Who's Tending Your Vitality?

❝ In my over 40 years of work experience, yesterday
was the best training day I had ever attended.❞

Participant in Triangle Training client engagement held at DCHS, Dec 2018 ~

I always appreciate feedback like this. But as a developmental facilitator who's partnered with dozens of distributed teams and hundreds of diverse people, I'm more concerned with something that just can't be known 'til much later — how far a client's initial enthusiasm will take them tomorrow...

...What generative impact, if any, it will have ... the scope and duration of that ... the real results it will breed ... up and down their lines of command, across their matrix, and throughout their enterprise (in this case, serving over a quarter million customers).

Because in the flush of a learner's sudden breakthrough or soaring success, any training can feel terrific. But its true effectiveness lies in the client's subsequent shaping, leveraging and application of it to their own unique, emergent conditions.

Quantifiable, or not: What will they actually make of their investment of time, attention, budget and other resources? Not just now, or in the near term, but for the long haul?

How will they generate, then sustain, more individual and group vitality?

The participant quoted above had just joined scores of co-workers in completing a key segment of their annual staff retreat with my fellow TT coaches and me. For the occasion, their leaders had selected a venue bearing the inspired civic message depicted above:

DURHAM'S VITALITY IS BUILT UPON
THE HEALTH OF OUR RESIDENTS
AND THE CAPACITY OF OUR COMMUNITY
TO FOSTER AND ENHANCE
THE WELLBEING OF EVERY CITIZEN.

Marquee at entrance of DC Human Services 

They had identified half a dozen specific factors which signaled their collective success. And they brought us in for fresh professional support with their team building, personal growth and organizational development.

While our service engagement unfolded together, a few employees described to me chronic features of their corporate culture which held them back and quashed their motivation to improve.

As an antidote to that, how potent or enduring would our intervention — plus one person's earnest enthusiasm — really prove?

At the very least, my co-facilitators and I temporarily disrupted our client's routine with the highly collaborative experiential learning that we offered them. And we created space for different conversations between staff members, about their persistent workplace issues. Perhaps these participants got some genuine benefit from that alone, whether or not any of them also deemed it their best training ever.

That word "training" is worth a closer look here. As a developmental team/leader/executive coach, I urge clients to shift their perspective around what my kindred colleagues and I actually bring them. To view it less as traditional training and more as pointing, prompting and probing; as inviting all and catalyzing some; as affirming anyone and challenging everybody.

And when we facilitate really well, to see us as responding authentically in the moment from an open place of deep listening and sincere service. Unattached to agendas, scripts, or stories about ourselves or others.

Teams can intentionally envision and deliver all of this to themselves, for themselves, and with each other — long after we professional providers have left the scene.

When we do our job right, and when our clients do same, they get a superlative "training" experience by co-creating and co-leading it together, via their own high-quality contributions. Through the in-tention, at-tention, self-efficacy, personal presence, attitudes and mindsets that they bring to the opportunity; along with their skills, competencies and sheer effort.

Cultures that foster this, in turn foster people who engender and perpetuate their own robust conditions, outcomes and resilience, on both individual and organizational levels.

So consider what influence the same civic declaration above could have, on any company which purposefully turned it inward:

Our corporate vitality is built upon
the health of our co-workers
and the capacity of our community
to foster and enhance
the wellbeing of every employee.

I relish my role as trusted ally and seasoned guide who gets brought in to help make things better, again and again. But ultimately, my clients will look to themselves as their own recurring providers, day in and day out. For better or worse, they're also continual consumers of whatever they dish up for each other. Their organizations' vitality flags or flourishes on that.