The Ripple Effect
How one person's growth and development positively impacts their most closely connected colleagues and ripples through their organisation.
Lead Into the Future Today (LIFT) is brought to you by Louise Mowbray of Mowbray by Design, the Creative Conscious Leadership Consultancy. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so here:
This week I thought I would share an interesting ‘Ripple Effect’ phenomenon around coaching, 20 reasons why you should know more about Futures and Foresight and the results of a KornFerry poll asking if salaries should be included in job descriptions. Read on…
“The Coaching Ripple Effect”
Have you noticed “The Coaching Ripple Effect” - where one person’s growth and development through leadership coaching has a positive impact on their team and closest colleagues?
I certainly have. Over the years I’ve witnessed leaders and executive teams (who have been coached) and the people around them seemingly magically shape-shift their cultures and the success of their organisations for the better. I say “seemingly magically” as the knock-on impact appears to happen without any direct intervention.
I’ve often thought of this phenomenon as an ecosystems or a physics/energy thing. When someone or a group of people change, those around them must change too.
It’s something we’re all very familiar with - we know that when we change, the people around us either embrace the change or in some cases, resist. Both of these reactions alter our relationships with one another. We also know that that that the people we interact most closely with shape our beliefs, how we think and our lenses on the world.
If we connect the dots, it’s the basis of how the AI in our search engines and social media platforms works. We are inundated with confirmation bias.
This morning I was thinking about how we measure individual and executive team change through coaching and how it doesn’t currently account for this Ripple Effect.
The median ROI for executive coaching is 7x the investment according to an ICF Global Coaching Study.
All well and good, however, we’re attaching a financial value to ‘people and performance’ through a linear model of change. This doesn’t take the complexity of our systems into account, it doesn’t measure psychological wellbeing and the organic, systemic impact of the Ripple Effect.
Why is this important? When we consider the impact of one person’s growth and development on those closest to them, we begin to understand the exponential power in coaching leadership teams and their ability to shape-shift their cultures and the fortunes of the organisations they serve.
It also explains the natural shift to coaching leadership teams rather than just individual leaders over the last few years.
Traditionally, the vast majority of coaching budgets have been spent on individual senior level executives. Today, we know we need leadership teams to grow together in order to work better, together.
How we work together is the crux of our ability to build successful businesses. Our world of work demands so much more from executive teams, not least the ability to be comfortable living with ambiguity and the intensity and pace of change.
There is so much to be gained by being more intentional about using the power of the Ripple Effect - a more organic, systems approach is, in my view, the future of coaching. Get in touch if you’d like to explore this for your leadership team.
The Coaching Ripple Effect
If you’re interested in diving into the research behind this, O’Connor & Cavanagh’s paper on the topic is well worth the read (extract below). It may well change how you structure, measure and evaluate coaching in the future.
“The 20 Reasons Why Futurism & Foresight Matter”
I’ve been talking about how vital it is for leaders at all levels to develop their mental models or lenses on the world for some time. One of these is “Futures Thinking” and if we ever needed one good reason to do this, Sean Moffit, Co-Founder, Grey Swan Guild and Managing Director, Futureproofing : Next gives us 20 in his article “The 20 Reasons Why Futurism & Foresights Matter”. It’s well worth the read…
Do we need transparency around salaries?
Last week, KornFerry ran a poll on LinkedIn asking the question: “Do you believe salary should be included in every job description?”
10,357 People voted with the majority stating a resounding yes (83%). What are your thoughts? Do you think salaries should be published in job descriptions?
Please feel free to comment and share your insight with us and if you know of someone else who would also enjoy this edition of LIFT, why not share it?
Until next time, take good care of yourself.
Best, Louise