Leadership Development
Executive und Team Coaching
Als erster im deutschsprachigen Raum akkreditierter The Leadership Gift™ Coach für The Responsibility Process, coachen wir ihre Teams und Leader basierend auf den Prinzipien des co-active coaching, evolutionary coaching von Richard Barrett, cultural transformation tools (CTT) von Barrett Values Centre und The Leadership Gift™ von Christopher Avery.
Als Certified Coach by Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching, garantieren wir messbare Ergebnisse im Leadership Development.
„Ilker is an exceptional coach and mentor. He has the ability to make transformation and change happen which can lead to exceptional results for groups and individuals.“, Marcus Börner, Founder and CEO at OptioPay Group.
„Ilker has been supporting Swarm64 in our change process to an agile organization using the Scrum methodology.
Ilker’s friendly persistence in following the responsibility process and his resilience against challenges and setbacks have been instrumental to the success we are seeing. Thanks to Ilker’s contributions, we have been able to develop a shared leadership culture in which each team member accepts responsibility and takes initiative for our joint goals. Swarm64 became a much stronger organisation through working with him. I strongly recommend Ilker’s work.“, Dr. Karsten Rönner, CEO swarm64, Entrepreneur and Investor.
Listening
Let us imagine that someone is coming to us with a problem.
And we are listening.
What may happen with us is to check in our database/thoughts (values, beliefs, experiences..) whether we had similar problem as she and what were the consequences of that problem in our case. Everything what she says is internally interpreted, evaluated by us.
With this information we get very much involved in the conversation and we sympathize with her.
This moment can be a good sign for not listening. Yes, this is not listening; it is the start of dealing with ourself, with our thoughts. If the problem is not fitting into our „list“ of „advices“ we get irritated. Irritation comes from fear and we feel out of control.
What is out of control?
…
So, what to do not to fall into the trap of „being out of control“?
What do we do when we listen?
We do this by letting go of the desire to stabilize, control the life, which is continuously changing.
This way of listening supports your colleague. She sees the problem with clarity, which gives her more confidence to solve it. She gains more trust towards you as a leader.
You as a leader have proven again your trust to your colleague, that she can solve problems and by listening you have learned a lot more about yourself as a leader.
You have extended your new areas to discover.
„Great leader have great teams“ is no more an illusion once your intention is stronger than your fear.
Agile Transformation is a Cultural Transformation
For good reasons many organizations have chosen to go through an „agile transformation“ while using Scrum as a framework for complex product development processes.
This transformation is a journey and impacting the way of working, the behavior.
With the positive attitude, enthusiasm and the genuine commitment from both top and down the transformation starts very well. After a while -even in the development teams the transformation shows the expected results- at wider range in the company the transformations slows, even more the transformation becomes something for „development only“. Old behaviors comes back and it starts limiting the growing space of agile teams. As a result the progress of those teams reach a „plateau“, where they do not grow anymore and even worse it may start to shrink. Shrinking becomes visible with less employe engagement and lack of trust between the teams and disconnect towards higher management.
Those may be the warning signs „lost energy“ (hard: money/cash; soft: internal cohesion) caused by frictions, which require everyone to think and act. In other words: transformation is most likely going to fail and it will be only a „change“: framework is adapted but the behavior remains the same as before.
What could be the reasons for that?
Agile Transformation is a „Cultural Transformation“. Why? Scrum is giving a framework and asking to change the way of working and embracing the following values: commitment, focus, courage, openness and respect. Those values are positive and everyone agrees on the importance.
Values are „real values“, if they are lived daily by demonstrating them with behavior and taken as a „decision criteria“. Printing them with large letters and putting everywhere does not help, if the behavior is not reflecting the value itself. As the culture is developed by behavior, the transformation we are looking for is cultural transformation: moving from the old towards a new one.
If the mentioned values are not lived or they can not be lived due to „potentially limiting“ values in an organization (like: hierarchy, blame, micro-management), then the envisioned agile transformation will have hard time to flourish.
What could be a way to go?
No matter whether you are in the transformation process or just about to start it:
Here is the challenge: this is a personal transformation. It requires personal commitment. Organizations do not transform, transform people do!