Rooted in The Grove’s Legacy, Aimed at the Future: Coaching Leaders for Inner Evolution and Outer Impact

Author: Gisela Wendling, Ph.D.

For more than 45 years, The Grove Consultants International has been creating effective containers of change for organizations across many sectors. As the pace and complexity of transformation accelerate, leaders are facing unprecedented demands on their attention, resilience and inner resources. This year, we are expanding our work by officially launching a new Leadership Development service line, which extends our expertise as designers and facilitators of change into one-on-one leadership coaching.

This article shares why we are evolving our practice and why coaching is now indispensable for leaders navigating transformational change.

Why We Are Concerned

At The Grove, we see the ground shifting quickly for our clients. When client conversations turn candid, leaders often reveal to us the stress and confusion they’re navigating. Many are not getting the kind of support they need to navigate the depth of the transitions they are undergoing. The change consultants we work with also share about the “polycrises” many are experiencing. Clarifying strategy, aligning stakeholders or mapping change processes is no longer enough on its own.

We believe leaders and their consultants today require a deeper inner capacity to balance the outer challenges. These inner qualities, in addition to organizational acumen, are essential for leading through complexity, uncertainty and intensifying emotion.

Why We Are Prepared

The Grove’s coaching integrates attention to both the inner and outer aspects of leadership, a dual focus that has guided our transformational engagements for decades. In our longer client processes, we have always coached leaders through major change initiatives, helping them stay steady, centered, and relationally attuned during strategic visioning and change-alignment work.

Through our own experience and through formal certification in one-on-one coaching, we have also come to understand how valuable a longer coaching arc can be for unlocking new capabilities and sustaining personal evolution.

Here are a few examples of leadership challenges emerging in our recent coaching engagements, reflective of the wider landscape:

• A founder and executive director of a successful nonprofit is facing burnout and is seeking to reignite her vision and passion, expand her skill set to support her organization’s growth and embrace the required personal development as her children leave for college and enter young adulthood.
• One client who has developed a nationally recognized breakthrough approach to preparing underserved young people for college is working to find the vision and courage to create a new center dedicated to this intention.
• A senior climate scientist who has successfully funded and led teams focused on climate preparedness and response for two decades is reevaluating her career path amid recent disruptions in national governance and is embracing a transition into a new professional direction.
• A member of the senior management team at a large construction company is receiving support to develop his own direct reports and to foster a culture of collaboration within organizational units. 

We at The Grove have experienced the value of coaching firsthand:

David Sibbet, The Grove’s founder, benefited enormously from long-term skilled coaching during the writing of his four-volume Visual Facilitation series for Wiley, a process that demanded both creative focus and emotional steadiness.

Joran Oppelt, a Grove senior consultant in Team Performance, Strategic Visioning and Graphic Facilitation with considerable experience in coaching was moved to tears the first time he worked with a coach of his own. For so long, he had led and supported others, but hadn’t experienced someone holding the change container for him. Having someone actively reflect the growth he’d experienced back to him and explicitly state their belief in him through the hardest times was a game-changer.

I worked with a coach to bring The Liminal Pathways Study to fruition, a project that required both rigorous inquiry and personal resilience, and I have benefited from the support of a coach during my transition to becoming CEO of The Grove.

Taken together, these examples show how varied and dynamic the landscape of leadership has become. Leaders today are carrying complex strategic responsibilities while also navigating profound personal shifts. Over the years, we have seen how transformative it can be when leaders have a coach who understands both the inner journey and the organizational systems they operate within. This dual sensitivity—psychological and contextual—is central to our approach.

Because leadership coaching requires this combination of long-term one-on-one support and a deep organizational understanding, we are expanding our team of coaches. Alongside our own experience, several seasoned executive coaches who have worked closely with The Grove are joining us to create a robust, diverse coaching bench for our new service.

What Are Our Foundational Models

Several orienting frameworks are the foundation of our coaching approach and will help our clients develop “Change Literacy,” one of four essential competencies we have identified.

The Liminal Pathways Change Framework™ (LPF), Gisela Wendling’s synthesis of decades of research and practice with the most basic and profound pattern of human transformation: the rites-of-passage sequence, is grounded in anthropology and years of applied work. This framework has become The Grove’s core model for understanding, designing and facilitating change and it is the pattern our coaching clients will inevitably experience.

The Seven Challenges of Change model integrates the LPF with The Grove’s process theories to add insights and offer practices for bringing about change in complex organizations. It will help clients think about their organizations.

We are dedicated to a whole-person approach integrating spirit, heart, mind and body. Gisela's long-time work with transformational process and human development has resulted in a Change Maker’s Competency Wheel™, which outlines the key competencies needed to engage transitions as developmental opportunities. We are now piloting assessments for individuals, leaders and guides that reflect the unique competencies of each role as part of our Transformational Change Practice.

This integrated view has led us to an essential conclusion:

Leaders and consultants can develop inner stability and resilience by developing competencies that attend to the whole person.

What are The Four Domains of the Grove’s Change Maker’s Competency Wheel

Change Literacy: Understanding the patterns, phases and paradoxes of change is fundamental. Leaders who are literate in change processes can anticipate thresholds, normalize uncertainty and bring more confidence to guide others with more steadiness and coherence.

Inner & Outer Guidance: Transformational leadership requires both spiritual and practical forms of guidance. Leaders need ways to access their deeper knowing, cultivate reflective or meditative practices and engage mentors, peers and helpers. Leadership is never a solitary act; it is relational and interdependent.

Emotional Fluidity: Disconnection and relational fracture are widespread. Leaders need to work skillfully with their own emotional range and support others in accessing theirs. Emotional fluidity creates the conditions for trust, respect, and genuine participation—prerequisites for sustainable change.

Somatic Awareness: The body offers essential signals about ourselves, others and the wider field. Leaders who cultivate somatic awareness deepen grounded presence, recognize stress-levels, regulate somatic activation and access intuitive clarity. This embodied steadiness strengthens resilience and supports healthier, more coherent responses in times of change. We collaborate with highly skilled practitioners in this area, integrating somatic intelligence into leadership coaching.

What Our Coaching Offers

Our new coaching offerings allow clients to discover, understand and apply these competencies guided by their own intentions. We work in three-, six- and nine-month engagements, taking the time, commitment and a trusted partnership to do deep personal development. Unlike consulting, coaching is guided entirely by a client’s goals, intentions and inner readiness.

Our purpose in coaching is to unlock both internal resources and contextual insight–deeper forms of clarity that cannot be reached through strategy alone. Often, the breakthroughs that matter most emerge unexpectedly, through a combination of reflection, attunement and practice.

While each coaching engagement is unique, clients commonly experience:

• Strengthened resilience and clarity in the face of uncertainty
• Expanded relational awareness and the ability to transform resistance into insight
• Greater capacity to navigate emergence while sustaining a visionary focus
• Alignment of actions with deeper purpose and values
  
  

Whether leaders are stepping into a new role, guiding a strategic transition or discerning their next horizon, coaching provides the structure, support and deep attention needed to navigate transformation well.

An Invitation

We are excited to bring our decades of experience, tools and frameworks into this new offering for leaders. If you are curious about how coaching might support your leadership journey, we welcome a conversation.

Schedule a discovery call to explore whether coaching is right for you and how it can help you realize your next level of leadership.