What Can I Offer You

my practice: mobilizing commitment for achieving results

Results are generated through people working together. Leaders generate results with their people. My work is geared to deliver results of my clients through mobilizing themselves and their people. What I do is always tailor-made. I bring over 30 years of experience and a unique and inspiring perspective. I guide my clients in the understanding of their questions, and the discovery and implementation of their answers, leaving them energized and with tangible results. Examples of what I offer are:

growing results as organizations - charging performance power

Clients call me with questions like: “Why are our results, despite all we did, still stagnating?”, or “Is the climate across the top leaders in line with our strategic urgency?”, or “Will this organisation deliver our strategic intent?”, or “Why do we have so many problems with the matrix?”, or “Why is my team stagnating?” etc. Through an intervention of 2½ days you will know what is the matter, what to do and how to do it. My interventions are known to be unconventional, bringing a different slant, a unique angle into your perspective. On the first half-day you and I will talk about what the issues are, using both our perspectives. The next day I will interview eight to ten of your key people. On the morning of the second day I will summarize my insights, which you and I will discuss in the afternoon. You and I will discuss how to best to approach the situation. We will scope your way forward in concrete steps, milestones and deliverables. Depending on the topic, you and I will validate this with the key people interviewed. I will leave you with an enriched, in-depth understanding, a clear perspective of the solution and a concrete plan forward.

cleansing the fabric- organization design

With deep involvement of the client, I provide a diagnostic and cleansing of the organisation’s fabric. My experience is the result of more than 30 years of working with profit and non-profit organisations across geographies and continents. It has given me a deep understanding of which variations of Organisation Design deliver results and which don’t.
Too often clients confuse Organisation Design with structure, the latter being the hierarchical grouping of roles and functions. The Organisation Design of a business reflects how the business wants to grow added value. It provides people with the framework within which they know how to cooperate for achieving results. It addresses in an holistic way the definition of:

1. Objective and responsibilities of individual key roles
2. Objective and task of functional and geographical groupings
3. Purpose and way-of-working of interfaces between functions across business processes and geographies
4. Meeting agendas, participation and frequency, both per function and for interfaces
5. An allocation of decision-making authorities between the roles, across functions and interfaces
6. The structure or organisation charts of the organisation.

All elements are brought together in one document: The Operating Framework of the organisation. All of which is informed by and geared to one principle: Realizing the strategic imperative of the business.

executive coaching - grounding your leadership

The reason people approach me for coaching varies from “can you support me to onboard in my new role” to “what are the best next steps in my career” to “I am stuck in where I am and/or about to lose my job” to “how do I better lead my team”? But also, people feel an inner churning ‘to do something’ because they ‘want things to be different’.
Most important is your motivation to start the coaching. You and I might go through the values and convictions you live by, through the conditioning you received, and through life experiences shaping you in order to understand why you do or don’t show certain behaviour. Through my coaching, you understand how you impact the performance of the business as well as your relations. You will feel an increased inner peace whilst being in the storms of the business. Coaching gives you mastery over why you do what you do and makes you understand why you don’t do what you want to do and why you still do what you don’t want to do.
The coaching process typically starts with a conversation to investigate what the actual question is and whether we both trust the coaching will bring progress. An option is to validate your perceptions with your people by me interviewing them. If the mutual click happens, we schedule some 6 sessions of about 2 hours each. Depending on the urgency and the nature of the question, the sessions follow each other every 3-5 weeks. The coaching preferably happens in person and on a neutral place with privacy (skype is possible as well).

growing your team - trust catalyzing team performance

Clients who want to grow their results know the importance of team performance. A team exists because the leader delegates sections of his work to the members. Their interdependency in achieving objectives bonds them. Questions triggering my involvement are: “Am I a good team-leader for my people?”, or “How can the team use more of the potential which I know there is?”, or “Why are we so meek, quiet and gentle when we’re together?”, or “How can we handle the stress and subsequent bursts of friction better?” or “How can we deal with the tensions the matrix is creating”, etc.
Growing a leadership team, working at the crossings of a matrix, generates high waves of interpersonal dynamics. It requires all members, including the leader, to develop EQ (emotional intelligence) in addition to the often too rich presence of IQ (reasoning intelligence). In one to three workshops, departing from the team’s reality, I provide a behaviour focussed EQ-crash-course. Every member’s demonstrated behaviour will be talked about. Good intentions are no longer good enough. It is all about the impact actual behaviour has on colleagues. Through this process, I grow their awareness on how their relations impact the results. I let them experience how their relations are meant to be both harmonious and full of friction, learning how disagreement, when handled constructively, is a rich source of creativity. By experiencing all of this, they will embrace how results blossom on fully living healthy friction. Only by growing trust in each other will they be able to capitalise on each other’s potential, living the motto: TEAM – Together Each Achieves More!

(self)evaluation of the supervisory board - professionalizing the board

Further professionalizing Supervisory Boards, e.g. through guiding their self-evaluation, is one of my priority ambitions because they play a crucial role in the longer-term strength and sanity of organizational performance. Early 21st century, in response to the dysfunction of seemingly shining organizations, focus came on the role and contributions of Supervisory Boards. Initially, more and explicit rules were supposed to do the job. Since then, more and more attention is given to the unique added value a Supervisory Board can offer, in particular the role they play as qualitative sparring partner to the board of the organization. For which the Supervisory Board needs to develop the attitude of blending critical engagement with distant involvement and independent commitment.
Supervisory Boards need to grow in their role as professional supervisors. Even more so since their agenda is expected to widen from a more strategic and financial involvement towards having more attention for the functioning of the organization, the culture it lives and the well-being of its employees.
Together with delivering the legal need for annual self-evaluation, I am excited to support your Supervisory Board in growing its strategic perspective, in how it functions as a group of seasoned professionals, in enriching the depth of the relationship with the leadership of the organization whilst respecting the domains of each-other.

aligning for delivery - mobilizing the top 80 (50-100)

Clients also ask me: “How can I strengthen the performance power of my key leadership group?”. In many organisations I have developed a so-called Leadership Forum. A Leadership Forum is a platform facilitating iterations of strategic and relational dialogue across the top-group with the purpose of aligning perspectives and mobilizing commitment for implementation. It often takes 1½ days and is organised 2 or 3 times a year. The typical number of key-people involved is 80. Eighty is a critical number to generate an organisation wide self-perpetuating momentum. Aligning this top 80 will mobilize ownership and commitment for delivery across the entire organisation. Guided by your leadership, the group validates or even develops the strategic business agendas, the frameworks for co-operation and the style of interaction. From the first Leadership Forum the effect is inevitable: It catalyzes across the business a focussed, more aligned and increasingly constructive cooperation!