In his “Global Research Report: Be Exceptional – Tomorrow’s Leadership and the Necessary Revolution in Today’s Leadership Development” Hawkins report connects with two early posts that summarises my understanding of systemic or team coaching. It also includes an interesting letter to the leaders of tomorrow – which I thought was worth sharing for debate.
In the lengthy report he points to the rise of systemic team coaching
The last five years have seen a significant growth in systemic team coaching (Hawkins, 2011a, 2014a, 2014b and 2017a; Wageman et al, 2008; Ridler Report, 2016; Henley Business School, 2016) and in innovative ways of incorporating just-in-time learning into the executive team’s core work. However, the use of systemic team coaching for other types of teams and partnerships is only just beginning (see Hawkins, 2017a: Chapter 10).
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We are seeing the rise of small agile teams with greater fluidity that form and disband, self-organise, are multi located, multi-generational, and need to establish trust and relationships fast and effectively.
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Leadership development team based organisations are simultaneously developing: leaders, the relationships between them, the collective leadership culture and capacity and the capability to partner and orchestrate across the business ecosystem. What can education learn from such a focus? What can education learn from an impressive array of global businesses interview, from BUPA to Lego to Unilever?
Leaders of tomorrow
If you want to get there, don’t start from here.
Chris McShane – School Leader
You will never find yourself in the best place to make a change. So make the change.
Hawkins report ends with a letter to the “Leaders of Tomorrow.” I include it here for your reflections.
We are aware that you will be taking on a world full of great, complex and interconnected challenges that are both daunting and exciting.
You will need to work collaboratively and effectively in teams and partnerships with others, both inside and outside your organisation, as none of the challenges can be handled by individual leaders, even the most powerful and best developed.
Computers and robots will increasingly replace a large number of the jobs that now exist, but there will also be a global skills shortage for people who can take leadership, working across boundaries, creating connections between different ages, genders, personality types, functions, cultures, approaches, as well as stakeholders occupying different parts of the wider business ecosystems.
It is never too early to start developing your leadership, and hopefully yours started at home with your parents, at nursery and through your schooling.
It is never too late to continue your leadership learning, as leadership development is a life-long journey.
To be an effective leader-learner, be always curious about different worlds and different perspectives, love learning and welcome every challenge life throws at you as a new learning opportunity. Go and work in a different part of the world while you are young and freer of tying responsibilities.
To deepen your curiosity, learn to listen deeply, empathically putting yourself into the skin of the other person and being interested in understanding their perspective and viewpoint. Do not get too invested in your own viewpoint but stand back, learn to see connecting patterns between the various perspectives that you can find. Discover what needs connecting, and develop enabling skills to bring different worlds together.
Constantly stretch yourself, get out beyond the laptop and find people that will rattle your cage, challenge your assumptions and shake you out of your comfort zone. Be globally mobile. Read widely, including global politics and economics, latest science, psychology, but also biography and literature, especially the great novels, poems and plays of the past.
Find your own passion and purpose – discover what the world of tomorrow needs, that you can make a unique contribution to – and then find others to team with you.
Learn to fail and learn quickly. Leaders ask for forgiveness not for permission, are not afraid of making mistakes and learn fast from failure. They are not afraid to decide, to make choices, to focus, and then to change their minds, when they discover better ways forward. Be an experimenter, a prototyper, a collaborative inquirer.
Keep yourself fit – physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually – and learn how to pace yourself; leaders will have to be elite athletes in all these spheres.
You become a leader when you see something that needs to be done and you get on and organise a response.
Realise you can take on and achieve far more than you think you can.
Help others become leaders. Have fun and enjoy the journey of learning and leading.
We wish you well.
Signed, Today’s Leaders.