Community

At Leadership Choices we are self-organized in communities. Most of these groups circle around specific applications of coaching in a client setting. Others cover specific functions or areas of interest. Each associate chooses if he or she wants to be engaged in any specific community e.g. because there is something to learn or because it simply is fun. The associates who are active in our community life form the inner circle of our company and are considered first when it comes to staffing projects or allocating business opportunities. All community meetings are open for all associates to join. Each community is typically facilitated by two Co-Leads who organize the meetings and make sure the collaboration is engaging and productive. The Co-Leads are nominated for one year and can than either pass on the baton to another colleague or continue their mandate for another year.

These are the LC Communities at a glance:

 

Get a first impression of our communities...

LC University

At Leadership Choices, it is important to us to foster both growth and a sense of belonging within our highly diverse and experienced community of coaches. Our internal LC University is our living centre of learning, our virtual campus of networking, growth and collaboration. It is also a place where our coaches can gain qualifications and participate in certification programmes for selected psychometric instruments. All our coaches bring valuable experience which in turn forms the eclectic core of our Coaching Solutions for Entrepreneurs and Managers. All our coaches work according to our coaching philosophy and the Leadership Choices model. Each week there is a wide range of community events, workshops for coaches, space to develop new ideas together and ongoing certification programmes. Our coaches can choose what best suits their needs and those of our clients from a vibrant campus life. In the LC University we consolidate our competences and exchange experiences from concrete assignments. We also help new associates to feel at home with us and organise supervision, case discussions and support each other in renewing our coach certification. Celebrations within our organisation are also organised here. The spirit of LC University is fed by trust, abundance and collegiality and leads to a broad commitment to quality combined with fun and joy in working together.

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Dr. Uta B. Nachbaur

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Silke Klees

Team Coaching

We also work with leadership teams. While the goal of achieving more impact is oftentimes similar to working with individual executives, coaching a team is very different from coaching individual managers and can also be quite challenging. Coming from a systemic point of view, Team Coaching is setting up organizational co-working towards a common goal. Our approach is to achieve greater cohesion and psychological safety in a team. Moreover, group dynamics and conflict lines have to be identified, considered and realigned. To address this appropriately, we deliver this type of assignments in a team of coaches. Our POWER model for highly effective teams is a common approach that we all share. In our Team Coaching Community, we consolidate our competence in this field and exchange experiences from concrete assignments.

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Mohamed Sharaf Eldin

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Dieter Wunderlich

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Gabriele Maier-Güttler

Resilience Coaching

In challenging times, the topics mental health, crisis competence and resilience become more important. Over the last decade, we have developed models, approaches, and tools around the topics of executive resilience, resilient leadership, and team resilience. Among them are the FiRE Model of Executive Resilience and the resilience measurement instrument Executive FiRE Index 2.0. We have also developed approaches to train and supervise resilience coaches in organizations to make sure all employees have access to well-trained colleagues who can support them on a day-to-day basis. In this community, we consolidate our competence in this field and exchange experiences from concrete assignments.

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Oliver Erbe

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Petra Lewe

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Barbara Romanos

Organizational Evolution

When leaders want to change the ways how organizations work on the inside, they often try to achieve this by changing the outside, i.e. the organizational setup and responsibilities. Oftentimes, this does not yield the desired outcome. We believe that if you want to help an organization to change and transform, you need to work with the people in charge and help them understand how their mental models and action logics influence the dynamics in the organizational system as a whole. Once this is understood, the desired transformational process can be created and designed.

Over the last years, we have developed models in the area of Organizational Maturity and Resilience to align our reasoning and successfully supported organizations in transformational projects based on our organizational coaching mindset.

In this community, we consolidate our competence in this field and exchange both research and experiences from concrete assignments.

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Dr. Holger Karsten

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Swaan Barrett

Dr. Holger Karsten

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Dr. Holger Karsten

Agile Coaching

Another special application of coaching is the field of digital transformation in organizations. Over the last years, many companies have started to work with agile approaches and methods in order to increase the speed, versatility and efficiency of product development or software engineering. However, working with a different method alone does not automatically change the mindset of the people in charge. And oftentimes such a shift is what is really needed. Therefore, our Agile Coaches play an important role in helping teams and individuals adopt a different way of thinking to enable a new way of working together. In this community, we consolidate our competence in this field and exchange experiences from concrete projects.

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Frank Dannenhauer

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Dr. Richard Grillenbeck

Navigating Complexity

The dynamics between organizational entities and the markets and societies in which they operate are oftentimes complex, i.e. there is no predictable relationship between cause and effect. Much rather, the development can be described as emergent, that means it can only be understood with the benefit in hindsight. One recent example are the effects of the Corona Pandemic on individual business. While in a given industry, some organizations suffered badly while others thrived. Most of today’s leaders have been trained to break business challenges down into small enough pieces and treat each of it as if it was complicated. In a complicated situation, the relationship between cause and effect can be understood by experts and hence outcomes become predictable. Oftentimes this is simply an illusion of control and manageability. Complexity research suggests that complex situations should be addressed with small organizational experiments to learn what works in any given situation and extrapolate from it. One innovative tool that can support leaders in observing the inner works in their organization is SenseMaker. In our community we meet regularly to discuss organizational, and sometimes also societal, topics through the lens of complexity. We consolidate our competence in this field and exchange both research and experiences from concrete assignments with client organizations.

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Johann Entz von Zerssen

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Anne Caspari

Inclusify

Creating conditions for diversity to flourish has become crucial for the leaders of today. In its broadest sense, diversity acknowledges how diverse human beings are, how much our mindset, our values, our communication style can be different from one another. Yet, navigating diversity is taxing and human beings often unconsciously prefer sameness. Whether we like it or not, when faced with diversity we often treat people differently based on our unconscious assumptions, feelings and judgments. The purpose of this community is twofold. On the one hand, we want to support our clients to open up for more diversity in their organizations and create conditions where everybody feels included. Diversity will then function as a motor of innovation and change. On the other hand, we also want to improve the levels of diversity and inclusiveness within our own community Leadership Choices. In this community, we consolidate our competence and experience in this field and exchange both research and experiences from concrete assignments and help each other overcome our unconscious biases.

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Prajna Paramita

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Dr. Dorothee Kaiser

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Dr. Dorothee Kaiser

Tailored Leadership Development

In the community Tailored Leadership Development, we are gathering all the experience and passion for designing, piloting, and scaling highly individualized leadership solutions, be it virtual, hybrid or on premise. We believe in a coaching mindset as an essential ingredient to all we do, also when it comes to leadership development. What this means is that we are convinced that collectively the participants in our learning journeys have the solution to the challenges they are facing already somewhere inside of them. The job of our coaches who have been managers themselves for a long time is simply to help the participants uncover these solutions and put them into action. This certainly also requires some models and tools. A major part of learning, however, is created by creating a safe space and inviting our participants to work on assignments which are challenging for them. These heat experiences can be manyfold from guided introspection to steering group dynamics or running an intensive leadership simulation. It is these convictions that drive us when we are designing tailored leadership development programs in a co-creative process together with our clients. To ensure sustainability and vertical development effects our learning journeys often contain individual coaching elements, group and peer coachings and the ongoing facilitation of alumni communities.

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Stefanie Arnold

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Friedemann Derndinger

Leadership Choices Academy

In this community we are bundling our faculty who are offering open enrollment leadership journeys to our diverse client base. At Leadership Choices, we have a holistic understanding of leadership development. We see it more as a way of realizing your full potential than learning a set of techniques. The key to becoming an effective leader is to learn how to win people’s trust and inspire them to follow you because of your humility, integrity, and authenticity. This requires deep listening and empathy for the people you are leading. It requires you to be able to hold opposing viewpoints inside of you and refraining from “Black-and-White-Thinking” when making decisions.

It requires superior levels of both self-awareness and self-management. As you become more impactful in your professional development, being an effective leader also means developing a reliable ethical compass that helps you navigate when the corporate rules are blurred. These convictions are what drive us when we are designing open enrollment leadership journeys for our participants.

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Kussai El-Chichakli

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Bernhard Broekman

Better World

We at Leadership Choices have made a conscious commitment to support non-profit organizations with our experience and expertise in coaching, resilience, and leadership development. Following our vision Better Leadership – Better Organizations – Better World, our coaches are honored to work with leaders of the social and environmental sector. We help them and their teams thrive on their mission to help realize the Sustainable Development Goals as stipulated by the United Nations. Together, we have a huge impact supporting leaders of large NGOs in developing more cohesive and impactful teams and organizations. Given our broad experience, we also add value by supporting social entrepreneurs to get their venture successfully past the initial seed financing to have real societal impact in the long run. In this community, we bundle our experiences in working with and for the social and environmental sector.

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Olga Vasylets

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Anne Schweppenhäußer

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Anne Schweppenhäußer

Shaking the Tree

It is one thing to be a great coach and help a client to achieve more impact in his leadership role. It is a totally different skillset however, to connecting with potential clients, finding common ground, and building trust to eventually identify potential opportunities for joint projects which create real impact and sustainable value. We view our work in the Shaking the Tree community very much as a team sport which is based on the one hand on trust, fun and co-creation. On the other hand, developing new opportunities also requires professionalism, structure, and a lot of creativity. Given the size, experience, and diversity of our community of coaches, we are a great partner for large international companies that are headquartered in Germany but have subsidiaries all over the world. As a strong team, we excel both in individual coaching engagements at all levels and also in company-wide leadership or organizational development programs where effective collaboration of the coach-team with the client organization is essential. In this community, we bundle all efforts and competencies for business development and work together to find new ways of increasing our impact on the world out there.

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Dr. Holger Karsten

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Martin Kruse

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Dr. Holger Karsten

Client Partners

At Leadership Choices we highly value a decentral approach to entrepreneurship and co-creation. Therefore, we both encourage and enable many of our coaches to become Client Partners. This group of trusted associates owns the relationship between Leadership Choices and specific client organizations and oversees all running mandates. In our conferences, they present cases of real-life projects together with their client counterparts and share the learning with our large ecosystem. Based on these ongoing collaborations, Client Partners gain more understanding of the specific challenges of “their” clients over time. Consequently, it puts them in a position to present better-informed suggestions for leadership or organizational development initiatives to their counterpart providing instant value to the company. In this community we therefore bring together all Client Partners on a regular basis to exchange lessons learned and develop new ideas in a collaborative way.

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Uwe Achterholt

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Karsten Drath

Talent

Who would know better which coaches fit to Leadership Choices than our Associates themselves? This is the basic idea behind our recruiting community. In a structured process, interested applicants run through several steps of the application process including two interviews which are conducted by trusted associates of the recruiting community. After that, the new coaches are supported by members of this community until they are fully onboarded and integrated into a Community. The members of the Recruiting Community come together on a regular basis to exchange observations and discuss ideas to further finetune the recruiting and onboarding process.

If you want to join, please start your application process here.

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Swaan Barret

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Melanie Siekmöller

Quality

The brand Leadership Choices stands for consistently high quality across all our offerings. Over the last years our average quality score for individual and team coaching has been 9.2 (out of 10). The reason we can say this is because we measure the satisfaction of our clients both qualitatively and quantitatively by so-called Quality Assurance Calls. These calls are triggered automatically around half-time of any given coaching engagement. They are conducted by trusted associates of our Quality Community and the results are shared with the coach to help him or her to finetune the approach in this particular coaching mandate. With the support of our Coaching Management Solution Cosmikk® we make sure that none of our mandates falls through the grid.

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Friedemann Derndinger

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Doris van de Sand

Marketing

In the Community Social Media, we bundle all our expertise and experience around editorial planning and the post-production of high-quality social media content. This includes videos, animations, graphics, text, carousels as well as the production of our biographic interview podcast Leaders Talk. It is the goal of this community to continuously grow our follower base on social media and to optimize the reach of our messages into our ecosystem. We do this by providing content which aims to inspire our ecosystem and support them on their personal development journey. Also, we are providing updates of what is happening at Leadership Choices. The members of this community regularly come together to discuss current developments and trends as well as latest insights from social media formats, algorithms, and other interesting news.

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Lena Wokurka

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Hannah Jandl

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Karsten Drath