We work with courageous leaders exploring progressive leadership who are finding it difficult to balance increasing autonomy with maintaining the performance of their crew.
We co-create a long-term programme with you and your team to establish the best cultural foundation for navigating this difficult moment. We call this culture Appreciative Collaboration.
Uncover what is currently working well, surface issues to gain insight, discover goals for the future and affirm commitment to change.
Bring everyone together to envision the future collectively. Co-design the route forward. Begin to acquire and practice the skills of Appreciative Collaboration.
Ongoing skill development and accountability measures to facilitate genuine enduring change, keeping everyone on course to the agreed north star.
This approach provides a structure, which is adapted to the needs of each team. The duration is determined by the team’s readiness for and commitment to the change.
Appreciative Collaboration (AC) is a culture, a way of working that we believe sits somewhere between authoritarian command and control leadership and entirely self-managing teams.
AC gives the team the required foundation to enable autonomous working that doesn’t slow the ship down. It develops genuine respect and admiration of one another, facilitates constructive conflict, and encourages collective responsibility for performance.
We use 3 domains to define and understand Appreciative Collaboration: People & Relationships, Process & Routines, Purpose & Results.
ExEnEm is the product of friends, DJ and Isobel finding themselves in happy alignment.
We coined the term Appreciative Collaboration to describe the culture we felt so strongly about creating.
We are experienced facilitators who are passionate about helping teams and working with leaders to work through the choppy waters of moving to self managing teams. We understand how hard this can be to do without support.
The ExEnEm approach is not for everyone. We are keen to ensure a good fit in terms of readiness, values and desired outcomes.
To achieve this we’ve developed a short quiz that will help identify if an ExEnEm programme makes sense for where your current situation and your best next step.
Not all the way. ExEnEm will help you to create a culture of Appreciative Collaboration, which we believe is the foundation of self-managing organisations. There will be a lot more processes and systems to put in place to become fully self-managed.
That depends on your motivation. We work with leaders who genuinely want their team to become great at managing themselves. If you are looking for a way to make your team more compliant with your direction because you feel you know best, then this isn’t for you.
If you believe that your team members are simply dysfunctional and that you have no need to change, then we may not see eye to eye. We believe, and our experience has supported this, that change starts with leadership.
We will ask you to take a cold hard look at your own behaviour and potentially change that first, in order to create the change you want to see. Everything starts with you, like it or leave it.
ExEnEm will help your team to do what they need to do, but that may not always be what you want them to do – they might very well enlighten you about what is the better/best way to achieve the goals of your organisation.
ExEnEm programmes are for every person in an organisation, not just the leaders. Everyone should be involved – and if there are those who are unwilling to be involved, then that must be explored first before proceeding.
If your organisation is structured hierarchically and there is even the slightest possibility of veto power from Directors or Trustees, they must also be directly engaged with and on board with this programme. Reluctant acceptance from those who have the most power in the organisation must first be discussed and unpicked before proceeding, otherwise you are setting yourself (and us) up to fail.
When it comes to growing a cultural zeitgeist in your business, and your business has power centred in individuals, those individuals will make or break it.
If you’re interested in an ExEnEm programme, we really ask you to go through the quiz<link> – it will help ensure that any discussion we have is rich and deep and not wasteful for either of us.
If, however, you need to be in touch for any other reason, you can email team@exenem.com and we’ll respond to you as soon as we can, or you can add us on LinkedIn in the footer below.
