In all our counselling and training activities, we use a systemic approach. We are looking at individuals and their interactions and dependencies within their organisation.
All our services are aiming at “learning” in a broad sense: evolving towards a more satisfactory mode of operation. This holds for individuals, but it holds just as well for organisations.
To be effective, counselling needs a strong connection between the coach / trainer / mediator and the client. impact knows how to create this connection both “face to face” and in “virtual” settings.
How impact addresses the international context
thinking “international” from both a personal and organisational development perspective
why impact ?
- Issues that specifically concern internationalized companies are our starting point. Rather than looking at them as add-ons, they are an integral part of our coaching and conflict management services.
- We continuously stay tuned to recent trends and developments of international business that entail internal adjustments for your company.
- Based on our knowledge of recent trends we continuously create innovative formats which respond to new challenges of international companies.
- In cooperation with you we create formats targeted to your company specific objectives.
- We always attune our formats to your strategic objectives in IHRD.
- We combine a Human Resource perspective with an Organizational Development sensitivity. A twofold benefit.
Who benefits ?
For companies that are well established in international business
International assignments have been part of your routine and for some years you have seen the world of international working change. Enhancing leadership is central to your success. Faced with adapting to the requirements of current trends and the overall skills shortage you constantly adapt to helping your international assignees succeed wherever they are in the world for however long a time. Your assignments need to be closely tailored to your company goals and the expectations of your talent base. You want to make sure that frictions, pitfalls of company life do not develop into costly conflicts.
For companies who are going the first steps of internationalization
You want to be sure that your managers develop their global skill accordingly , and you have a mechanism at hand to sail successfully through tough phases.
developing people and organisations
every coaching process can generate feedback that allows the organisation to grow
Coaching Leaders
Business coaching is a format that is targeted, close to the job and adaptable to the specific needs of companies. Business coaching for international leaders assists managers to meet the challenges of international leadership, it enhances international skills with an approach that is attuned to the specific role, the company context and all inherent dimensions of international leadership, i.e. cultural issues, spatial distance and language management.
It is a format that can capture the reverberations of current changes on the operational leadership level: the effect of remote leadership designs, remote team collaboration, hybrid effects etc.
Coaching is a highly efficient tool in these times since it provides the methods and tools to directly “dive into the heart of issues”. Each coaching process is embedded in your company’s defined strategic objectives for that role and or assignment.
Our approach is based on the humanistic growth-model (see e.g. https://www.simplypsychology.org/humanistic.html) , the foundation of our services is our conviction that human beings want to grow – as long as they live. Curiosity, the desire to learn, to go one step further are the central drivers of people. Of all ages – as neuro-biological research of the last 20 years has confirmed.
Formats for managing your international workforce
As part of your strategies and policies to manage your international workforce coaching can be a useful instrument to capture, analyse and feed back the experiences “on the ground” into your International Human Resource Management and Global Mobility teams. Accompanying your assignees with adequate formats helps to enhance assignment experience. At the same time it channels back important information on how policies work.
We provide adapted support formats to meet upcoming company needs in view of the current transitions in international staffing and assignment policies. With coaching programs for your different assignment types that are tailored to the specific context we are able to meet the needs of your different mobile workforce groups. This also serves to monitor and evaluate the new developments in collaboration with those concerned both on the operational and on the strategic level.
Make your company profit from the current developments and enhance the quality of your leaders!
Who benefits?
For assignees on developmental, strategic, project, skill shortage moves or for reasons to address adhoc issues.
conflicts are opportunities to adapt
by looking at the parties inherent interests, sustainable solutions are easier to find than in a purely “power-based” conflict resolution. Impact mediations help your company to find good solutions for conflicts, to avert risks and damages and to reboot following challenging times.
It’s easiest to solve conflicts when they are handled early on. And the earlier a conflict is addressed the higher the chances are that the people involved solve it among themselves. This happens all the time in in teams and other company settings.
Managers can support and empower their team members in different ways to solve their conflicts using their leadership and facilitation skills and thus contribute directly to finding constructive solutions. (See also our leadership training programs to enhance the conflict management skills of your leaders).
When to mandate external assistance?
When conflicts escalate and spread, they involve ever more people and topics. They become ever more inextricable and difficult to tackle. Being involved in or being close to a conflict – as direct conflict party, responsible manager, or HR – it is increasingly difficult to get a clear view of where to start and how to proceed to stop the dynamics and how to arrive at solutions. These are points in conflict dynamics when it is advisable to draw on external resources.
As mediators we are looking at conflicts as the neutral third party. We provide an external view, having no vested interest in the conflict, and no preferences for a particular solution. It is our job to check – in collaboration with you – who needs to talk to whom in order to deal with the issues at hand and conceive satisfactory and sustainable solutions. We accompany all parties on the way towards its implementation. Mediation is a professional and structured approach to conflict resolution with a tested toolset to do this.
For internationally operating companies, online mediation is a timely and straightforward option to bring together those people who can come up with satisfactory and sustainable solutions, even if they are far apart.
Who benefits?
boards, committees, internal organs, units, peer leader circles. teams, (internationally dispersed, hybrid, co-located or project teams), individuals
managers are in the right spot …
… by addressing conflicts in their area of responsibility early on, they have the best chances to limit their negative effects and establish sustainable outcomes.
Our leadership training program is based on the key message that managers are responsible for the management of all conflicts in their area of responsibility. We know that that is a challenging claim which might make a lot of leaders’ hair stand on end. So, let’s assure you: It does neither mean that leaders should be acting as judges, nor that they are responsible for the specific solutions to conflicts.
They are, however, responsible that conflicts are addressed, that paths are defined towards solving the issues and that the paths are followed through – or rectified – until sustainable solutions have been agreed on. Depending on the actual team, the specific situation, and the intensity of the conflict at hand, this could mean very little intervention on the part of the leader or a lot. Our fundamental credo for leadership intervention in conflicts is: “As little as possible, as much as necessary“.
As in all our services our aim is to provide to companies both learning paths to build up individual competencies and learning paths for organisation development. We teach leaders to know what to do under which circumstances, and in this way enhance their competencies to act in conflicts. And we open learning paths for the company to build up conflict resilience.
Our trainings are lively, insightful, challenging and entertaining. That’s what participants say at the end of programs. Impact has been venturing into online formats starting in 2015. We assure the same high quality as in in-presence workshops. Our long and profound experience over many years of training practice allows us to match workshop goals with the right – effective! – methodology and corresponding tools.
Who benefits?
Leaders of all levels of your hierarchy, of all functions, HQ or sites, countries. In fact, the better the mix of leadership levels and functions, the higher the impact of the program in shaping the conflict management of your company. The better the mix, the higher is your company’s ROI on this investment.
virtual 2.0 – taking web-based counselling to the next level
more then two years of lock-down have sharpened our perception of the power and pitfalls of virtual communication. impact implements the lessons learned.
impact creates the technical environment and the required tools to provide support to managers wherever they operate. We started internet-based counselling in 2015, when scepticism concerning the validity of this approach was still widely spread. As coaches and mediators we work with a wide variety of tools to support each process. We took on the challenge to adapt classical tools used in in-person counselling to match them with the possibilities and conditions offered by the virtual environment, and to create new ones.
A virtual environment offers a host of possibilities that were not as readily available in a classical setting. It offers a wide variety of tools that visualise the steps that form a counselling process. This includes the access to supporting video and audio material, as well as the possibility for cloud-based documentation, which allows to share and co-edit exercises/ documents with an ease that had not been available in a paper-based environment.
Who benefits?
For settings requiring (fast) intervention in geographically separated corporate environments.