After eight years of being self-employed, my work has changed considerably compared to 2015.
I started out as a Method Coach for cross-functional collaboration, including methodologies such as Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Scrum. This is also where my name ‘Innovation Coach’ comes from.
My objectives and my drivers for my work have remained largely unchanged though compared to the beginning of my self-employment: For me, innovative strength and resilience of companies start with good collaboration. Therefore, my efforts focus on supporting companies, leaders, teams, and individual employees in rethinking their collaboration. The goals I pursue during my work always are: generating better workflows, more seamless communication, higher transparency, and more commitment within teams.
Today, I would therefore tend to introduce myself as a Team Developer, rather than as a Method Coach. My view has become more holistic as a result of my own experience (also gained from failed projects, as described in my most recent newsletter) and my two-year training course for systemic coaching.
A team always represents a system that consists of at least the team members and their manager. Therefore, team development in my view also includes – apart from working with the team – coaching the leader. Moreover, the system ‘team’ is embedded in a larger system, namely that of the organization. This aspect also remains one of the focus areas of my work. In order to improve team work on a sustainable basis, it is therefore often necessary to also analyze the structures outside of the team.
True to the motto “Change is the only constant” (Heraclitus of Ephesus, 535-475 BCE), I expect that my areas of focus will continue to change over and over again – based on the needs of my customers as well as driven by new insights gained.
The activities I am already aware of for the first quarter of 2023 will certainly be an inspiration for change:
- Continuing the cooperation with my colleagues Vanessa Giese and Heike Heeg for joint client projects and open webinars (you can read more about this in my next newsletter).
- Conducting a training for 10 facilitators in a client organization in an agile context - here I will help my client to establish agile values and a corresponding attitude in the agile transformation in a sustainable way.
- Performing a customized training for all product owners in a client organization - by aligning the product owner role in my client's organization I will further support their organizational development
- Executing a communication training for software engineers - I enjoy helping employees with an exclusively technical background becoming speakable in order to be able to resolve conflicts themselves
- Open seminar on the topic: 'Systemic' in Hof Gnadenthal
And for sure, other areas of exciting activities will arise in the course of the year....
I am very much looking forward to making the world a little bit better together with you in 2023 and to enable appreciative collaboration, thus generating added value for your organization and for the society as a whole.
This text first appeared in my newsletter 'Innovation on Wednesday'. It is published every other Wednesday. For subscription click here