What can we do together that we can’t do alone? Rethinking leadership and self-development through the lens of relationships.

Fri, 16th March, 2018 from 9:30 AM, in London

“Relating with another person is one of the most powerful crucibles for our growth and awakening, giving us the opportunity to learn to become more aware and able to see ourselves more clearly, to love more deeply, to communicate and show ourselves transparently as we grow trust.”

Malcolm Stern

 

 

As people who believe they are responsible for your own long term personal development, we invite you to join us in London for our next London Sadler Heath event with Julian Burton and Elinor Rebeiro.

Julian and Elinor believe that the quality of interpersonal relationships at work is central to personal learning, wellbeing, performance and the success of every organisation.

In this workshop they want to do two things. Firstly, to set the scene by sharing some leadership research that is helping us think about the benefits of more relational styles of leadership and learning. Then they want to do engage in experiential exercises to explore developmental themes that each of us are finding on the edges of our learning and look at how the quality of our relationships could positively influence our capacity to learn and grow.

As O.D. practitioners they find many leaders are experiencing more complexity and uncertainty in their role leading change. Some they talk to feel stuck, overworked and exhausted. They often hear that clients want to move away from command and control and move towards more collaborative ways of working. The focus of culture change seems to be becoming more personal; there is a requirement for leaders to role model stepping into new, more collaborative ways of being. For many of us this may involve some degree of personal growth and for others, a significant transformation.

There seems to be a growing need for more relational ways of leading and managing. The dominant view of management is still that work is done transactionally by individuals (Hartling, L. and Sparks, E., 2008); yet the collaborative, interactive nature of organising and coordinating mutually interdependent tasks and roles means that effective working relationships are what gets things done (Fletcher 2001).  We are not machines, we are human beings with needs and feelings. We are not autonomous beings, we are all deeply connected, we need each other and our relationships are what matter most in life. Our lives are a tapestry woven from the fabric of our relationships. This is why they believe that organisations can’t afford not to focus on building relationships as a central theme in leadership development and culture change work.

They will engage us in some experiential exercises to explore the different ways we can relate to each other at work and discuss how that can illuminate the direction that leadership development might need to take in order to more fully support organisations to thrive.

Jeremy Keeley will be moderating this event, which will be held in our now normal venue of the Amadeus Centre near Little Venice.  A light continental breakfast including Kay’s lovely muffins will be available from 9am, formal activities will run from 9:30am to 1pm and will be followed by lunch for those who want to stay, again home-cooked by the centre’s wonderful chef, Kay.

Julian Burton, Director at Delta7, has worked as a change consultant since 2007. As a consultant, he is dedicated to improving the quality of dialogue in organisations, and supporting people to build the relationships needed for organisations to be more human,  effective and successful. Julian has worked at the LSE Complexity Research Group, is an active member of the Organisational Development Network Europe and is has recently contributed to the forthcoming book, the Handbook of Research Methods in Complexity Science [2017]

Elinor Rebeiro, Managing Director of Delta7 Change Ltd. has been a change consultant since 2011. Her passion is for supporting organisational development, working with organisations experiencing cultural changes and supporting them to develop leadership behaviour and build relationships between leaders and employees. Her client work led to her PhD discipline centering on embodied voice and silence in organisations. She has presented at the Critical Management Studies Conference and also The Developing Leadership Capacity Conference