“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” ― Albert Camus

I always feel a twinge of melancholy in the waning days of summer, as we wave good-bye to long summer days and get in gear for the busy fall season. On the other hand, “back-to-school” time brings an exhilarating shift in energy as the temps cool down and clients gear up to meet end-of-year goals.  Fall is a particularly exciting time for us at the IOC, as we host our biggest event of the year — the annual coaching conference sponsored by Harvard Medical School.  This year the range of thought leaders and workshops is wider and deeper than ever before. 

Among the stellar line-up of speakers at this year’s conference, we are thrilled to welcome back as a keynote one of our most popular speakers, Amy Edmondson, from Harvard Business School.  Amy has a fascinating new book, Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation, that, to my mind, encapsulates the challenges facing today’s leaders:  how do we craft and implement big visions in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world?  How do we collaborate across boundaries—cultural, geographical, functional, geo-political—while simultaneously fostering innovation?  How can leaders “think big” yet execute incrementally, working as Amy might say, with "big vision in small steps”?  Amy and her co-researcher, Susan Reynolds conducted a multi-year study of a visionary CEO and his Portugal-based start-up.  Their close look at the leadership dynamics of an incredibly diverse, innovative and cross-functional team in action bring to life the unique challenges facing today’s organizations.   

Many of us in leadership coaching find ourselves working with clients who have global responsibilities, who manage virtual teams with staff from all backgrounds and cultures. Social media technologies and instant communications have made the world smaller, yet leading in these complex environments grows more difficult: How do you define work/life balance when someone on your team is awake and working, 24 hours a day? How do you build a coherent team when people are situated in far-flung locales, speak different languages, have unique customs and cultures?  How do you delegate and empower teams with differing levels of expertise comprised of millennials, GenX’ers and boomers? 

With these challenges in mind, we are thrilled to have Amy Edmondson join us as a speaker at our annual conference, and again in October for an interactive webinar devoted to the application of her “big teaming” concepts to coaching. We are also excited to build on these leadership themes with truly “global” executive coach presenting September’s webinar.  Katrina Burrus, an Institute Founding Fellow based in Geneva, coaches executives all over the world and is an expert on the challenges of expatriate, cross-cultural and “nomadic” leaders.  For more information and to register for the conference and these exciting webinar programs, see below.  

Despite the shorter days, and cool nip in the air, I hope you will feel inspired to join our upcoming programs with these leading edge researchers/practitioners. Whether we work with clients in our own backyards or half-way across the world, ours is a special profession, where with each client we have the opportunity to change the world—one leader at a time. 

Warmly,

Jeffrey Hull, PhD, Director Education and Business Development