Leader as Facilitator, Coach, and Servant

Listening to conference speaker Matt Church, an Australian “Thought Leader” (see www.thoughtleaders.com.au) a few weeks ago, he made it very clear that Leadership and Innovation are currently the key topics organisations are convinced are the most valuable lever points for flourishing in our rapidly evolving environment. This is not a matter of legislating ‘thou shalt now step up and be more creative’. The unlocking of human potential requires an environment that promotes these things rather than stifling the flow. To truly allow the creative to manifest itself we need environments that foster the flow - where the environment is stifling, talented people move away. For organisations this is critical. Visionary leadership, solid teamwork and a nourishing personal and professional environment are all highly relevant and within every conscious individuals influence.

Conscious transformation is the most exciting game in town and the game is now to co-create with the many rather than rule via the few. That means we need to be great coaches for each other and we need to foster excellent facilitation skills so we can best serve our teams and organisations in the achievement of their purpose for existing.

So, a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Does the environment you work in have a vibrant creative feel to it?
2. Is there a system in place to generate creative ideas that everyone in the team/organisation understands and can contribute to?
3. Do you have a process in place to test out new ideas for robustness?
4. Does your organisation facilitate change well?
5. If you are a Leader in your organisation, do you find you need to ‘pull rank’ to get things done or are you able to truly coach your team to success?
6. Are you confident in your ability to facilitate team meetings and activities?
7. Are you a Leader as Coach? Or a leader as ‘Ruler/Dominator’?
8. Do you feel inhibited in expressing your creative ideas in the environment you work in?

To move in the direction that seems to be emerging more and more, here are a few ideas to help.

• Facilitate a team get together and discuss all the things you can think of that make a good team great – that cannot be bought with money
• Create the space for you and your team to have an open conversation about how everyone is doing.
• Be open to ideas from the team as to how you can be more effective in ensuring your team has the resources it needs to get the job done without compromising health and wellbeing.
• Check out whether team meetings have a clear purpose that everyone understands.
• Establish ‘vital signs’ that are relevant to your team that everyone can align with and use as a check in periodically to keep you on track.
• Ensure your team has a clearly understood purpose that aligns with and contributes to the organisational purpose, vision and values.

Truly understanding the facilitation of process and change requires personal work. The theory is not the application. To be successful we need to ‘Be’ safe and model the values and behaviour we are seeking – otherwise we will communicate incongruently and we won’t be ‘walking the talk’. If you are seeking to build your own confidence as a Facilitator, find an organisation near you that offers this education - you will find it useful for Life!

Whatever we do for the Whole, we do for ourselves.

Your contribution in every moment is to a world you are part of, so contribute to the world you truly want to see and experience. The mission is then to follow your own whistle and choose powerfully in the direction of your bliss. Choose any direction that calls to you – social justice, economics, science, health, education, environment, animals, the arts…. where are you called to play? Does what you are doing make your heart sing? The new age weight given to having to figure out some huge world-beater purpose for one’s life has stifled so many people’s progress. It can make us hang back as leaders and instead seek out who to follow. Where once we might have had such creative thinking and big ideas, believing we could do something special with our lives, it can be tempting to sink into a malaise of ‘what I do doesn’t make a difference’. This is depressing and debilitating.

None of us exist in a vacuum. We all have control of our responses. We all have brilliant emotional and intuitive guidance systems. Follow your heart - powerfully follow your heart and allow Creation to work through you for the Universal good. We are all making a difference every moment of our lives. What sort of difference is up to us.