Introducing a New Service Area: Systems Coaching

As Rosov Consulting marks its ten-year anniversary as a professional services firm, we are excited to begin offering a new service to clients: Systems Coaching.

This service focuses on coaching leaders and leadership teams for organizational health — an area that often is both a great challenge and need for many organizations. Rosov Consulting’s tagline is “Information. Insight. Impact.” And, yet, even the best information will only lead to impact if an organization is set up to deliver that impact. In 2008, MIT’s global study Making Change Work found that the most significant challenge facing organizational change efforts were “people” challenges (e.g. changing mindsets 58%; organizational culture 49%). And in 2012, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmundson noted in her book, Teaming,

Fast moving work environments need people who know how to team, people who have the skills and the flexibility to act in moments of potential collaboration when and where they appear.

Our Systems Coaching service area is led by Pearl Mattenson, who has been a member of our Senior Leadership Team for nearly four years. During this period, Pearl has worked on a wide range of evaluation, strategy, and organizational systems improvement projects. The organizational systems work — helping leaders and leadership teams to navigate organizational changes and challenges and to develop a skill set for excellent leadership in any situation — has been her passion and her expertise since long before joining Rosov Consulting.

As a certified relationship systems coach, Pearl develops confidential, trusting relationships with senior leaders and their teams. She ensures that they not only meet, but exceed, their potential and bring their best selves to their work and their work relationships. As we always do at Rosov Consulting, Pearl draws on multiple disciplines and approaches to address clients’ needs.

In our work, there is no such thing as a “routine” assignment. While there are many reputable leadership coaches and no shortage of strategic consultants, we are excited to have on our team one of the few systems coaches operating specifically in the Jewish nonprofit space.

Here are two brief vignettes that exemplify our systems coaching work to date:

• A large synagogue wanted to merge its separate education departments into one team. This would require articulating a unified mission, redefining roles, and finding interdependencies and new ways of working together across the organization. Our systems coaching work unfolded over the course of a year, bracketed by two retreats and interspersed with small group coaching sessions, to create a new sense of alignment among the key staff members. The resulting clarity enabled the synagogue to find a director to oversee the newly formed team.
• A nascent senior leadership team needed to move away from leading in silos to working cross-functionally and feeling collectively responsible for their organization’s outcomes. Our systems coaching work, still ongoing, helped to build trust among the team members, opened lines of communication, and began to lay the groundwork for collective decision making.

Please reach out if you have any questions or inquiries about Systems Coaching or any of our other services.