Are you an Entrepreneur who is passionate about growing a vision without sacrificing its core ideals, or the lives of the people devoted to it?
Are you ready to build a mission-driven organization with the agility to thrive in these uncertain and rapidly changing times?
What is Beyond Listening?
Beyond Listening is a robust and accessible online program with live sessions that assist leaders and organizations in building their adaptive capacity, facilitative leadership and the ability to navigate steady, rapid, and fundamental shifts in their internal and external environments. While many in organizations are in the difficult job of adjusting structures and ways of doing things form within already developed systems, Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to build their projects and ideas using new systems and processes aligned with the new world of work.
What we’ve observed
We have been experiencing unprecedented shifts in our world. Listening to startups, social impact organizations, non-profit, and religious leadership across the globe, We are Open Circle has documented these foundational shifts, and the struggles and opportunities these changes have presented. While the responses have been diverse, the themes are overwhelmingly shared. A sampling of these themes included concerns about:
Safety, especially for organizations who are still operating in-person businesses. Coupled with unclear governmental policies or mixed messages, this has become the primary concern for many organizations.
Preserving company culture: “Who are we if we aren’t together?”
Strong focus on need to achieve goals with a long term fatigue and often challenging personal environments
Navigating issues of race and gender equity, diversity, and inclusion
Loss of informal communication and social interactions
Zoom/tech fatigue
Hiring staff in online environments
Where do we go from here?
Overall, there is a strong sense that we will not go back to the way things were, and no one is certain where we are headed.
These conversations, interviews, and listening circles build upon We are Open Circle’s 5+ years of researching and piloting approaches that assist leaders and organizations in building their adaptive capacity; or ability to navigate steady, rapid, and fundamental shifts in their internal and external environments.
Over the last few months we have accelerated our work to launch Beyond Listening and now we are extending that to a unique approach to build new organizations from the ground up in a creative way that keeps your team agile and mission centered in high growth.
Adaptive organizations require new sorts of leadership whose capacities and skills can be developed, and which are needed now more than ever.
In the past, leaders were chosen and cultivated for their:
Technical skill and expertise
Personal charisma and social/cultural power
And their ability to influence others
These skills and capacities rely on fixed systems. These systems are changing rapidly.
Skill Development
In this changing environment, leaders need to facilitate change and build collective systems able to adapt to complex and rapid change.
Their skillset needs to include:
The ability to cultivate and practice listening, awareness, and understanding across divisions, roles, and even industries.
Vision as the animating spirit of growth of the team - heals by all instead of the founder
Relying and developing instinct as a way of knowing alongside “working it out”
Building cohesion and alignment in decision making
Guiding collectives (teams, groups, organizations) through birth and death cycles
Group and situational (ecosystem) awareness
Self and group awareness around biases, limiting agendas, and power uses and abuses
Cultural awareness and cultural leadership
Please join us to learn more about the changing landscape of leadership and organization development across a spectrum of industries. Let your project and idea blossom and grow in alignment with the new world of work.