By Paola Valeri*
“We are experiencing a deep paradigm change from which there is no turning back.” This is a recurring statement from Simon L. Dolan, professor, consultant, author of more than 60 books and creator of the methodology called Coaching by Values.
I was lucky to do most of my training in the methodology with Simon Dolan. Brilliant and visionary mind, Dolan prophesizes the idea that Values are the key factor that will allow us to address positively the deep transformation we are living, which is unstoppable and has just begun.
Professor Dolan has chaired for many years the Future of Work Department at the renowned ESADE Business School. The data collected by Dolan and his colleagues, plus the continuous data coming from the market and the news, show worrying drops in trust and coherence in leadership. This is why Dolan affirms that leaders, in business and in the social and political arena, need to acquire and deploy a set of competences of the so-called “soft” type, as well as a significant change of attitude.
The primary attitude identified is to open up to “do-learn and re-learn”, in other words, to learn by doing and unlearn to be able to learn again.
The second set of attitudes requires that one forget yesterday as well as today’s successes to focus on new perspectives. Leadership in every realm and sector must be able to produce thinking and actions oriented towards understanding a future that is complex, uncertain and volatile.
Often, decisions taken at organizational and/or individual level trigger the demolition of solid businesses and reputations. From the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to the scandals at Enron that swept Arthur Andersen away; from the Wells Fargo Bank fake accounts to the most recent Volkswagen scandals, a common factor seems to be at the root of these downfalls: people become unable to act in line with their level of responsibilities, with the company’s values and theirs’.
Dolan affirms that it is due to a mislead sense of what is valuable or which is the same, an altered scale of values where people base their decisions on ideas and attitudes that are unsustainable, for them and for their organization or environment.
For long, the idea of leadership strongly relied on authority and secular power. These were believed to be the feature required to make people willing to follow. Today we know that leadership depends upon values. Actually, if I would ask you to think of someone who represents your icon of the best leadership and to define what defines that person worthy of your trust, you would surely describe Values.
Many leadership-training programs consider “soft skills” to be too emotional to be included in any serious approach. However, many studies and researches indicate that factors like Integrity, Honesty, Capacity to inspire other or the Capacity to motivate others are at the top of the scale of importance for people and peers when evaluating leaderships.
In a context marked by uncertainty and volatility, nations, communities and businesses need to deploy their best talent.
Skills based on Values have today become a central part of organizational strategy because rules, instructions and procedures are not enough to awake in people the kind of emotional bond and motivation that ensure creativity, innovation and sustainable teamwork. When organization, and individuals too, face the uncertainty of transformation, the only way out starts from diving in by asking “who am I” and “what is the sense of what I am doing”.
The concepts of Managing and Coaching by Values sustain cultural reengineering that goes the opposite way of the featured of the Hubris Syndrome, which Sir David Owen described as “two interlocking features: diminished empathy and unbridled intuition”. When smart people act pushed by ego and overwhelming self-confidence, end up exhibiting a form of incompetence that may culminate in catastrophic leadership errors.
As professor Dolan always clarifies, values are not good nor bad in themselves. The configuration of the main Values is what defines and predict the predisposition of people to act in a way or another.
Dolan builds his theories around solid scientific researches and consultancy in the battlefield of business and institutions. He advocates for a new transcendent spiritual leadership that arises from a philosophical commitment. His tri-axial model explains that people build their behaviors based on three types of Values. For leadership, Dolan is exploring a fourth spiritual axis, which is not religious at all, that adds to the 3 original axis: economic-pragmatic, ethical-social, emotional-energetic.
The implementation of the By Values models with individuals, teams and managers, opens the doors to understanding leadership from a truly holistic point of view, one that recognizes change as a value to revitalize cultures in life and business and inspire a collective commitment based on trust and coherence.
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* BA in Communication Sciences with a focus on corporate communication, Masters in Human Resources and Knowledge Management, Masters in Digital Journalism, Masters in Counseling, Masters in Integrative Systemic Coaching, Specialist Systemic Team Coaching, Practitioner in Refurbished DMB © Neuro Linguistics (NLP), Practitioner in i4 Neurolider 360º Assessment Tool by About my Brain Institute, Master in Coaching for Values Awarded by Prof. Simon L. Dolan, Specialist in Systemic Coaching by the AINP.
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