Helping mission-driven organizations scale inner development for transformational impact.

Over the course of two decades of experimentation and innovation at high performing nonprofits, Dr. Max Klau developed an approach to integrating a powerful, scalable process of inner development into purpose-driven organizations. He tells the story of how he arrived at this model, how it works, and how it is currently having an impact in the world in his new book, Developing Servant Leaders at Scale: How To Do It, and Why It Matters, with a foreword by renowned Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

He founded the Center for Courageous Wholeness to bring this work into the world.

This work integrates three key concepts:

1) Servant Leadership
This is type of leadership in which the primary focus is on supporting the growth and development of others, rather than seeking domination, control, or personal enrichment. In his seminal essay entitled “The Servant as Leader”, Robert Greenleaf explains the concept this way:

“The best test [of servant leadership] is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“ (Greenleaf, p. 27)

2) Scaling Impact
The concept of “at scale” means “at a size or number that makes it possible to meaningfully address the challenge at hand.”  This book presents an enterprise-wide approach to leadership development. This is not just about working with a small group of high-potentials or senior leaders; it’s about creating an organization-wide (or movement-wide) capacity to engage everyone in a transformational leadership development experience.

3) Inner Development
This work is grounded in the belief that transformation is a Dual Journey involving both outer-world impact and inner-world change. The book explains how to integrate a new organizational capacity to guide thousands of individuals through an experience of inner development into an organization that is already focused on purpose-driven impact.

Dr. Klau explains that building a new capacity for scalable inner development is a significant organizational change effort. He states:

”It turns out that organizations tend to resist the emergence of this capacity because it challenges some deeply held and largely unexamined assumptions about what leadership development means and how change happens…[T]he effort to do this work at scale evokes a whole set of issues that must be addressed and challenges that must be overcome that are not apparent when engaging in the work of individual or small group leadership development.  I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life figuring out how to understand and effectively address those challenges, and I’ve written this book to share what I’ve learned. “

An Approach that is Practical, Proven, and Powerful

Courageous Wholeness Consulting guides organizations and communities through the work of achieving the following:

• Internalizing a set of key mindset shifts that are essential for organizations that aspire to effective engage in inner development at scale

• Learn how to create and hold spaces that invite deep reflection and inner development in ways that are effective and scalable

• Identify and train existing staff to skillfully facilitate the dialogues that occur in these spaces

• Build a new organizational capacity to engage in question finding, curiosity, and dialogue

• Skillfully manage with the resistance to this work that inevitably emerges among senior leaders

• Successfully engage not only the enthusiasts, but also the skeptics and the cynics

As the book makes clear, this is not a think-piece making an intellectual case for the importace of developing servant leaders. It is an approach the has been refined over the course of years of experimenation and innovation in mutliple high-performing nonprofits. It’s a proven, practical, and powerful approach, and we can help you bring it to your organization.