Coaching Center of Vermont Blog

By Liz Dallas

During a recent family vacation to Yellowstone National Park, my curiosity was piqued while studying the landscape behind a sign that read, “This forest seeded by natural forest fire.”  As far as the eye could see, lodge pines stood tall and thicker than previously viewed sections of the park.  How could it be that such life was created out of such devastation?

When I returned, I set out to research this phenomenon of nature’s method of procreating life.  My findings drove home the miracle of transformation — that change requires a catalyst and that the most dramatic, spectacular, life-giving transformations require catalysts that completely wipe out and destroy the life that precedes them.[i]

In the case of the lodge pine, mature pinecones need to sit in the ground undisturbed for 40 or more years before they are prime for seeding.  And even then, it requires the intense heat of fire to melt away the wax coating and release the winged seedlings into the nurturing ashen soil that makes new growth possible.  Younger pinecones will yield less productive seedlings; older cones will yield highly thick, healthier trees.[ii] In this section of Yellowstone, the seedlings are more than one million per acre dense.  And as the trees begin new life, the phenomenon of this steroid-like growth is replicated in other plant life as well.  Brilliant wildflowers and other vibrant vegetation quickly burst to life, giving the landscape exceptional beauty to attract insects and animal life to the area—all which serve to nurture the forest that will grow to serve the life it protects and feeds.

In my role as a corporate leadership coach, I am in the business of nurturing emerging leaders to succeed their predecessors such that organization ensures long-term success.  As an organization initiates this act of preservation and growth, invariably it endures the chaos and short-term costs of uprooting old ways of doing business so that the new, more relative and sustainable ways of doing business can emerge.  This is an uprooting that can often catch the established leaders off guard (even the very ones who have set the directive); many times, they are simply not ready for the grief that accompanies the process of ending the old so that the new can begin.

Today’s emerging business leaders are creating cultures marked by the seeds of collaboration that spawn innovation. They invite the integration of diverse contributors, making it essential that each member of the organization be intimately connected to the unique difference they make. Being part of something bigger than themselves is the essential fuel for ensuring personal significance and corporate relevance.  There is no room for widgets that merely make the machine that run by the leader; instead, each gear must drive itself out of the inspiration to be part of something meaningful and bigger than the tasks at hand.

There is much to learn about the process of cultural transformation for our 21^st century businesses. And I have to ask the provocative questions of my generation of baby boomers:

• Are we ready for the extreme heat and pressure that is required to melt away the exoskeleton of corporate systems?
• Are we waiting for economic, political, or demographic conditions to serve as the catalyst for transformation (like 25-40% of today’s leaders retiring in the next 5-12 years)?
• How might we artificially create the catalysts of cultural transformation such that we cultivate it vs. be a victim of it?
• What kind of leaders do we need to be in order for these new leaders to be successful for the sake of succession?

My sense is that visionary coach leaders are best equipped to inspire and empower the leaders of tomorrow to create what’s possible for our businesses…for our world.  I invite your thoughts on this too! Join the conversation by leaving your comment, below.

Founder of the Coaching Center of Vermont, Inc, Liz Dallas coaches corporate leaders to grow their own capacity for transformational leadership and to develop emerging leaders to steward bottom line success. For more information on the transformation of corporate cultures, visit the CCVT Vital Business Division.

[ii] Read more about the seeding of lodge pinecones.

By Lea Belair, Business Innovator – Coaching Center of Vermont, Inc.

Like it or not, business leaders are reinventing, retooling and reengineering to become leaner and greener as we find ourselves in the new global economic reality. Integral to the process of reinvention, we’re seeing the value of conversation and story rise to the top of the chatter and clutter of relationship building. The value of conversation and story, couched in ever-new and ever-changing technologies, is that it prompts us to expand how we interface with customers and business partners alike because: Together we are better.  I’ll share a story of how this works in a few moments…

Synergy means different entities cooperate advantageously for a final outcome. Simply defined, the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. We’ve long known that our story is our enduring value. Each company, each industry segment, each customer, has their unique story, and that story is their sweet spot. In order to act synergistically, we are prompted to start new conversations, in new sectors, with new customers and new partners – and to and keep those conversations alive and vital. Leaving behind the wasteful practices of traditional competition, this need for synergy evolves us beyond competition to coopetition, where through conversation and dialog and the desire to do and be more with less, each business weaves together the parts of their business where they can stick to their story, do not compete, and  where they share common costs and resources.

Here’s a simple story of synergy and coopetition in action:

The Coaching Center of Vermont, Inc. provides training in coaching skills as well as individual and group coaching programs. The University of Vermont’s Vermont Business Center provides professional certificate programs and educational resources to the professional community. After a four year traditional working partnership, we decided to pursue a new value proposition: Better together. Our conversation led us to reinvent our relationship so that the Coaching Center now contributes its bricks and mortar capital at the Champlain Mill in Winooski and administrative support, as well as our virtual community and name recognition and UVM/VBC gets to maximize its existing resources and training caché without diluting its resources and focus in lean times. One advantageous result, the Coaching Center of Vermont was able to secure $18,000 in grant funding from the Vermont Training Program at the Vermont Department of Economic Development for its UVM/VBC offerings without siphoning funds away from the University of Vermont’s funding pot.

As we move to greater expansion of our web-based presence and constant innovation, many companies are creating new platforms for conversation such as blogging, micro-blogging and commenting. In this environment, customers increasingly drive the conversation and the opportunity for synergy. As we invest in a new, sustainable business infrastructure, we invite others into our sphere of influence in the spirit of synergy and coopetition.

How can we constructively engage our customers and partners in the conversation without having to control it, rather co-create it? Change is happening more rapidly and complexity is going exponential. The new business model calls out to be more organic, more connected, and more resilient. As in the story above, in the spirit of synergy and coopetition we naturally become more entrepreneurial. We spawn prototypes that can afford to be tested, and can afford to fail. In this co-creation born out of synergy and coopetition, each player’s story stays intact, interacts, and grows in value and potential. And since story is our sweet spot…how sweet it is! So let’s keep the conversation going….Get involved in the conversation by replying below with your thoughts!

Lea Belair is a thought leader in the field of change management. As a partner in the Coaching Center of Vermont, Inc., leader in the coaching profession, and author of Walk on Water: How to Make Change Easier, Lea inspires and empowers those she works with to thrive in change.