Our Offerings
Fostering effective leadership and sustainable change by tapping into your full potentialOrganizational Development & Change Facilitation
We offer facilitation of organizational development and change processes (change facilitation) for a variety of industries and business situations. Our goal is to provide your organization with the tools and capabilities to creatively adapt to an ever-changing external world and continuously shape the future. We help your organization identify the potential for improvement and develop strategies to maximize the success of change efforts.
Why do we call it “facilitation”? Facilitation means enabling, promoting, supporting. We call it this because our approach enables you to identify, nurture and realize the full potential of your organization and your people. Sustainable systemic change is based on the participation of all stakeholders who have information about the system and who have the power and the means to make things happen. In other words, all people who belong to the system, who have a particular claim or at least a concern. We enable the participation of all people who can contribute to change and are affected by it. By involving people, we make them agents of change.
As change facilitators, we act in an impartial way and accompany your change process in the foreground. We also offer to accompany you in the background as a coach and sparring partner and to develop your own skills as a facilitative leader in our facilitation workshops.
Leadership Development
Our customised Leadership Development is experiential and holistic, focussing on the three leadership dimensions leading yourself, leading others and leading business. Participants build skills and attitudes to become servant leaders, take ownership and facilitate own and other’s leadership – indispensable capabilities in an increasingly complex and agile work environment.
With increasing complexity and unpredictability of our fast changing world, leaders need to enhance the capabilities they could rely upon in a relatively steady world. Many organisations have changed structures, processes and technologies hoping to become able to cope and adapt faster. Seemingly, the new demands often outstrip the organisational capacity to grow the leaders who are able to make sense of the new circumstances they are expected to lead.
In our Leadership Development Program we create conditions to catalyse creative and effective leadership. Participants develop new inner capacities to reflect, relate and act which enhance their visible capabilities to handle the complex and unpredictable world:
- Facilitate group conversations
- Navigate polarities
- Exploit diversity
- Handle different contexts
- Foster creativity and innovation
- Govern personal conduct
We stand on the shoulders of many people. Our approaches and methods are significantly influenced by «Immunity to Change» by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey and by «The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures» by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. We work closely together with MDV Leadership and Talent Consultants in London, especially for Leadership Assessments.
Team Development
You want your team to become more effective and better aligned with your organisational purpose? Our customised Team Development supports you as a team to make effective progress within defined strategies. Together with you, we determine the desired results, define roles and responsibilities, work on the collective behaviour and develop the processes for how you can become a high-performance team. Our goal is achieved when your team knows how to adapt behaviour to entrepreneurial challenges and thus is in good contact with one another and with the outside world.
We use a variety of tools and methodologies which build on diversity and the full integration of individual strengths, skills and capabilities in order to tap into the full potential of your team.
We help you to implement success factors of effective teams:
- The team members know each other well
- The team has common objectives
- Cooperation is based on mutual trust
- The roles are clearly and sensibly distributed
- The team has a constructive conflict culture
- The leadership ensures that the above conditions are created
In our Facilitation Workshops you develop the capabilities of a facilitative leader who fosters team development day by day.
Ego Development
Are you ready to step up as a leader, to experience a step change in your performance? One of the fastest ways to grow and overcome a challenge is to see clearly what the core issue or conflict is within you. Whether you are struggling with
- staying calm during frustrating meetings,
- saying “no” and setting boundaries without feeling guilty, or
- feeling confident in your decisions (and not like an imposter or fraud).
What is ego development?
The model of ego development is based on a constructivist understanding of development, which goes back to the approach of the Swiss researcher Jean Piaget. Scientists like Jane Loevinger and Robert Kegan expanded this developmental stage approach. They not only explored how a person’s personality develops and thus matures internally. They also identified different stages of personality development that are independent of a person’s age, especially in adulthood. In English, it is also often referred to as “adult development.”
In short, the theory of ego development postulates that people have the opportunity to pass through certain stages of cognitive development during adulthood, and that as people pass through the stages, increasingly greater abilities become available to them – for example, being more strategic, more self-aware, more diplomatic, more innovative. Research by Kegan and others has shown that later developmental stages correlate with better leadership performance.
Ego-development approaches assume that the thought structures a person uses to gain an understanding of his or her world are gradually built and expanded. These structures can gradually become more differentiated and integrated, i.e., evolve. With each stage of ego development, a person crosses a mental developmental boundary between the world he currently knows and understands and the world he does not yet know and cannot understand.
Unlike standard personality models, determining an individual’s ego development does not examine what a person thinks or what is meaningful to them but rather how they think and how they give meaning to the world and things around them.
Determining Your Ego Development
There are various methods available for determining your level of personal maturity. You can fill out a written sentence completion test, the evaluation of which provides information about your individual inner maturity. For the evaluation of your Ego-Development-Profile we work together with Dr. Thomas Binder and his team from the Center for Ego-Development & Transformation (ZIE&T) in Berlin.
Another way to determine your individual maturity is an Ego-Development Interview (IEI), which we conduct directly with you. In this complex and nuanced interview, we listen to you to understand just one thing: How do you make sense of things in the world?
The IEI is an evolution of the Subject-Object Interview (SOI) developed by Dr. Robert Kegan and colleg:ers at Harvard University. The IEI was developed by a student of Kegan, Dr. Jennifer Garvey Berger, and colleagues specifically to support personal growth and development (Growth Edge Coaching). In her book, Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World, she writes that the IEI process is designed to give you “a map of the current terrain of your meaning-making and support to help you move to a place that better fits the demands of your life.”
The IE Profile and/or the Ego Development Interview (IEI) can help you gain the clarity to understand why your current challenges are challenges for you so that you can (finally) overcome them.
Following the determination of your ego development, you have the opportunity to further develop your personal meaning-making system in a targeted ego development coaching session, if you are so inclined.
Leadership Assessment
In an increasingly interconnected world your competitive advantage will be the availability of agile and transformational leaders. With a Leadership Assessment which is based on the concept of ego development, we add value to your organization in a disrupted business environment. Beyond skills, talents and behavioural traits, we match what is critical to you with those individuals who have the greatest potential to thrive in the role you need to fill.
The concept of ego development looks beyond the usual personality styles, behavioural traits and abilities to assess how an individual makes sense of the information, relations and the world around them. The constructivist approach creates an access to the underlying capacity of an individual to make sense of and respond to situations, working directly on their internal «meaning making», rather than just behaviours or actions.
The core of the assessment is a detailed life cycle interview, which is carried out by experienced assessors and contains knowledge from a variety of suitable psychometric data. We may also recommend additional tools such as simulations, case studies or the Cognitive Process Profile (CPP), a powerful measure of cognitive complexity.
After evaluation, we will prepare a detailed report for you, showing the particular strengths and likely areas of development and potential in a number of skill areas, including how the person can deal with ambiguity and complexity.
For further information on the concept of vertical development and our partners in the area of leadership refer to MDV Consulting.
Coaching
Our Coaching focusses on improving individual effectiveness and performance through behavioural shifts. We support our customers to build necessary skills to achieve critical deliverables which are in line with their organisational objectives.
Are you facing a special challenge, have you taken on a new role or is your company in the middle of a major change process? If you want to achieve your objectives in the best way, our coaching offers you experienced support. The primary goal of all our support is that you develop your highest personal effectiveness.
Executive Coaching
Do you have a demanding management position?
We support you in quickly expanding your leadership skills, using management tools more effectively, acting more confidently, communicating clearly and conveying empathy.
Transition Coaching
Have you taken on a new leadership position?
We support you in quickly penetrating your new role, clarifying expectations, acting from a powerful position and providing the first important impulses.
Change Management Coaching
Are you planning a restructuring or did you have to take on a change project?
With our expertise in change facilitation we act as your sparring partner in the background to support you in finding the levers to become effective as leader and involve others as change agents.
Sparring Partner
Are you looking for pure reflection and a sparring partner?
As experienced supervisor, familiar with organisational and leadership challenges, we support you to gain distance from everyday life and a neutral view of yourself and your environment.
Conflict Coaching
Are you in the middle of exhausting tensions?
Our conflict coaching supports you in navigating polarities, transforming the energy inherent in tension into constructive power and redirecting the focus on your business results.
Adult Development Coaching
You are successful, but you are looking for ways to become more effective and really grow as a person?
With an Adult Development Profile (I-E-Profile or MDV Leadership Assessment), we explore your level of personal development in a unique way and start an insightful developmental journey where your current edges of personal growth and challenges lie.
Clarification & Mediation
Mediation is a structured process with the goal of clarifying conflicts. As a mediator, Nicole Werner accompanies conflicting parties in their process of conflict resolution.
Conflicts are quite normal and an expression of lively contact between people. It is tough and unpleasant when conflicts are not recognized and soundly clarified. As a rule, they then have devastating consequences for those involved and often also for those only marginally involved. In private life as well as in everyday work, the effects of conflicts affect the atmosphere as well as practical issues of living and effectively working together.
This is where clarification support comes in: It is an extremely effective method of mediation. The goal of every conflict moderation is a sustainable solution that involves all parties. However, the basis for such a conflict resolution is always clarity between the conflict parties – and always on the level of facts as well as on the level of feelings. A special focus of clarification support is the “repair” of hurt feelings, which will undermine sustainable solutions as long as they remain under the surface. We use the method of clarification support to help you achieve sustainable solutions for all parties involved.
Facilitation Workshops
In our Facilitation Workshops you and your co-workers learn how to include and unleash everyone in a group and use the creative energy of diversity. Participants experience how to benefit from the collective intelligence of teams and organisations. In our workshops you act your way into new thinking, rather than think your way into new acting.
A facilitator or facilitative leader promotes self-organisation in a group and supports open-ended, participative processes. For the unfolding of a group’s potential, the facilitator provides clear structures, principles and practices and ensures that they are adhered to. Facilitators can let go, do less to create more space. They welcome conflicts and use them to raise awareness of the diversity in the group. In this way, facilitators enable profound change and transformation processes in groups, organisations or networks.
You can find more about the art of facilitation on the website of the International Association of Facilitators.
Content of Facilitation Workshops
- The core competencies of a facilitator: from controlling to enabling
- Create and maintain a participatory environment
- Foster creative, productive and playfull collaboration
- Navigate polarities
- Levels of dialogue and dialogue practice
- Role of mindfulness
During the workshop we work with the facilitative power of Liberating Structures.
For more about Liberating Structures please contact us. We offer customised Immersion Workshops in English and German.