Coaching to support Leadership and Organisational Transformation

Harthill's Developmental Inquiry Coaching is at the very heart of how we work with clients who want organisational transformation or to develop a really impactful leadership programme. Our coaches know how to support and expand the development of individuals who are each on their own pathway, developing their capacities and capabilities for transforming the business and culture.

As Frederic Laloux says, in Reinventing Organizations, "Another way to avoid attaching judgement to stages [of development] is to recognize that each stage is well adapted to certain contexts". This highlights the importance of leaders across the organisation being able to be on their individual paths of development, seeing both the limitations of a current Action Logic, as well as the opportunity presented by later stage meaning making. Working with individual Coaches may support and provoke more momentum on that developmental pathway, whilst the organisation continues on its core programme.

Coaching Individuals & Leaders

Harthill’s approach to executive coaching is unique – it is deliberately developmental and transformative. Our high quality leadership coaching, when within or outside the scope of larger interventions, can advance the developmental agenda more rapidly, in the absence of other systemic work. We focus on supporting the more fundamental development that leaders need, in order to deal with the complexity now facing us.

Working with the individual presenting issues and context, as does traditional performance coaching, Harthill's coaches go beyond the performance and results focused approach. We use the leaders' business challenges to work on transforming their key recurring patterns, by working at the level of the individuals' meaning making. In enabling the development of the leaders' Action Logics, we can support a longer term, more profound shift, transforming their capacity to lead in complexity and enable transformation of the organisation itself.

Unique Harthill Approach

Harthill Coaches all work with 5 core elements of our unique approach -

The Leadership Development Profile

All our coaches are Authorised to use the LDP, the most widely used ‘meaning making’ psychometric globally. This provides a reliable map of the Action Logics and key insights into a leader’s capacity to enable transformational change.

3 Meaning Making Capacities

Three core capacities underpin a leader’s Action Logics -

 Self-Experiencing, Perspective Flexing and Complexity Processing

Each is deliberately developed according to the context, interests, needs and unique developmental edge of each leader. 

6 Transformational Capabilities

Having profiled over 11,000 leaders across the world using the LDP, our research points to six transformational leadership capabilities. Again, each can be deliberately developed according to a leader’s interests, needs and unique developmental edge.

Developmental Inquiry

This profoundly different developmental approach is a practical way for leaders to intentionally develop their meaning-making in their day to day leadership and life. Developmental Inquiry is the frame through which immediate needs, recurring patterns, deeper reflections and transformative conversation are explored and resolved. All our coaches are experienced guides in this process.

Deliberately Developmental Practices

With an emphasis on active experimentation, our approach is highly practical and delivers tangible systemic change. Uniquely crafted with their coach, DDPs become the vehicle for leaders to develop the capabilities and capacities both to deal more effectively with the presenting performance challenges, as well as to lead in complexity and enable transformational change. 

Vertical Team Development

Harthill has refined a specific vertical developmental approach to working with teams and continues inquiring into and building this body of work.

There is a strong element of considering the Action Logics that are most present in the team system and working with that collective intelligence. However, team Developmental Inquiry is more than just profiling the individuals and aggregating a collective profile with a shared set of individual developmental activities. There are many aspects to be carefully balanced so that everyone in the team constellation is valued and developed equally and differently, that their individual development is supported by the team activities. So, there is a blend of developmental activities that make sense to the whole.

Harthill's vertical Team Developmental Inquiry will bring huge benefits over time -

• developed and growing sense of shared identity and a unifying purpose with a clear sense of inclusivity
• systemic embracing of complexity, ambiguity, unpredictability and paradox
• ability to surface and nurture talents much more broadly and flexibly
• applying talented "teaming" to emerging situations
• inclusive practices developed within teams for its own members and beyond
• enabling of Agile practices and other approaches to organisational effectiveness

DEVELOPMENTAL INQUIRY SUPERVISION

Harthill has a growing community of Coaches. As part of our commitment to our coaches, to our community and to clients with internal coaching communities, we also have been researching and creating Developmental Inquiry Supervision. Supervision is key to the ongoing development of every Coach, focusing on their developmental practices, their ethical considerations and sometimes also supporting the expansion of their knowledge and skills.

The complexity of the many and varied choices facing coaches in complex organisational systems needs to be met with a matching level of development in their own compexity of thinking. This is embodied in the work of the coach in the system. It is important for supervision to support coaches fully in their work with clients, in order to be supporting a truly healthy ecosystem.

Harthill also recognises that some communities of internal coaches would benefit from access to this deeper level of Developmental Inquiry Supervision, so is committed to making this available to some client organisations. We see a role for us also to provide supervision in the coaching market that is responsive to a more complex world and to coaches needing to support clients in that complexity. In providing supervision that includes deliberately developmental practices for coaches, we hope to support an even broader population of leaders in their capacity to lead in complexity.