Leadership Team Work
Dialogue sessions, offsites, and transformation engagements for leadership teams navigating conflict, transition, or cultural renewal. I hold the room, the tension, and what wants to emerge, so the team can think and decide together in ways it couldn’t alone.
Conflict is not the problem. Collapsed thinking is.
Most leadership teams don’t lack intelligence. They lack a way of thinking together when the stakes are high. Positions harden, the real disagreement goes underground, and decisions get made in the corridor.
Dialectical work treats opposing views as raw material, not as battles to be won. The move is from “No, but” to “Yes, and”: from positions defended to wisdom co-created.
When teams bring me in
Sometimes there is an occasion: a merger, a reorganization, or a change at the top; a new CEO who inherits a team; a generational handover in a family business; a decision about what AI means for the company and for the team itself. Just as often there is no occasion at all, only signs like these.
- The real disagreement happens after the meeting.
- Everyone agrees in the room, and nothing changes afterwards.
- Two camps have formed, and new people learn quickly which one to join.
- The same discussion comes back every quarter with new slides.
- There is a strategy everyone signed off on and nobody fully believes in.
- Meetings end where the CEO started.
Formats
Deep Dialogue sessions
Half a day to two days on one question that matters.
Offsites
Designed around your strategy and your team’s actual tensions, not a standard program. I design and facilitate, so that everyone, including the CEO, can stay in the conversation.
Team transformation engagements
Over several months, combining team sessions with individual coaching for key leaders. The aim is a team that no longer needs a facilitator for its hard conversations.
Brave and safe, at the same time.
I create “brave and safe spaces, delicately facilitated for mutual learning, vulnerability and compassion.” Safe enough that people say what they actually think. Brave enough that it gets said in the room, not afterwards.
I draw on dialectical practice, somatic work, systemic organizational development, and Warm Data Labs (I’m a certified host with the International Bateson Institute). Never as a program, always as what the situation calls for.
AI is a question for the whole team.
When AI changes a company’s work, it changes the leadership team’s work first: what decisions rest on, which roles shift, what the team tells the organization. These conversations tend to split a team along a predictable line, with one camp seeing a threat and the other a tool. I facilitate them so that both truths stay on the table long enough for the team to reach a decision it can carry together. When the strategic question needs more depth, the AI formats in Strategic Advisory pick it up.
Some decisions can only be made together. Let’s make room for them.
or write to lennart@lennarthennig.com