Written by Mark and Arabella
Time to change
We believe it’s time to do leadership differently and to develop leaders differently.
Our intention in inviting people to join the Gyre movement is to create an inclusive community of people dedicated to finding a different approach to leadership and to how we develop our leaders.
Our contribution to the movement is to offer access to the Gyre platform free of charge: so that everyone can take part and be included. We can also offer our time, spirit and energy.
What has motivated us to want to start a movement?
25 years - and not enough has changed
We share a deep sense of frustration that 25 years after getting involved in the world of leadership development, so little has changed. And that frustration gives rise to a matching deep appetite to make a difference.
The problem as we see it
Leadership and leadership development remains something for the elite, something inherently exclusive. Leadership development still happens a decade or more after people actually start leading. Managing is still seen as a stepping stone to leadership.
But leadership is not about hierarchy, it’s about working with other people to create brilliant high performance teams: teams that make a difference to themselves and the world around them.
The consequences of this unhappy status quo?
The vast majority of people, particularly early on in their career, are left to their own devices when it comes to leading.
When someone is promoted to be a team lead, the experience is so often one of stress rather than excitement. And if people are lucky enough to get any training, the models that people are handed rarely if ever focus on the team: instead the agenda is about 1:1 coaching, 1:1 performance reviews, individual goal-setting.
The outcome for the team is often one of dull weekly operational status updates, punctuated possibly by a trip to the pub after hours.
We can do better than this.
A world that inadvertently excludes
Access to high quality development resources and tools has been locked down: if you can’t pay, you can’t access. Gyre is a commercial enterprise: we understand the profit imperative. But we believe we need to rethink our prevailing commercial models.
Arguably with the best of intentions of establishing and promoting best practices, our business models inadvertently reinforce the sense of exclusion. Development can only come from a certificated coach and the coach in turn needs to be certificated to use their tools, and in turn the tool-developers need certificating. Each layer motivated by the best of intentions but inadvertently excluding the people who can benefit most.
We have to do better than this.
An alternative model
The Open Source Software movement
Gyre has a fantastic and deeply skilled tech team. They live and operate in a world of open-source software, where the core code-bases and libraries are often free to access and use as tools. The licence provides explicit permission to use the code freely and often without making a claim on the IP that is created using the code base.
Is this a charitable act? Far from it! It recognises that software works best when it is widely adopted, and developers won’t adopt a software tool until the ‘community’ has vetted it positively. Hence you need to get the tool into the hands of developers easily and to get into the virtuous circle of feedback enhancing the tool and driving further improvements and adoption.
It is then for the original developers of the open-source tool to exercise ingenuity in how they commercialise their creation, often through offering value-added services such as running dedicated servers, or making enhancements to the core tool that they charge for.
The point is that any developer, anywhere in the world can access the same high quality tools that are used in the most advanced technology businesses.
We will replicate this:
we are making Gyre Open Access - meaning that everyone can access our platform
we are reaching out to coaches, consultants and leaders to begin to create a community - join us on LinkedIn (Mark and Arabella)
we are offering our experience and insight to pool with yours to offer the next generation something different.
