018: Herb Stevenson: Stories and Insights from Coaching Teams: A Gestalt Approach to Team Coaching

Join Dr. Krister Lowe and leading organizational coach Herb Stevenson for this week’s episode of The Team Coaching Zone Podcast.  Herb is the Founder and CEO of the Cleveland Consulting Group, a Board Certified Executive Coach, a Gestalt Certified Coach, and a Certified Professional Coach.  He specializes in executive development and coaching, succession planning, whole and large-scale change and diversity management.  Herb is also the Founder of Natural Passages, an organization that offers nature-based leadership programs for men.  He has spent the last decade reclaiming his Cherokee and Shawnee Indian heritage and provides workshops across the country on indigenous healing practices.

In this episode Herb shares his journey from working in the banking industry, to making a shift into gestalt consulting and coaching, to founding the Cleveland Consulting Group and also to facilitating leadership retreats for men.  Specific themes discussed on the show include: the gestalt approach to systems change; 4 levers to improve team effectiveness: roles, responsibilities, communication and authority; constructive conflict in teams; Tuckman’s four stages of team development including accelerating team development across the stages as well as clarifying the leader’s role at each stage; Hackman’s four purposes/types of meetings: informational, decisional, consultation, coordination; team charters; the diagnostic stage of intervention; a number of assessments (The Team Diagnostic, Extraordinary Teams Assessment, MBTI-Form Q, Thomas Kilman Conflict Styles Inventory, FIRO-Business, Influence Styles and the Intercultural Conflict Styles Assessment); prioritization and ROT (return on time); the ripening of receptivity for team coaching in business; virtual team coaching; co-leadership vs. individual leadership; and the relationship of engagement to leadership, team and organizational culture. Throughout the episode Herb shares numerous stories and anecdotes from his experiences coaching teams from a range of industries including banking, oil & gas, insurance and more. 

As a bonus to the episode, Herb shares perspectives from his work running nature-based retreats through his company Natural Passages that focuses on creating constructive rites of passage for men.

For detailed Show Notes go to: www.TeamCoachingZone.com/HerbStevenson