) moving from an individual expert’s to higher levels in the organisation. As in Barry O'Reilly’s book (Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results) · Unlearn the behaviours and mindsets that keep you and your organisational roles from moving forward. · Relearn new leadership skills, strategies, and innovations that are transforming your ecosystem · Break through old habits and thinking by opening up to new ideas and perspectives while achieving extraordinary results. Experts usually try to exercise control by perfecting their technical knowledge and exercising watertight thinking, clinging onto things— knowledge status, technical power, PhD titles —simply does not make sense considering their evolving nature. These things add to your life, but they are not your life. You’re all that’s guaranteed, and even you grow and change, physically, emotionally and spiritually. What if, what we perceive as reality is not actually reality at all? What if, it is simply what our mind's eye has led us to believe? There is a story of two Zen monks, an elder and a junior, both committed to celibacy, who were travelling across country and reached a rushing river. On the riverbank was an attractive woman who was nervous of the water and asked for help in crossing. Without hesitating the older monk picked her up, carried her across, lowered her gracefully on the other side and then carried on with the journey. A few hours later the brooding young monk could not contain himself anymore. He was upset by his elder’s actions and, under the guise of politeness, enquired: ‘Do you think it was appropriate, considering our oath of celibacy, to carry that woman across the river?’ ‘I put her down,’ the elder replied, ‘as soon as I reached the other side. But you, my young friend, are still carrying her.’ This is common, isn’t it? We all carry things in our minds that we have trouble unloading. We carry stories for too long. Our monkey minds can’t let them go. Tao of Leadership - The Paradox of Letting Go: When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need. Article reference : https://thefourwinds.com/blog/shamanism/the-practice-of-nonattachment/

How can we learn to learn more quickly?

“Nothing that was will be Again the way it once was Everything passes, everything will always pass Life comes in waves Like a sea In infinite coming and going (...)” Lulu Santos song It seems obvious, but the obvious always needs to be remembered: the only permanent thing is change. Currently, the changes in the external environment (VUCA) are even faster, given the countless technological possibilities. But are people prepared to learn at the same speed as change? And how are organizations preparing their leaders to learn quickly and make decisions at different levels of complexity? In fact, past results do not guarantee future results. In the knowledge society, the improvement in organizational performance is due to the performance of its professionals. In this sense, experience and performance combined with the delivery of results are fundamental elements for good professional performance. On the other hand, as technology evolves, innovations emerge, realities are reconfigured and then we are all pushed into an incessant learning movement. To succeed in this volatile, complex and ambiguous context, we need to master the art of learning and adapting. Faced with scenarios of uncertainties and ambiguities, how can we learn to learn more quickly? While technological solutions are not yet sufficiently validated and disseminated, we suggest some competencies that can be easily developed: Integrating capacity - as leaders, we must have the "integrating capacity" to gather and make sense of seemingly disconnected information and ideas, creating innovative solutions from them. Openness to the new - leaders also need to be comfortable and able to embrace seemingly absurd ideas and be open to diversity. Active listening - good leaders are more listeners than speakers. But here we go further. Listening actively requires an authentic openness to the new and the ability to be attentive to what the environment has to say. Systemic thinking - in a complex environment, critical thinking leaders who carefully examine problems and make new connections between all areas and the macro environment. Setup for changes - As we move up the executive career, we need to be more and more comfortable with uncertainty and sudden change. Ability to learn quickly - Learning requires an open and receptive mindset, this makes it possible to improve the ability to adapt. People with agile learning stand out for absorbing information from their experience and then extrapolating it to unknown situations. Changing rooted habits and behaviours can be quite challenging. It is about exercising flexibility in thinking and behaviour in everyday organizational life, in order to make learning more enjoyable and thus stimulate the learning agility of your employees. The adaptability to learn will consistently reflect on the effectiveness of your applied skills. So, instead of simply following a business routine, it is important to encourage reflection on the different possibilities and ways to improve efficiency and obtain better results. by Rosi Sabino #BusinessInnovation #LearningAgility

On top of Pico Agudo in Parana, Brazil and lessons learned on adaptive leadership

Pico Agudo is the Portuguese name for "acute peak" – a grinding 4hrs hike with 1000m elevation, straight up and no time for a warm-up under 30c+ scorching heat by midday in January. It was an adventure to travel there with our rented car. To access the Pico you need to drive a knotty dirt road for at least an 1hr+ with steep hills, no infrastructure, little roaming and signage and we were lucky with the weather that day. I am not sure if we would have reached the parking entrance of our hike if it rained on wet roads without a four wheel-drive. Welcome to Brazil and the world of adaptability. 😊 I would consider myself well-travelled, having lived and worked on three different continents and seven different countries, not counting years of backpacking, however in this fast-paced world and accustomed to western quality of life, I found it difficult to adjust to the complexities of the pace of Brazilian culture at the beginning. From not being able to draw cash from one of the main bank of Brazil to using my GPS roaming data allowance at the speed of light and having to buy a local SIM card, I began to regret the backpacking days of the ‘Lonely Planet’ with no internet, its paper maps and slow pace of life, albeit always chaotic whilst travelling in developed countries. In today’s VUCA world, “Analyse, plan and implement” has given way to more adaptive leadership that relies on experimentation, sense-making, emergence… making traditional organizational planning less relevant. During this business/personal trip I realised I still had some more inner work to do in letting go of concrete expectations around planning, structure, organisation and control, etc knowing “systems leadership” * is one of my coaching specialities. 😊 Due to time constraints on this journey and my ‘conditioned’ mindset living in Ireland, I witness inner-tensions of impatience, anxiety and frustrations due to uncertainties like driving for 1hr+ on dirt roads with an ill-equipped car in the middle of nowhere, not knowing where we were going nor reaching our destination. Only to be mesmerised by the beautiful scenery once reaching the mountain top, going with the flow, having faith and trusting the patience, guidance and instinct of my Brazilian friend. In Brazil, an erosion of trust and faith in government in recent years has been the backdrop for a swing from the socialist policies of former Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff to the election of current President Jair Bolsonaro. Maintaining trust is a key value and part of the attributes of an individual “systems leader” including among others intrapersonal skills such as a deep inner self-awareness and compassion leading to inner-peace, an interest in the system over one’s self (i.e. ego), and an ability to facilitate constructive dialogue. As with the Hero’s Journey from academic Joseph Campbell, my travelling pilgrimage guided me to the threshold of my inner route map, helping me to better navigate the landscape of my inner core – i.e. managing polarities between the familiar/rational – linear mind and unfamiliar/heart – non-linear mind. When was the last time that you gave yourself permission to travel into a totally unfamiliar world (i.e. not speaking the language in an unfamiliar country and travelling like a local)? The trip highlighted a better understanding of 'self' by enhancing my degree of conscience and compassion within my regional, budget-conscious travelling context – perhaps the best leadership training is to drop an executive by foot with limited roaming data, no Portuguese language in the heart of Sao Paulo, one of the world’s fastest-growing metropolitan with 19 million inhabitants and ask S/Him to cross the town with its famous ‘bairros’ by night time? * “Systems leadership” is about leading in a situation where power is diffused, and where the consequences of decisions are magnified and less predictable as their impact progressively ripples across the organisation. It requires cultivating a shared vision for change, and empowering innovation and collaborative action. According to research, systems leadership is needed to address complex problems which cannot be solved with a top-down, conventional, pre-planned approach that focuses on one area to the exclusion of others. Journal and lessons from my latest business trip to Brazil. "Adaptive leadership is a practical leadership framework that helps individuals and organisations to adapt to changing environments and effectively respond to recurring problems. First, the change itself needs to be considered to subsequently take on challenges and respond to the change." #adaptiveleadership #comfortzones #polarities #coachingbusiness #tourism #explore #brazil #adventure #lessons #businesstrip #traveling #vucaworld #changemindset #changeleadership #transformation

You can't make an omelette without eggs

How to accelerate business innovation in externally funded scalable start-ups? “Given enough time and money, your competitors can duplicate almost everything you’ve got working for you. They can hire away some of your best people. They can reverse-engineer your processes. The only thing they can’t duplicate is your culture… Do you know the difference between strategy and culture? Well, when Napoleon was in Paris in a room with all his generals around a table, discussing how to attack Russia, that’s strategy. But what makes a million men march to Moscow that is culture!” Herb Kelleher Southwest Airlines This article draws on my previous experiences as a business innovation coach, coaching some of the top HPSUs (High Potential Start-Up) in Europe and the past 10 years as an executive coach working with CEOs and senior leaders in international corporations and large public sector organisations. I have the privilege of working with some of the most innovative start-ups through the H2020 Phase 2 programme managed by the European Commission and as part of this very competitive programme (<6% success rate) I coach clients from their concept to market maturity. The main coaching outcome is aimed at bringing their innovation to investment readiness and maturity for market take-up. I love these coaching engagements because I can prototype some of my own concepts around systems thinking, psycho-dynamic analysis using OD/team coaching as a conversational leadership tool for change with firms ranging from 20-70 employees; moving from seed funding to round A of venture capital financing; where the main working styles are about innovating, researching, exploring, exploiting opportunities, pushing for change…. I love these coaching engagements because of the buzz, energy, passion, fire element, post-modernist worldview of ‘making a difference’ - working with the oldest and youngest millennials – the generation Y as oppose to the other side of my coaching practice working with the traditional (i.e. fulfilling duties, preserving tradition) large public sector organisations and modern worldviews (i.e. appealing to status) of the Fortune 1000. In every Phase 2 engagements it’s clear that the means to address key strategic challenges, mainly scaling the HPSU, already exist within the organisation. However invariably there are factors which get in the way – such as next round of funding or hiring functional experts but the main one I found is the ‘professionalising of the organisation’ – the upgrade of its operating system led by the Senior Management Team (SMT). Many of these issues are solvable but not by individuals on their own. It’s widely accepted that the biggest barrier to innovation in companies is the suppressive effect of culture and leadership but by taking a more strategic approach to coaching and mentoring, it’s much more likely that they will address these difficult challenges. For example, the majority of the Senior Management Teams I coach see themselves as a – pseudo or potential team on the Katzenbach team performance curve (see Phase 2 client examples from pic). Katzenbach and Smith define a Real Team as “a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they are mutually accountable”. A Pseudo Team doesn’t want to take the risk of committing to a common purpose and the mutual accountability that this entails and a Potential Team are working towards a higher level of performance and must agree on mutual accountability. I should have added that the main thrust of Organisational Psycho-dynamic Analysis is action research which surfaces the unseen, the invisible, the sub-conscious in order to accompany senior managers to the place for transformational change to begin. For this reason this approach is deeper than most business coaching or change management engagements. It does this by getting the senior management talking about what is actually happening compared to their aspirations. The crux point is the extent to which the HPSU is ready to enter the “dark night of transformation” (extreme disequilibrium) when they are ready to suspend their current attitudes, judgements, fears, habits practices……. Only 3% of start-ups go on to scale-up (EU Start-up and Scale-up Initiative) and the most impactful way to coach a HPSU is through actively surfacing the conversations about what is happening in the SMT in order to get collective buy in. Their reactions and resistances to this, and to naming or seeing the unspoken, will inform much about their readiness to scale. The other aspect is to coach each leaders on their leadership skills such as influence, resilience and strength to lead others into and through this extreme disequilibrium – first they, themselves have to be fit for the journey. Deep change that generates ongoing adaptiveness is a phenomenon with exterior and interior dimensions and by working from the inside-out as oppose to the common outside-in approach I listen for a lack of alignment between purpose-vision-mission and strategy – the process of leadership (interior culture of SMT). This miss-alignment will usually highlight gaps between structure and processes within the collective and by identifying these gaps early on; it helps me to adjust the learning outcomes of the coaching process. By linking this alignment together and using a proven goal setting and achievement coaching process allows for sustainability leading to Kirkpatrick's 4th level and generating a significant return on investment. Connect with us and get a FREE consultation on this blog post or comment - talk soon:)) #TeamPerformance #StrategicAlignment

BC Team Coaching speaking at TechConnect Live, Dublin on 31st of May

The city of Dublin will host TechConnect Live, Ireland’s largest technology event, on the 31st of May 2017. This gathering of 3000+ key decision makers from the Irish and international tech sector will provide a unique forum for technology companies, start-ups, investors and the largest Irish and global end users of technology and services in order to facilitate investment, innovation, collaboration and fostering of new commercial relationships: http://techconnect-live.com/ Bernard Chanliau, owner of BC Team Coaching will present: How to accelerate business innovation in externally funded scalable start-ups? Insights and Challenges from the field of Business Innovation Coaching Seminar 6: Sales and Marketing Skills and Training and Professional Development at 09:55 am Seminar 3: Start-ups / Scaling a business Time 10.45 - 11.00