The Client
This is a case study on a program for the most senior women in an international consulting firm.
The Genesis
The leader of the project had been asked the question by a respected male colleague:
“How can our most senior women become a distinctive asset of our organisation?”
She decided to answer this question and engaged the Passion Maps organisation to assist.
The Challenge
The task was to discover how to facilitate this program whose purpose was to find the distinctive capacity of the 20 most senior women in a largely male dominated international business consultancy.
The design involved a number of stages over a six month period. The women, despite being spread around the globe, would need to come together as a group of powerful women from a place of deep authenticity, purpose, and personal potential.
The Solution
STAGE 1
All women directors were interviewed to determine the current issues and to understand the nature of the group. A joint interviewing group and key questions were agreed. These questions were asked of all women that covered their role and activities in the organisation and aspirations for the group.
STAGE 2
The initial focus for this stage were the North American women. They came to a leadership retreat held in a beautiful retreat centre in southern United States,chosen as it enabled a balanced body, mind, spirit, heart approach. A team of 8 experienced Passion Mapping Master Facilitators were to provide their unique heart and spirit technologies.
All the women undertook their own Executive Passion Mapping programs over three days and within a holistic program.
Next, they shared their own Maps. This was an empowering, bonding and clarifying experience and the women got to understand each other at a deeper level.
Then they created their Collective Passion Map, during which they captured, harmonised, and released the energy and passions of all the women.
STAGE 3
Other Directors outside North America felt the power of the process and all wanted to be part of the program as well, so the focus was extended to a global one, making the next step facilitating individual Passion Maps around the world, mainly UK and Europe but including places as far afield as Russia and Japan. This group was very diverse, other than the fact that they were all women working for the same organisation.
One of the remarkable features of Passion Mapping is that, as it works with life force energy, it works for anyone, any number of people regardless of individual differences such as gender, age, religion, culture, geography, sexual orientation, personal beliefs, even values.
Another feature is the capacity of the practitioner team to form into a potent and coherent group using the same processes that their clients experience.
Women from different parts of the world heard about the wonderful outcomes for their North American colleagues and all wanted to become part of the program. Although not planned in the beginning, a new initiative was created to bring Passion Mapping to all the most senior women internationally. Many had only met a few other senior women.
The Executive Passion Mapping programs were undertaken by all of these new women in their home states, home countries or home places, including Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States.
STAGE 4
All 20 senior women came to London for one day workshop where they shared their own passions, their Passion Maps and their experiences.This was profound for them as they all got to know each other at a deeper level through sharing their individual Passion Maps. They formed into a potent global group rather than, previously, just as colleagues around the world who happened to be women.
They then developed a collective intention for the group to support each other and other women in the world.
The passion that they created together was a synthesis of the key passions of each individual woman towards meeting that intention or goal.
Initiatives
Having this sense of the collective passion of these 20 powerful women, they were able to create 11 initiatives in just one day, many of which are still active today.
These initiatives included a:
- leadership program resonant with the nature of women
- networking program for women in senior positions in major corporations
- political movement within the organisation to support women
- set of awards to be presented on a critical day to men who had most supported women in the organisation. This was a very clever initiative because it played on men’s competitiveness– in wanting to do things better than other men and to support women more than other men were.
- health initiative for the organisation
This was an extraordinary outcome for the women and one of the learnings was that when powerful women come together, they have their own way of creating a future path for themselves, which is quite different from the way that a similar group of men would have done.
Most were surprised at how powerful they were as a group of women coming together in their feminine essences, rather than from their understanding of how they fit into a male dominated organisation.
Conclusions
As the facilitator, I learned that it is possible for women to empower each other both individually and collectively in a safe and systematic way, beyond what they or I have ever imagined.
We have many examples around the world in political organisations, in business organisations, in different places where male dominance prevails.
A very big part of the answer is not to rely purely on men for change but for the women to empower themselves as women. In doing so they empower themselves to educate males as to how they can be more effective in bringing forward this extraordinary capacity for women to come together in their essence.
originally published on Peter Wallman’s LinkedIn