Where my philosophy comes from

Freelancing as a coach and consultant in organizations I worked a lot with teams and leaders. I would be contracted for jobs in larger companies, like banks, insurance or aviation. Often I was a part of a larger change management roll-out and was asked to coach teams and leaders to get somewhere else than where they currently were. This external model that had to be reached was either a part of higher management’s change philosophy, came from the frameworks the coaching company used in their trainings or was a combination of both. In any case, the focus was performance and efficiency improvement.

I learned this is how lots of change management in organizations is done and noticed how there was little space in the environments I worked in to bring something different. Many of the teams and individuals I worked with where high achievers and liked to push themselves, so they also wanted external goals to strive for. Nonetheless, I often couldn’t help but see exhaustion and stress.

Being trained as a Gestalt practitioner I started to resist these change methods more and more. In Gestalt we start with what is present to understand where one is in relationship to a changing environment. Given how fast that environment changes, an external change model is bound to become useless quickly. Applying this to organizational work, I realized how individual leaders, teams and organizations need to continuously find stability in themselves as a place from which they are able to make flexible and dynamic decisions (Beisser, 1970).

After a couple of years the mismatch between my own growing philosophy and the requests of the clients became too big and I was the one who had to step away due to exhaustion. During that long break, it took me a while to understand I had been complicit in and had suffered from a capitalist, neoliberal system, where more, faster, better is the norm and human needs are often secondary to that performance fetish. The idea of starting from those human needs when change is needed seemed to be too radical for most of the places I had worked for.

How to build your capacity to move through the different levels of leadership?

Great, you’re fascinated by this idea of different levels of leadership, you’d love to increase your own capacity as a leader and grasp more of what is going on in your organization.

But, how to get there?

I use a model called the ‘SOS model’ to support leaders to develop towards more capacity in their access to the 3 levels I explain above.

SOS stands for Self, Other and Situation, a model I borrow from Gestalt theory, more specifically from the inspirational teachers at Relational Change. You can read an article on their development of the SOS model here.

Applying the SOS model in leadership development learns you to build your awareness muscle to include yourself, the others you relate to and the situation this all happens in when decisions are made. Including these 3 areas of focus consistently brings you in the intersection where ‘slow leadership’ can happen, meaning you get a larger view of the needs in the moment and can see more clearly how you can intervene on the 3 levels of project, people or purpose.