Industrialisation seeds humanity with greed and separation. Lost inside a dream of machines, we numb our senses by chasing tasks and activities. We sleep walk through our work with unexamined assumptions of growth and false sense of achievement. In pursuit of consumerism, we paralyse our human potential. Collegial connection is shredded by the ratrace and competition. Under a structure of power and hierarchy, we march to our destruction through the very busy work we perform every day. The crisis we face, both at a macro and micro level, is overwhelming in its scale and complexity.
We could easily feel disempowered in our ability to challenge and act. Yet inside this very crisis is an impending transformation opportunity for humankind. Billions of years of universal intelligence is encoded in us since
the beginning of time and space. Humanity is waking up to life’s inherent potential to be and to become. People around the globe, young and old of all races, are taking actions to make the world a better place. Get Connected is a small initiative to support team development in the workplace, yet with a big ambition to tap into our human potential and aid collective evolution.
Get Connected is a collaborative effort among a group of highly experienced transformation facilitators, aiming to empower team leaders with a practical toolkit to help them build teams and grow team cultures. It is a do-it-yourself package to guide you through the framework, process and methodology of team development. It supports you to question the way you work, to examine the assumptions you behold and to build the connection you long for. The book is based on the belief that in most teams we have much more potential than we currently use, due to the way we organize and behave. It provides you with the possibilities to free more of that human potential by:
- Empowering you as a team leader, or team coach to connect your team members on a more subjective and emotional level.
- Helping you to see „the whole“ journey in order to grow and create a more connected team, recognizing that it is not one or two events or workshops that make the difference, but rather the attention and respect you give your team by investing in time to connect and bond through dialogue around issues that are of individual and collective value to the team.
- Supporting you in planting and caring for something, in this case a group of human beings, that is continuously developing and growing, and inspiring you to take risks and go outside your own and your team’s „safety zones“, in order to explore and evolve together.
If you want a harvest that will last for a life time, grow people
This book is not a mechanical manual to follow and live by, but an illustration of an organic process to live through. With a set of practical processes and tools, which we find most effective through our collective experiences for team development, we intend to provide you with a baseline platform to experiment with and innovate from. It is a tool kit with words, not facilitation skills with senses. We ask you to play with it, trust your intuitive judgement, and discover what works or not through trial and error. Growing your team is an organic living process, which requires you to tap into the inner knowing of your team and to leverage group intelligence to co-create and co-evolve. We ask you to stay open to learn and strive to improve with humility.
Your personal development is a critical foundation for your success in growing your team and culture. Not only do you need to do the work with your team, but also you need to carry the work and be the change you wish to see. As a team leader, you are the role model and must walk the talk. How you treat your team members will set the ceiling for the level of bonding and depth of connections they experience with each other in the team. You need to challenge yourself to develop your own potential and evolve who you are as a leader.
Nature is the greatest teacher of our time, and offers generous antidotes to offset the imbalance accumulated since the Industrial Revolution. We use a simple tree metaphor throughout the book as a natural system symbol to guide our thinking. It illustrates a way of growth in nature to challenge institutional programming, balance intellectual models and stimulate human intuitive senses. Whenever feeling lost or struggling for ideas on your journey, we invite you to spend reflection time in nature to get recharged and inspired. Natural system thinking is a most effective and sustainable pathway for transformation.
We hope, through the good work you do in developing your people and growing your team, their innate human potential will reveal to make a difference in your organisation and our society. We envision deeply connected teams across organisations highly energised to achieve performance with greater learning, enjoyment and purpose. We imagine circles of connected human beings collaborating every day at work and radiating positive energy like ripples in the pond to make this world a better place for ourselves and our children.
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The Values Driven Organisation
Based on significant new research from multiple sources, Richard Barrett creates a compelling narrative about why values-driven organizations are the most successful organizations on the planet. According to Barrett, understanding employee’s needs—what people value—is the key to creating a high performing organization. When you support employees in satisfying their needs, they respond with high levels of employee engagement and willingly bring their commitment and creativity to their work.
This book updates and brings together in one volume, two of Richard Barrett’s previous publications, Liberating the Corporate Soul (1998) and Building a Values-Driven Organisation (2006), to provide a reference manual for leaders and change agents who wish to create a values-driven organization. The text provides both a leadership approach, and a language, for organizational transformation and culture change that incorporates concepts such as cultural entropy, values alignment and whole system change.
With an updated set of cultural diagnostic tools and a wide range of new and exciting case studies on culture and leadership development, The Values-Driven Organization will be essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of organizational change, leadership and ethics.
