Marco Valente

My clients range from pharma companies to banks, from tech companies to manufacturing, and from venture capital to bold NGOs who work towards systems change. The clients I work with range from fortune 500’s, to EU-funded organizations, or small non-profits. 

I am particularly passionate about helping humans and organizations who are explicitly commitment to positive change in the world. 

I have worked with a leadership team that has made great progress in becoming more effective at having honest conversations, getting to know one another, fostering trusting relationships, and having more hands-on tools to tackle complex problems that otherwise would consume a lot of their energy. 

Over the course of our time together, we have worked on a mix of: 
1:1 coaching 
leadership team retreats 
virtual touch-base points 

Especially during our leadership team retreats, we have facilitated a mix of activities: powerful, concise teachings; facilitation of deep connections to one another; facilitation of important conversations and meta-reflections that happened in the moment. 

We have helped the team with simple, powerful practices on multiple fronts: to expand their range of listening, we have practiced Listening to Learn; to recognize the complexity of their challenges at hand and take appropriate action, we have practiced mapping their problems through a complexity lens and related leadership moves;  and to work productively through deep-seated disagreements, we have helped them through Polarities mapping and navigating tensions. 

All of this has proven beneficial to the leadership team. Their morale is high, there is a strong level of cohesion and trust, and their capacity to have timely, important conversations has increased over time. The array of tools, practices, and mindsets has led to an even better functioning team that is able to cascade their leading-by-example across hundreds of other employees nationwide, and improve their results across the board. 

I have grown up strongly believing two things that have shaped my life: 1) that there is no correlation between loud voices and best ideas 2) that messy, complex problems cannot be answered by one person alone, but required something “more”. I did not know what “more” was at that time. So then: 

I was drawn to facilitation to help quite people have a voice 
I was drawn to social science to make society better 
I was drawn to leadership because I wanted to grow, myself 
I was drawn to complexity theories to understand what works with messy problems

My work has been informed by a confluence of interests and career paths. From an initial background in social science, semantics, journalism, to later studying sustainability science and systems thinking. This led me to understand and work with complex social and ecological systems in order to help them thrive. Later in my work at a university, I practiced facilitation methods as ways of helping people learn, and co-create meaningful outcomes. I studied and practiced coaching and leadership theories, grounded in adult development approaches to foster people’s growth. 

For a decade now, I have deepened my practice with complexity theories and applicable tools. Today, all of this comes together in: 
– approaches to coaching and how humans grow; 
– how teams can map, make meaning of, and act in their complex challenge 
– how organizations and teams can have the right conversation and create together a path forward 

My clients appreciate the clarity that I provide in mapping concepts, the eclectic approach to create leadership trainings, coaching journeys, and especially the flexibility and vast array of tools for facilitating meaningful dialogue and chart a way forward in complexity and uncertainty. 

And with all of that said, the work is never finished! As we invite our clients to develop, I myself, am a work in progress, always at the edge of my learning. I am thankful to all my colleagues and clients for the opportunity to constantly be in a space that enables mutual learning. 

The best work with my clients emerges from a space of openness, aiming to build trusting relationships, and co-ownership of the work we do with their teams. This means, in practice: 
– I try to listen closely to your needs, both to the present challenge, and to whatever we learn about the need as we dig more 
– I have a flexible array of tools, but let’s not rush to conclusion, solution too fast. Your needs come first. 
– With multiple iterations, a plan comes up that you can fully own and get behind.  

– “I may not be the best fit for you, if what you need instead is…” this sentence liberates both me and my client. To serve you best, let’s take off the pressure that I must be your only option! 
– I am your cheerleader and supporter, and I will challenge you at times.  
– We try and model together, in every dialogue, the kind of practices and ideas that we invite your team to grow into. I can only invite you to consider the importance of listening if I practice my best to listen to you. 

I am a part of the executive team, which means co-shaping with a small group of colleagues the strategic direction of the company, tending to our culture, and creating preconditions for CL to thrive in the world and grow into its biggest self.