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I’m honored…

I’m honored and excited to share that I am now a certified Leadership Agility 360 Coach.

The Leadership Agility 360 is a powerful assessment tool that gives leaders detailed feedback on how their actions help and hinder the performance of their team.

I think what makes it so powerful is that is grounded on deep conceptual theory of human development and growth, AND it is extremely pragmatic. It really focuses on behaviors: What is that you do, as a leader, that helps and hinders.

Certified Leadership Agility 360 Coach

The theory comes into play in that the behaviors are the actions that research show actually matter.

I had to take a couple people through the 360 for my certification, and one of them was kind enough to post a referral over on LinkedIn:

I recently completed a Leadership Agility 360 Development program led by Evan. After almost 35 years building companies and managing teams this journey was tedious, methodical, humbling and exciting. The deep data and written comments gathered during the feedback phase of the program from primary managers, direct reports and key stakeholders was very insightful. The candid and sometimes contrasting information from my perceived leadership capability forced some much needed soul searching.

The program focuses on 24 Leadership Agility Practices in 4 Action Arena’s and was daunting for me initially. The process of summarizing my 6 highest rated and 6 lowest rated Agility Practices was very enlighten. Evan skillfully guided me through the process and spent the right amount of time checking in throughout the journey while coaching me on the written development planner assessments and my 3 action plan objectives.

I was able to applying several of the concepts discovered during the process before we even completed the final action plan sessions. For a professional looking to gain a candid, data enhanced understanding of your current leadership capability with clearly defined areas for improvement, I highly recommend this program led by Evan.

I have links to a case study and a brochure from ChangeWise (Leadership Agility) on this page.

SOFA talk…

Back in May I gave a presentation to the Global Sociocracy For All conference. I really appreciated the chance to think through and share my ideas about the connections between Leadership Agility and Sociocracy.

Leadership Agility is a discipline for charting a course for developing leaders, and Sociocracy is a governance model for designing better ways to make decisions in organization.

As far as I can tell, nobody else is talking about how these are related. In other words, the Leadership Agility community is off doing its thing, and the Sociocracy community is off doing what it does. They’re not talking to each other.

My view is that they should be talking – that you really can’t develop to a Catalyst leader without reinventing how decisions are made in your organization. And likewise, you can’t successfully implement a new governance model if the top leaders aren’t consciously developing their leadership capacity so they can embrace the sociocratic model.

Since this was an audience of sociocracy folks, my presentation introduced Leadership Agility and how my personal journey as a leader moving from Expert to Achiever to Catalyst expressed itself in the deployment of sociocratic principles in my company.

This presentation was a lot of fun. The video of my presentation and a pdf of the talk are available on my Writings page.

Published…

I’m really pleased that Presence Magazine, a juried journal published by Spiritual Directors International, picked up my article “Leaning into Letting – Leadership as a Path on the Spiritual Journey.” It is available in front of their paywall for a limited time. You can download a PDF of it here.

And here is the audio podcast of an interview I had with Presence discussing the key themes of the article.

First essay published…

I’m very excited (and a little nervous) about posting my first essay on this site.

In this essay, “Coaching or Companionship – What’s the Difference“ I begin to articulate this vocation that is emerging for me: Coach – Facilitator – Companion.

I’ve been accused of being a conceptual-thinker (and most of the time I do not think it is meant as a compliment). And that’s probably the root of the apprehension I feel in putting this out there.

At the heart of the matter? The world needs leaders who are operating from a deep place – from their soul. But soul work is subtle.

In Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer writes:

If we want to support each other’s inner lives, we must remember a simple truth: the human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard. If we want to see and hear a person’s soul, there is another truth we must remember: the soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient, and yet shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.

Check out the article and let me know what it stirs in you.

Oh, and a shout out to Rhonda Pfaltzgraff-Carlson over at WorkingWisdom.co for some helpful feedback on the essay.