Who's Tending Your Corporate Vitality?

❝ In my over 40 years of work experience, yesterday
was the best training day I had ever attended.❞

Participant in TTC client engagement held at DCHS, Dec 2018 ~

I appreciate feedback like this. But as a developmental facilitator who's worked intensively with dozens of distributed teams and hundreds of diverse people, I'm generally more concerned with something else which just can't be gleaned 'til much later — 

The scope, duration and generative impact of a client's initial enthusiasm: up and down their lines of command, across their matrix, and throughout their enterprise (in this case, serving over a quarter million customers).

Because in the flush of a learner's sudden breakthrough or soaring success, any training can feel terrific. But its true effectiveness lies in the client's subsequent application, leveraging and shaping to their own unique conditions afterward. What will they actually make of their investment of time, attention, budget and other resources? Not just now, in the near term, but for the long haul? 

How will they generate, and then sustain, more individual and group vitality?

The person who issued the glowing comment above had just joined scores of co-workers in completing a key segment of their annual staff retreat with my fellow TTC coaches and me. Their leaders had set it at a venue bearing an inspired public message *, and they brought us in for fresh professional support with team building, personal growth and overall organizational development. In preparing for this, they had identified half a dozen specific factors which signaled their collective success. 

While our service engagement unfolded together, a few employees described what they saw as chronic features of their corporate culture that held them back and quashed their motivation to strive for improvement.

As an antidote to that, how potent or enduring would our intervention — plus one individual's earnest enthusiasm — really prove?

At the very least, my co-facilitators and I temporarily disrupted our client's routine with the custom-designed challenge-based experiential learning that we offered them. And we created space for different conversations between staff members, about their persistent workplace issues. Perhaps these participants got some genuine benefit just from that, whether or not any of them also deemed it their best training ever.

That word "training" is worth a closer look here. As a developmental team/leader/executive coach, I urge clients to shift their perspective around what my kindred colleagues and I actually bring them. To view it less as traditional training and more as pointing, prompting and probing; as inviting all and catalyzing some; as affirming anyone and challenging everybody.

And when we facilitate really well, to see us as responding authentically in the moment from an open place of deep listening and service.

Corporate teams can intentionally envision and deliver all of this to themselves, for themselves, and with each other — long after we professional facilitators have left the building.

When we do our jobs right, and when our clients do same, then they get the best training day ever by mutually co-creating that experience through their own high-quality contributions. Through the intention, attention, effort, presence and personal character that they bring to the opportunity, along with their skills and competencies.

In that spirit, consider this altered version of the vision statement depicted at top *, which beckoned us all this month:

Our vitality is built upon
the health of our co-workers
and the capacity of our company
to foster and enhance
the wellbeing of every employee.

I relish my role as trusted ally and seasoned guide who gets brought in to help make things better, again and again. But ultimately, my clients will look to themselves as their own recurring providers, day in and day out. For better or worse, they're also the continual consumers of whatever they dish up for each other. Their organization's vitality flags or flourishes on that.

* The marquee at DCHS' front entrance 
(depicted top of page) reads as follows:

DURHAM'S VITALITY IS BUILT UPON

THE HEALTH OF OUR RESIDENTS

AND THE CAPACITY OF OUR COMMUNITY

TO FOSTER AND ENHANCE

THE WELLBEING OF EVERY CITIZEN.