Genuine Contact is an approach to organizational development that supercharges the work you are already doing, using simple but very effective means that lead to genuine contact really fast. Genuine contact for people with themselves, with each other, and with the purpose of what they are doing together.
When this happens, people tap into collective intelligence allowing for better solutions to happen faster for everyday issues and complex challenges. Teams build naturally as a by-product of working towards business goals. Productivity increases alongside job satisfaction.
The Genuine Contact Program is designed for organizational development and a means to create a culture of leadership, where everyone is invited to take leadership within the givens of the organization. The program is designed to allow leaders maximum freedom and choice for adjustment to the unique situation of their organization and the culture of leadership they wish to nourish.
The Genuine Contact program provides skills and knowledge which will last a lifetime. Each workshop is designed to provide techniques, tools, and concepts that have multiple applications for leadership, facilitation, consulting, and managing.
Genuine Contact Program
The methods, tools, and approach are taught in nine different workshops. Each workshop offers valuable skills and capacity building around a specific learning objective and as a stand-alone module. Workshops can be bundled together to achieve more complex learning goals including effective meeting facilitation, leadership development, organizational development, and improving organizational health and balance. The final workshop in the series, Train the Trainer, authorizes you to teach these workshops both publicly and in-house in organizations.
The workshops are offered in different locations and languages around the world. You can also find them online in different time zones.
Foundational Workshops
The Foundational Workshops are designed to regenerate your relationship with yourself and the values of your organization. They provide the foundational modules for more advanced work with the Genuine Contact program and support extraordinary leaders who wish to nourish a culture of leadership.
Path to Organizational Health and Balance
An orientation to a holistic approach to organizational success and the resulting benefits from such an approach. It also provides an introduction to some simple, easily duplicated tools.
Achieving Organizational Health and Balance: Diagnosis and Regeneration
Provides participants with the skills and confidence to carry out a diagnosis of the state of health and balance (wellness) of their organization without the need for consultant help. You leave with self-help tools so you can do period checks and adjustments in order to sustain the desired state of the organization.
Individual Health and Balance for Leaders
Provides a framework to examine your personal health and balance and to develop a plan for regaining health and balance within a fast-paced stress filled life. This is key to good decision making and sustained leadership performance. >> Learn More
Holistic Leadership Development
For those who are ready to go to the next level of leadership development, expanding your capacity as a leader to nourish a culture of leadership in your organization and sustain optimal, spirited performance. You have already developed increased self-awareness about your personal health and balance by taking the Individual Health and Balance workshop for leaders.
Advanced Skill Building Workshops
These workshops focus on implementing a new operating platform and developing a culture of leadership. Change is brought about by highly participative meetings as a supporting and driving force. The workshops are designed for leaders, consultants, and facilitators who need means of finding optimal organizational solutions in ways that are fast, simple and duplicable. Using these skills results in the development of the Genuine Contact Organization, a highly engaged organization that sustains performance even in periods of rapid change.
Working with Open Space Technology
A highly participative method for large group meetings, that when used frequently shifts the culture in the organization. You will learn to facilitate OST meetings and you will learn the longer process of planning, debrief and accountability meetings to make optimal use of the results for the benefit of the organization.
Whole Person Process Facilitation
This meeting method is more guided while still offering maximum choice and freedom to participants. It is congruent in values to Open Space Technology. WPPF invites the whole person to be present in the meeting and use his or her full wisdom and potential to find the solutions that are needed.
Cross Cultural Conflict Resolution
Works from the perspective that underneath the diversity, all humans have some things in common. The workshop supports your contact with yourself and your beliefs about conflicts and provides a design for conflict resolution from a perspective of universal needs and understandings.
Genuine Contact Organization
An operating system to foster a solution-focused base and achieve sustainable peak performance for a living organization. It provides patterns of simple, elegant processes that can handle and benefit from all the complexity within and outside the organization. It also provides a nourishing environment in which the human spirit can flourish creatively and fulfill its potential. Solutions come from the collective genius and passion of the organization’s existing human resources, generating the energy to implement them in the process. A culture of leadership results as does an ongoing interconnected learning organization.
Train the Trainer
To be a Genuine Contact™ Trainer is to support life nourishing organizations and sustainable growth. You are invited to step into your extraordinary leadership and commit to your own development and growth.
The workshop is designed so that you can grow into mastery in using and teaching the Genuine Contact™ program. With the Train the Trainer workshop you are authorized to teach the full program in-house and in public workshops. You are invited to join the ongoing international mentoring circle of Trainers and you will get access to resources to support you in working with Genuine Contact including sample training outlines for facilitating your own workshops. As a Genuine Contact Trainer, you are invited to become a member of the Genuine Contact Co-owner Group Inc.
Join our community of more than 130 Genuine Contact Trainers worldwide!
Beliefs, Components, Key Concepts and Foundational Givens
Birgitt and Ward Williams designed the Genuine Contact program with simplicity in mind. The program, focusing on attending to organizational health and balance as a foundation for organizational success, uses meetings as a catalyst for organizations to develop as conscious, life nourishing, interconnected creative organizations. Meetings are used as a catalyst. Management learns to manage differently. We call these organizations Genuine Contact Organizations. The process is organic so that every organization brings about its own unique change from within.
The program is supported by:
- 5 Beliefs
- 11 Components
- 9 Key Concepts
- 5 Foundational Givens
What's Next?
Workshops are offered around the world and in several languages. Workshops are regularly offered in English, German, and Swedish. They are also offered occasionally in Dutch, French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Russian. Genuine Contact Professionals offer workshops both in person and online. In short, it's easy to find an upcoming workshop near you!
Find a Trainer
Looking for a Trainer offering workshops near you? Prefer to learn online from the comfort of your home or office? Find a Genuine Contact Trainer here
Find a Workshop
Looking for a particular workshop? Or a series of workshops to achieve your learning goals? Find an upcoming Genuine Contact Workshop here.