Integral Coaching as Servant Leadership

Integral Coaching, Holistic Leadership

My intention in integral coaching is to help cultivate the best capacities in a leader around responsible, intelligent, resilient, and wise stewardship of vital resources. At the core of stewardship is a commitment to the dignity of people and the vitality of nature as reflected in leadership values and behaviors, organizational culture, relationships with stakeholders, and the design of organizational systems.

For coaches, leadership coaching is an extraordinary “opening”, by design, to contribute to the learning edge of leaders. We help leaders to coax from themselves their human potential, wisdom, and courage, and, in turn, to understand how to cultivate that in others.

What else is integral leadership? Integral leaders know how to craft and continually tell meaningful stories about the organization while intentionally embedding that story into the culture of the organization. That includes the actual architectural design (or modifications) of the building and its infrastructure, the business ownership structure, the organizational structure, and the design of systems, processes, and job functions. The entire anatomy of the organization, therefore, expresses the organization’s core identity (values, principles, vision, mission), tone of relationships (top down, collaborative, matrix, learning community), and ways of accessing and sharing information (from carefully restricted on a need to know basis to complete transparency). When done well, the stories and design will stimulate and strengthen people’s dignity, meaning, and community while stimulating innovations that deliver solid value to shareholders. From the confluence of these interdependent elements the organization’s culture is shaped.