DNA helps organisations improve their performance through increasing the effectiveness of their leadership.
The emphasis of our work is on the organisation - which we help our clients look at from a complexity perspective - and on the personal, at the same time.
We do this through :
- Leadership and Organisational Assessment : through the use of a Leadership Stages Model that can determine the readiness of individuals and their organisations to handle complex, rapidly changing and demanding environments.
- Breakthrough Coaching : coaching leaders in the skills and capabilities required for breaking through into new ways of leading and influencing their organisations.
- Conversations That Make a Difference : top team workshops that focus on increasing the effectiveness of leaders and their teams, “One conversation at a time”.
- Leading Edge : an in depth residential leadership programme for individuals, or work groups, backed up with ongoing coaching to support implementation.
We share the views of Richard Pascale,
“The ultimate and largely ignored task of senior management today is one of creating and breaking mind sets....the trouble is that 99% of managerial attention today is devoted to techniques that squeeze more and more out of the existing mind sets - and its killing us”
-quote from "Surfing the Edge of Chaos : The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business." Three Rivers Press 2001
Underlying DNA’s work is a belief that a profound shift is taking place in the focus of effective leadership, which we summarise as “Moving from Compliance and Control to Coherence and Commitment” and which we illustrate in our Red / Green curves diagram.
RED CURVE MIND SETS
- Plan the way forward
- Control people in relation to the plan
- Complicated but can be resolved
- Intentionality dominant
- Silo functioning by default
- Power and knowledge hierarchically held
- Works to minimise instability
- Crisis to be avoided or seen as problems to be solved
- Compliance, coordination & consensus
GREEN CURVE MIND SETS
- Learn the way forward
- Connect people up to learn
- Complex and unpredictable
- Emergence and spontaneity encouraged
- Coherence through conversation
- Power and knowledge distributed
- Instability used as a creative source
- Crises welcomed as learning and breakthrough opportunities
- Responsibility and Autonomy enabled
“Leaders who live in the new story help us to understand ourselves differently by the way they lead. They trust our humanness; they welcome the surprises we bring to them; they are curious about our differences; they delight in our inventiveness; they nurture us; they connect us.”
-quote from Margaret Wheatley “Finding Our Way. Leadership for an Uncertain Time” Berrett-Koehler 2005
Our ability to work with our clients “on the edge” of their comfort zones, with the inevitable anxieties to which such work gives rise, provides DNA with a distinguishing and competitive advantage in our leadership development work.
