It’s time for me to look up from my desktop to catch you up. Here are a few things that have been getting my attention lately.
Loving Your Work Website Relaunch
We relaunched the Loving Your Work website with a beautiful new mobile-friendly look, more clarity about who we serve and a new free quiz. We’re hoping to make it clear how we help mid-career and seasoned professionals to find clarity on their career journeys, overcome challenges and advance towards more fulfilling and joyful work or retirement. How did we do? Do you know anyone who needs this kind of help? Pretty well all of us get a little lost in our careers at some point.
Although building a website always seems to be much more work than we think it should be, this time I had truly excellent support and so the process was relatively seamless and the results are very satisfying. I’d like to say thank you to my designer Erin Ferree , my copy editor Lisa Canfield and my technical team at Bauhinia Solutions. I hope this site can help connect more people to the life-changing services of career coaching as delivered by my colleagues and I.
Leadership Development is an Imperative for Business Success
I have a sense that in 2016 there’s new clarity in the corporate world about the true value of leadership and corporate culture development. The voices of those leaders who understand the leadership imperative are resonating with the challenges we are facing. Slowing growth, financial uncertainty and rapid societal change are forcing us to learn the lesson that it is people who create value in business, not money nor machines. In addition, the generation of millennials now entering the workforce refuse, bless them, to work the same way their parents did. They demand opportunities to learn and develop rapidly, to have autonomy in their actions and to create real value through their work. It means that for businesses to be competitive and successful now, they MUST have engaging and efficient working cultures led by inspiring leaders. 
The new book Mastering Leadership, by Robert Anderson and Bill Adams is an example of cutting edge research that is confirming the leadership imperative. The book describes a universal model for leadership development and it includes in-depth analysis and case studies that authenticate the links between leadership, culture and business results. This book brings together the research that underpins The Leadership Circle Profile, which is one of the primary tools I use in leadership development.
As a result of these new levels of understanding and new clarity about the need for change, I’m seeing some large-scale, innovative leadership and culture development schemes emerging across Asia led by certain multi-national organizations that are serious about thriving. Our collective understanding of how to develop leaders has improved dramatically over the past decade, and now we are called to practice implementing this rapidly and on a large scale. It is a very exciting time to be a leadership coach.
If you are involved in developing leadership and culture in your organization, shall we meet up to compare notes? There’s a lot we can learn together.
Self-Organizing Operating Systems
Have you read the book ‘Reinventing Organizations‘ by Frederic Laloux? Or have you heard of Holacracy, the new organization operating system that revolutionizes the way people work together? These works point to a new trend in organizations: self-management or distributed power. Self-organizing systems solve some of the key problems faced by most corporations these days, in particular 1) the lack of agility and bottlenecks created when decision-making is concentrated at the top of a hierarchy, or across a matrix and 2) the lack of engagement that results when workers have insufficient autonomy and weak connections to the value of the work they produce.
Frederic Laloux’s book explains how organizations evolve and it presents some convincing case studies on organizations using the world’s most mature and innovative operating systems. Holacracy is one such operating system designed to help all kinds of organizations adopt effective self-management systems.
I am very inspired and attracted to this idea of self-management. Having been self-employed for more than two decades, this is the ONLY way I can imagine wanting to work inside an organization, especially a diverse one. I am already working with a few clients to implement some of the organizational innovations into their current working systems. There are actually quite a few relatively small changes that can make a big difference in reducing managerial workloads and increasing engagement.
And, not to be overtaken, I am implementing a self-management experiment myself in a new entrepreneurial venture I am part of. We are working on a project to provide Leadership Due Diligence services to investors who want to account fully for the leadership and cultural aspects of their potential investments. The rapid developments in our understanding of how people and organizations work best in the 21st century can help investors see beyond the surface of what creates business success and thereby make much better investment decisions which also add more real value to the world.
If you’d like to know more about how to implement self-organizing systems in your workplace, or if you are an investor who wants to support organizations that are adding true value in the world, please send me an email and let’s talk.