The Bet — The Pond-Deshpande Centre’s Systems Coaching Experience (1/5)
This blog is the first in a five part series that details the experience the Pond-Deshpande Centre (PDC) — a team that includes NouLAB and Be.For.Change Ventures — is going through with Holon Leadership, the coaching firm of Saralyn Hodgkin. The funding for this work is being provided by the Innoweave Scaling Impact program, specifically the work is to Scale Deep — changing the “hearts and minds” of the organization to allow for greater impact in the work we do.
It was Kismet — a chance crossing of Lewis, a consultant working for the PDC, and Saralyn at Billy Bishop airport in the Fall of 2019. The impact of that moment has accelerated the PDC team towards greater impact in 2020 as we navigate complexity at many levels, in contexts we have not been in before, and with an intention we are actively cultivating and tending. It started with a bet — that prioritizing our leadership capacity is a key lever for impact by using inner work and reflective leadership practice.
Why did we need this? Because without tending to the relationships amongst us as a team, any structures we set up to work effectively would likely fail. Because reflective practice allows us to actually hear one another — and we were in a space where we needed to hear one another differently.
So, when Saralyn and Lewis met at Billy Bishop, they bounced some ideas back and forth: how could Saralyn’s System Leadership Coaching & Consulting best support the team in a conversation together towards building a new relationship? How does a reflective leadership practice amongst the team as a system better enable the needed alignment to be an integrated, high performing team?
Here’s our story, oriented around a Leadership Series we are working through with our Systems Leadership Coach, Saralyn Hodgkin, and with the support of an Innoweave grant.
