“Developmental practitioners have known for years how to provide expert support to individuals on a one-to-one basis. However, little attention has been given to applying these principles and methods to an entire organization.” An Everyone Culture-
Robert Kegan
With all the changes and disruptions that COVID19 has brought into our lives, we need to step up our creativity, reinvent ourselves and innovate what we offer our clients. This encouraged me to think ‘systemically’, moving beyond working with individuals and teams to developing organisations. Instead of offering ‘leadership development programs’ I now offer a more systemic service.
I realise I was not training systemically. I was either following my own agenda or the client’s agenda. This implies that the client knows what they need, which is not always the case. The decision-making process for training and coaching is primarily done by HR, who often operate from a checklist. Or by urgent requests from managers who want a quick fix to poor performance. As a result, leadership development programs can be siloed, disjointed, and fragmented and therefore may become ineffective and unsustainable. In some cases, they are not strategically planned or integrated with the strategic objectives, vision, values, or desired leadership style and culture. People development is not always on the top of the list in boardroom discussions, unless they are talking about cost-cutting.
Working with organisations means working in a complex and dynamic multi-faceted system with subsystems, within a unique culture. If you provide training and coaching without seeing all these systems and subsystems, you may be missing something important, and your efforts are at risk of being swallowed by the very ‘system’ you are trying to influence.
Here are three things that can help you take a more systemic approach with your clients:
1 Three distinct roles
“The kind of coaches we are looking for, are those who place coaching and training as a relational engagement located at the meeting place of individual and organizational learning and development, facing both ways, seeing both the organization and the individual as equal clients. An approach which systemically brings personal, interpersonal and organizational realities into the process.” ~ Marc Khan- Global Head of People and Organization Development- Investment Bank South Africa
In addition to training and coaching, it’s about integrating the organization’s culture, strategy and business practices. That means adding consulting to your work and offering a strategy on how to apply the training to improve actual business practices.
2. Shifting from theme-based training to systemic development
“All real-time learning and development is relational. There is always more than one client you need to serve. A trainer, coach, or consultant needs to partner with the direct client so that both are in service of what the world is requiring the individual team or organization to step up to.” ~ Peter Hawkins
Peter Hawkins, in his book ‘Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy, talks about the ‘Law of three clients’. He says “the first client is whoever is in the room, the individual or team. The second client is the organization or network. The third client is the purpose of the joint endeavour to which they serve. (Clients, all stakeholders, etc.)”
Systemic development means focusing both on individual growth and organizational development. There are two key aspects that influence organizational development. Culture and Strategy. Culture includes leadership style, communication style, general behaviour, language, and the collective values displayed. Strategy includes company vision, key strategic objectives, and the overall purpose of the organization, ‘why’ the organization exists.
Instead of delivering once-off theme-based training, systemic development focuses on the key aspects that enables the people to robustly navigate through the culture and strategy to achieve both individual and organizational success.
These can be divided into four categories:
- Self-Development (Personal growth)
- Relational Development (Communication and emotional intelligence capacity)
- Leadership Development (Leadership strength)
- Systemic Integration (Strategic ability)
If your training is focused on these four aspects, you offer a framework that transforms both the individual and the organization. By identifying the connections between the training, you deliver and the organizational system, you help individuals integrate what they learn with what they need to do in their daily tasks. Focusing on these four developmental areas will not only benefit the individual and the organization, but ultimately, all the stakeholders in the system.
3. Integrating Neuro-Semantics Training
When it comes to choosing training content, Neuro-Semantics trainers are at a huge advantage. We have a treasure chest of courses that are perfect for systemic development. How you present the training and how you frame the outcomes and benefits can highly increase the meaning and value that organisations perceive. Attached is a table with a menu list of courses under these four categories. This framework has helped me to promote and sell Neuro-Semantics training to organizations, evolving into bigger projects which has given me the opportunity to collaborate with other trainers. I hope this demonstrates how you can utilize Neuro-Semantics to incorporate your training into consulting projects and inspire you with an innovative way to introduce Neuro-Semantics to corporates.
| SELF DEVELOPMENT | RELATIONAL DEVELOPMENT | LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT | SYSTEMIC INTEGRATION |
| APG | Coaching Essentials | Unleashing Leadership | CollaborativeLeadership |
| Unleashing Vitality | Emotional Mastery | Leadership Matrix | Business genius |
| Unleashing Potentials | Defusing Hotheads | Releasing Productivity | Games BusinessExperts Play |
| Resilience | Perceptual Genius | Group and Team Coaching | Unleashing Creativity and innovation |
| Unleashing Authencity | Inside-Out Persuasion | Executive Thinking | Practice Labs and Drills for Skills |
| Team CoachingTopics | Co-Learning Sessions | Co-Learning Sessions | Systemic Integration |
| Our Purpose – The Purpose Creates the Team | Art oF Framing – 4MatModel | Meta Model – Precision Questioning | Co-Creating a stakeholder Map |
| The Social Panorama atwork | Listening – NLP Basics.Holding Meaningful Conversations | Meta Programs –Thinking Patterns | Identifying CollectiveProblems |
| Creating a Team Constitution | Listening Excellence –What to listen for. VAK | Higher Level Thinking -Meta States Model | Co-Creating CollectiveSolutions |
| The Collaborative Team –States for Collaboration | Perceptional Flexibility -Multi PerspectiveThinking | Leading Change – Axisof Change | The Well-Formed Problem Conversation |
| Authenticity- Uncovering Blindspots | Art of Questioning – FromTelling to Questioning | Collective Leadership Matrix | Receiving and Giving Feedback |
References:
Robert Kegan (2016). An Everyone Culture.
Frederick Laloux (2014). Reinventing Organisations
Robert Kegan (2009). Immunity to Change
Barry Oshry (2007) Leading Systems
Peter Hawkins (2012). Creating a Coaching Culture
Peter Hawkins and Eve Turner (2020) Systemic Coaching
Peter Hawkins and Nick Smith (2013). Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy.