Genuine Contact

Many leadership theorists and organizational development consultants talk about WHAT is needed for organizations of all kinds to thrive in today’s internal and external environments of constant change. The Genuine Contact™ program provides you with tools, techniques, and concepts of HOW to do so.

Genuine Contact is at the root of our way to work from a holistic approach with leadership and organizational development. It is best described through its two primary components:

  • The Genuine Contact Program
  • The Genuine Contact Way

Both were developed by our Dalar International Consultancy team and are now used worldwide in all kinds of organizations. Organizations of a variety of sizes from solo-entrepreneurs and freelancers up to international corporations and NGOs with hundreds or thousands of staff. Organizations of a variety of hierarchical structures, from millennial startups determined to do work differently through to organizations with strict structures and processes. Genuine Contact works with organizations across cultures because its tools, techniques and concepts are based on what is the same in all humanity rather than focusing on differences.

The Genuine Contact Program

The Genuine Contact program was developed by our Dalar team beginning in the 1990s and has since been worked with and taught around the world. The program is made up of simple and duplicable tools, techniques and concepts designed to support organizations in achieving and sustaining optimum success. They are easy to learn and shift into immediate application. We want the focus to be on finding the best solutions for challenges and opportunities…and this requires a simple and easy to learn and to duplicate tools and processes for the engagement of people.

The program provides an effective and quick means to access the issues that need to be addressed in your organization and the solutions that need to be implemented. Through its holistic approach, the Genuine Contact program was designed with simplicity in mind, using highly participative meetings to engage the people involved in doing the work, in finding solutions and developing results focused action plans.

Through decades of applied research in a variety of cultures, engaging people in such a way consistently resulted in outcomes that surpassed expectations. Such meetings used as a catalyst for engaging optimal performance were supported by creating a participatory architecture as key in sustaining the engagement and leadership needed for a high performing solution focused culture in a performance environment of constant change.

The Genuine Contact program is of value in your efforts to:

  1. Close the gap between potential and results
  2. Nourish a culture of leadership, critically important if you have knowledge, service and technology workers
  3. Develop the capacity of your organization to thrive
  4. Develop leadership for leading in a culture requiring agility, flexibility, and solutions in a performance environment of constant change

The Genuine Contact program was designed in a modular way with intention. It is possible to learn specific modules to achieve specific business goals including leadership development, strategic planning or strategic plan refresh, team development, meeting facilitation or project turnaround. It is possible to learn to work with the entire program to support organizational change and transformation efforts.

It is possible to engage us as consultants to support your organization in achieving your desired culture change to a solution focused culture that gets the results that are possible when your people are highly engaged. Along the way, we develop key staff to ensure that there is capacity in your organization to sustain the engaged higher levels of performance.

>> Learn More about the Modules of The Genuine Contact Program

The Genuine Contact Way

Following development of the Genuine Contact program and its use in various settings in various countries, leaders and consultants commented on a resultant sense of a way of living and working that emerged for them. They wanted to understand this more, and particularly wanted to understand the leadership development required to lead in a culture of leadership.

In response to these comments and accompanying requests, co-founder of the Genuine Contact program Birgitt Williams authored a book The Genuine Contact Way: Nourishing a Culture of Leadership. Birgitt is clear that personal development and leadership development are intertwined and cannot be artificially separated. She also believes that leadership development work is some of the most important work on the planet at this time. Important in this work is supporting leadership through nourishing a culture of leadership. She is a strong advocate of people empowering themselves by claiming leadership of their lives, their businesses and organizations for the greater well-being of all.

Birgitt maintains that there is leadership capacity within everyone and that it is time for people to awaken their leadership potential. The Genuine Contact Way: Nourishing a Culture of Leadership offers reader the opportunity to take a deep dive into the subject of personal and professional leadership development.

Exploring the beliefs of the Genuine Contact way through the book supports deeper understanding of the Genuine Contact program and why it works.

Previously, she had focused on the HOW of working from a holistic approach, co-authoring nine workbooks and offering training in the components of the Genuine Contact program in a number of countries. Despite being asked for a decade for the ‘book’ that would define this Genuine Contact way of working, she avoided undertaking this task until the program had been in use for a decade. She did not want a book as a ‘how to manual’, with a firm conviction that the workbooks and workshops caused people to think deeply and align their actions with their own unique interpretations and styles. Her quest was to write a book in such a way that it described the five beliefs that underpin the Genuine Contact program and at the same time created questions for the reader to address without giving answers.

>> Learn More about the Genuine Contact Way

Getting Started

Ready to learn more about Genuine Contact?

  • Contact Birgitt Williams to schedule a free one hour on line consultation to determine the parts of the Genuine Contact program best suited to your business goals.
  • Join the international Genuine Contact Organization. Your membership includes an online mentoring circle for people who are interested in the Genuine Contact program. The White Level membership is free to join and other paid membership levels are available. There are people from many cultures and countries who engage together in peer-to-peer mentoring. People learn from each other and support each other. At present, the international Genuine Contact online mentoring circle that is available constantly throughout the year uses the online technology Google Groups and thus is email-based and not in real-time. However, if you have a question, you will discover that answers and feedback come in fairly quickly in response to your post. In this regard, people in this mentoring circle are very generous with each other.  There is no requirement to have taken even a single workshop in order to participate in interesting discussions in this international mentoring circle.
  • Check out the Genuine Contact website for more information. Created and hosted by the Genuine Contact Organization, this site will offer you more information about the program and the collective of people working with this approach worldwide.