"How come supermarket owners always put the candies at the end, just before the checkout, when they know that this causes a fight in every family?" the 5-year-old daughter asks her dad, Fréderic Laloux. Stories like this drive Laloux. "Reclaiming Integrity at work" was his topic at the online conference "Teal around the world", where I spend 24 hours with over a thousand teal-enthusiasts from around the world. "Teal" refers to a level of consciousness that Laloux applied to organizations and stands for self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose.

In his keynote, Laloux, whose book "Reinventing Organisations" initiated the Teal Around the World movement, explores the question of how we can regain and live integrity at work. By integrity, he means standing by our need for wholeness and being truly being ourselves. Laloux invites us, first, to be curious about what we need on our path of wholeness and then to address it, to find true integrity at work. 

In order to address our needs for integrity, it is not important to have a ready solution at hand. Quite the opposite. Laloux suggests, it is about noticing the feeling that points to our lack of integrity and trusting that the solution will develop step by step in exchange with others, when we address it.

Interestingly, nonviolent communication by to Marshall B. Rosenberg offers us a simple method, to adress these needs for integrity with others. "Stop being nice, stay honest" is the subtitle to our introductory seminar. NVC aims to address our needs such as integrity without using power over but rather with compassion and request clear actions, sinple steps, in order to fulfill these needs. This increases the likelihood that our needs are actually heard and that people around us voluntarily agree to help us. 

In our seminar introducing non-violent communication - solution-focused approach- we offer space to get to know this kind of communication. We discover how it works when we focus our attention on our observations and the feelings that arise through them. We learn to communicate our desire to have our needs met without reproach or devaluation. Non-violent and solution-focused communication connects us with our interlocutors. It helps us to gain more integrity and to set out on the path towards a resolution.

Author: Oliver