A change in career, thanks to new insights from the Governor’s Leadership Foundation program

Karen Marsh is one of the participants in the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF) program this year. She has recently changed job and was delighted to share with the team at the Leaders Institute of South Australia that she feels the GLF program has greatly contributed to her career change. Of course we love to hear these stories, so I met for a coffee with Karen to find out more.

In 2011 Karen Marsh started working as Enterprise Manager for ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology. In her role she was looking for new income streams for this not-for-profit organisation. Who could have guessed that her search for new opportunities would lead her to purchasing the first 3D printer in Australia and starting Fab Lab Adelaide? Thanks to the financial support of the South Australian Government, who saw potential in the 3D future of transforming manufacturing among other things, Fab Lab opened its doors in 2012. Managed by ANAT, Fab Lab Adelaide is based in the Adelaide College of the Arts and has a growing community of users of 3D printing and fabrication equipment and services.

Last year Karen felt is was time to spread her wings and push herself a bit into new directions and the GLF seemed to be exactly what she was looking for. She is one of the lucky participants that could realise this dream thanks to the help of a GLF Alumni scholarship. As a single Mum working part time it wouldn’t have been possible for her to take this next step in her career without this financial support. That she is grateful for this chance becomes very obvious when listening to her experiences of the program so far, and her examples of personal and professional development she is going through.

A vision of Living Cities in South Australia

INTERVIEW |Sonja Bar-Am graduated from the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF) program in 2013. She works as Family & Relationship Counsellor at Uniting Communities, while also running a web shop in eco, sustainable and organic cotton clothes and home linen. Sonja is one of those people that never sits still and is always on the lookout for great ideas and new opportunities. She will fly to New York in October to meet with the CEO of Living Cities, an initiative she would like to pilot here in Adelaide and she might need your help… Read on to find out more about this inspiring woman and to see how you can support her in making a positive change in our community.

Sonja, could you tell us something about your work as a counsellor?

“Uniting Communities holds three core principles: Care, Compassion, and Commitment. As a counsellor and family therapist with the Adult and Family Counselling Team, I endeavour to make these principles active in all help and support to people who come to consult with me about their lives and relationships. We are federally funded to provide counselling services, and I have a very large client base of men, women and their children of all ages who choose to come to a Community Service agency for Counselling help. I cover the city office and I do outreach to Murray Bridge. It is a daily privilege to sit with clients who are inviting me into the most intimate and difficult parts of their lives and relationships to collaborate with them on finding hope and personal agency.

“Adjunct to the client work I also extend counselling theory and practice possibilities of helping people, through writing and introducing new innovative practices into Adelaide such as the Open Dialogue practice to helping families where a person has had an experience of psychosis and other mental illness presentations. I am currently extending thinking and practices of our team in working with a strong awareness of gender in relationships and working with addressing violence in our community. I am extending this thinking into promoting equitable and equity in gender relations organisation and business workplaces.

“While the counselling and thinking around this takes up much of my working time, the GLF reframed my vision into seeing multiple possibilities to extend into areas I am interested in.”

Integral Theory and Vertical Development

Sanne Reijenga reflects on the lessons learnt and insights gained from participating in the Integral Leader program at the Leaders Institute of South Australia.

“The word integral means comprehensive, inclusive, non-marginalizing, embracing. Integral approaches to any field attempt to be exactly that: to include as many perspectives, styles, and methodologies as possible within a coherent view of the topic. In a certain sense, integral approaches are “meta-paradigms,” or ways to draw together an already existing number of separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching.” – Ken Wilber*

This day was perhaps the most brain-stretching day of the Integral Leader program. Before the program started the name of the program made me very curious already; what does that actually mean – Integral Leadership? What I guessed was some form of leadership that integrates different ways of thinking, but I couldn’t get much further than that in my thinking at the time. By now, I think I understand Integral Leadership better, but it will still be the biggest challenge to share it here with you. Do you recognise how sometimes you can comprehend something, but to communicate about it is quite different? That’s me at the moment. I’ll give it a try!

Like many other days of the Integral Program we started the day with a moment to check-in with ourselves and the group. A moment to share how you feel, to express what your expectations are for the day and to leave anything that is on your mind and that is not helpful for the day by the door. This day, we went a few steps further. As we learnt about the Integral Quadrants – a mind-boggling framework that helps you to look at an (adaptive) problem from various perspectives and worldviews – the need to meditate on what we just learnt all of a sudden seemed the most logic thing to do. It helped to let the learnt sink in better, and to almost visualise what it was all about…

Integral Quadrants

Integral Theory Conference 2013

Niki Vincent, CEO of the Leaders Institute of South Australia, on her contributions to the Integral Theory Conference 2013 in San Francisco.

I presented a paper, participated on a panel and facilitated a workshop at the recent Integral Theory Conference in San Francisco. This was a wonderful experience as the conference was jam packed with incredibly interesting presentations, presenters and other delegates. I had very little sleep throughout the three days (+ 1 day of pre-conference workshops) because there was so many interesting people to stay up talking to!

I was also very privileged to be awarded a ‘Best Research Paper’ prize for my paper entitled ‘Processes and personality preferences involved in adult consciousness development: An investigation of participants in Australian community leadership programs’. This was based on the findings from two of the three components of my PhD research. My husband Simon Divecha and his co-author Barrett Brown also received the same award for their paper (also based on their PhD research). This was a very unexpected honour for us.

Quite a few people have asked me for a copy of the paper and/or the presentation, so I have provided links to them below. I have also provided a link to a paper of mine published in the Journal of Adult Development in June 2013. This is based on the first study from my PhD research. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall, but can be accessed for free via university libraries etc. I would love to receive feedback, questions, constructive criticism etc about these. I am still completing my PhD research and so any of the above would be helpful.

Integral Theory Conference Paper 2013

Integral Theory Conference presentation 2013

Personality Preferences and Their Relationship to Ego Development in Australian Leadership Program Participants – paper published in the Journal of Adult Development, June 2013

Levels of consciousness and the ‘so what factor?’

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘Leadership Agility – Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change’, (Joiner and Josephs, 2007). 

So why have all these blogs about different levels of leadership consciousness been relevant to you, to me and to the Leaders Institute’s mission to create wider leaders and better citizens? Let’s explore that in this week’s blog through a series of questions Joiner and Josephs pose.

Q: Does leadership agility and levels predict organisational responsibility?

How to lead at the ‘one percenter’ level of Synergist

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘Leadership Agility – Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change’, (Joiner and Josephs, 2007). 

As we discussed in the previous series of blogs talking about leadership agility competencies and the vertical stages of leadership development, people operate at different levels of consciousness.  I am currently reading about Joiner and Josephs’ final stage of leadership development, Synergist.

As I read through the Synergist chapter opening case studies I am struck by some commonalities:

• There is a clear shift to a strength based approach that amplifies positive energy,
• The central characters start to operate from a much deeper purpose,
• They pull on this and tap into their values in real time especially when in situations of conflict or intimidation to find the courage to do the right thing and stay on path,
• They exhibit a clear strength in the ability to collaborate with colleagues again amplifying the positive and can seemingly turn adversaries into friends and allies by controlling their reactive behaviours.

Co-creator or strategist? One and the same. Let’s meditate on it.

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘Leadership Agility – Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change’, (Joiner and Josephs, 2007). 

As we discussed in the previous series of blogs talking about leadership agility competencies and the vertical stages of leadership development, people operate at different levels of consciousness. These have been identified through rigorous research and labled as Opportunistic, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist or Catalyst, Strategist or Co-Creator, Alchemist or Synergist and Unitive.

Joiner and Joseph’s call it Co-creator, Cook-Greuter and others call it Strategist, but they are all talking about the same leadership level (which is occupied by 4% of leaders) and they both believe meditation can be a very useful practice at this level (and I am sure before this). Joiner and Josephs’ chapter on the Co-Creator starts off with a case study  which features daily mediation and mindfulness in business and illustrates how powerfully impactful these practices can be on you as a leader.

Getting Experimental with Leadership

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘Leadership Agility – Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change’, (Joiner and Josephs, 2007). 

As we discussed in the previous series of blogs talking about leadership agility competencies and the vertical stages of leadership development, people operate at different levels of consciousness. These have been identified through rigorous research and labled as Opportunistic, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist or Catalyst, Strategist or Co-Creator, Alchemist or Synergist and Unitive.

In Joseph and Joiner’s language the ‘Catalyst’ accounts for about 10% of leaders.

My Catalyst phase was creative, diverse and broad in nature. It saw me marry my lovely husband (an experiment that worked out), leave corporate offices to take a job with a desk in the beautiful and serene surrounds of the Art Gallery of NSW, move states, co-author and publish two books with a supporting blog, magazine column and website, develop and deliver an older adults preventative exercise program, develop and deliver a return to work program for long term stressed police officers, create art and there were many, many more ideas to accompany those in the space of a few short years, just not enough time as we also started a family.

Photo credits: Unsplash – Matteo Minelli

Do you want to be more of an Achiever?

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘Leadership Agility – Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change’, (Joiner and Josephs, 2007). 

This blog is relevant to a very significant 68-78% of our leaders today! What does stepping from an Expert level of consciousness to an Achiever level of consciousness (or better embodying Achiever consciousness) mean for a person’s leadership style and capacity? What would they do differently?

As we discussed in the previous series of blogs talking about leadership agility competencies and the vertical stages of leadership development, people operate at different levels of consciousness. These have been identified through rigorous research and labled as Opportunistic, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist or Catalyst, Strategist or Co-Creator, Alchemist or Synergist and Unitive.

Leading at the Expert level of consciousness

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘Leadership Agility – Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change’, (Joiner and Josephs, 2007).

As we discussed in the previous blog talking about leadership agility competencies and the stages of leadership development, people operate at different levels of consciousness. These include Opportunistic, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist or Catalyst, Strategist or Co-Creator, Alchemist or Synergist and Unitive.

At each level a leader’s world view and capacity as a leader is affected. In this blog I am exploring the Expert leader (who is approximately 38% of our management population) and how this worldview manifests in terms of leadership.

According to Joiner and Josephs if an Expert leader is likely to have a strong problem-solving orientation and with a more independent and analytical approach, they are likely to think they are responsible for solving the problem solely! They will be more tactical, less strategic and rarely take initiatives to improve relationships across other units focussing only on their own. They don’t yet have a full appreciation of how much key stakeholder’s motivations and expectations can impact on their initiatives.