Nataliya Wiedemeyer, the founder of GRAVITEAMS MANAGEMENT CONSULTING, is an international trainer, project manager, and business consultant. She is dedicated to team collaboration, understanding, and performance in unity. Nataliya Wiedemeyer focuses more on creating organizational goals where people can work unitedly to achieve these.
She gathered up all her expertise, knowledge, and skills and established GRAVITEAMS to help different businesses attain success through effective consultation and training. The company focuses on innovative business models, leadership, and better teamwork. GRAVITEAMS is also visible on social media on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Through GRAVITEAMS, Nataliya Wiedemeyer helps businesses with advisory projects, facilitation, leadership and team coaching, speaking engagements, and webinars.
It was quite a wonderful opportunity to speak with Nataliya Wiedemeyer, a productivity-driven and team-spirited woman who is rising as a business leader in the Arab World. This article focuses on our interview with Nataliya Wiedemeyer.
Explain the background of you and the company in detail.
GRAVITEAMS is a Management Consulting firm for future-ready leadership, innovative business models, and engaged collaboration. Furthermore, I am passionate about motivated teams and cohesive organizational cultures. GRAVITEAMS stands for gravity in teamwork. Physical gravity is this invisible force that holds planets in their orbits and us on the ground. We don’t consciously feel its presence; we take it for granted, as it is always there.
We are different when it comes to mutual attraction and cohesion in our business relationships. Social gravity is not something to be taken for granted, but it should be deliberately fostered. When people constructively contribute and understand each other, no business strategy or business operation is impossible. But, on the other hand, no great things are ever achieved by one person alone; there is always a team.
With a people-centric integrated transformational approach, GRAVITEAMS helps companies and organizations to connect their people through technology and in spirit and drive their business performance and productivity today while getting ready for the challenges of tomorrow.
What are your goals?
It takes a special kind of mindset in organizations to create a culture of engagement, and contribution, where everyone can do their best and thrive. My goal with GRAVITEAMS is to create awareness that this is the only way to create a sustainable and healthy work culture and achieve business success in the long run. The world today is just too complex for any one person or a small group of people to know all the answers.
Transactional coordination of roles and tasks does not work and leads to bad quality, lack of subordination, and very high employee turnover. The culture of command and control that used to be effective for simple production lines of the 20th century is outdated now. The one in command can never have the whole picture as much as a coordinated team with different perspectives and can never achieve high-quality results unless people involved understand what is in it for the organization and how they can help make it happen.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of yourself/company right now?
My biggest strength is the methodology that I use– team coaching. It is a way to collaborate with the leader and the relevant stakeholders closely. It includes elements of consulting, training, facilitation, and organizational change driven from within.
The approach might be new within the coaching and consulting professions, but since I have worked for over 15 years as a coach, consultant, organizational trainer, and project leader, the elements simply fall into a cohesive whole. My approach helps me to find the right tools and methods to help implement change successfully.
What was the path you/your company took to get to where you are today?
I think that flexibility and the ability to learn are the most valuable skills in the 21st century. However, having a winning product today will not guarantee you to be successful in the future. In fact, it might be the reason for your ruin, as you’d be not vigilant enough to spot the need to innovate and to stay at the edge early enough. Remember some examples of such disasters? Nokia, Kodak, Blackberry, etc.
In addition, flexibility is not about simply jumping on the next fancy trend, but more the application of critical scrutiny and deep analysis of the needs of our customers and willingness to create tailored solutions. This is the strength of GRAVITEAMS, and this is what we work on with our clients.
Why did you start (or want to be the head of) this company?
While working in corporate roles, I have seen in my own experience what can happen in a situation when you, as a leader, have a clear understanding of the challenge, but your team does not follow, it is not aligned. As a result, you cannot achieve any good results. Task clarity – transactional or strategic – must be enhanced by the skill and talent of the leader to align the team. In addition, most problems come from toxic organizational environments. Toxicity is never intentional, but so difficult to change. As a business coach, I can help leaders see this and transform for the better.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Helping business leaders to understand that working towards a collaborative organization culture is the right thing to do. It takes a lot of growth mindset for a leader to let go of the good for the sake of creating the better.
COVID was a challenge too. I came to the UAE in 2020, just before the pandemic started. At that time, business innovation was not a thing of immediate urgency for many organizations. However, luckily, we are over it, and now is exactly the right time to get on the top of the wave of innovation and technological acceleration or be swept by the wave otherwise.
Give us one word that describes you the best.
Determination.
What makes you excited about Mondays?
I am excited about every day of the week. I love what I do, and I have a strong sense of self-discipline. As a mother of three, I also have quite exciting times outside of my work, so I also love my weekends, when I can spend more time with the kids and my husband. Never bored and always busy, but in a good sense.
What do you value most about your culture and vision?
The key is the abundance mindset. Opportunities are plenty for everyone, and you just need to find the right ones for you. Resources are plentiful, ideas unlimited, just as human creativity and imagination. Markets can be created as innovative products appear. We live in the age of networks, scaling effects, and acceleration. As an entrepreneur, it is key for me to embrace coopetition, which is cooperative competition, and be part of an ecosystem.
Nataliya Wiedemeyer , Tell us about a project that forced you to be innovative and creative.
I don’t think anything has forced me to be innovative and creative. If you look into neuroscience, the best creativity and innovation do not happen out of being forced. Being forced sounds and looks to the brain as a threat, it activates the subconscious response to resist. In addition to that, it deprives our thinking of the required resources needed to be creative. I do my best creative work, my best results when I am driven and determined. When I am in the flow, when the challenge is just above the level of feeling comfortable and secure.
What are your company’s strategies, and how do they stand unique from your competitors?
Our team coaching approach is a bit different than what other consultancies offer. It is like a consultancy in the way that I help clients create the best solutions, but it is also coaching, as I unlock the best ideas from the organization’s own people.
The result is that there is no resistance or lack of acceptance when the change is being implemented, as people, the stakeholders are being listened to and being involved. By facilitating, I help the team to tap into the values of trust, respect, appreciation, and contribution.
I help them see their conflicts or misunderstandings within a better, broader perspective, which helps them accept and appreciate their individual differences more easily. Again, coaching and facilitation are key here.
What are the key values that helped you overcome the roadblocks/challenges in your career? Tell us something about your memorable incident in your leadership?
Integrity. This is my most important value. To me, integrity has two components:
First, it is about knowing your moral principles. These are different from the social moral norms and can be very individual. However, they are the guidelines that we live by. Some of mine are: decisiveness, commitment to quality, thinking critically, and being aware of your own limitations – no one is perfect.
And the second component is to act according to those moral principles, to do the right thing. Finally, it implies knowing what your best personality and behavior look like and making your decisions accordingly, so you can proudly look into the mirror, into your own eyes.
Here is an example. I had taken over a project from a colleague and soon realized that the problem we were solving was not the root cause of what we needed to change. The easy way would have been to just finish it the way it was. However, my commitment to quality drove me to convince the stakeholders to look at it differently and to change the course. In the end, the result was worth the effort.
Nataliya Wiedemeyer How do you see the company changing in two years, and how do you see yourself creating that change?
My specialty is providing tailored solutions. This means change with every new project and every new client. So, for me, change is the only constant, and that will drive me personally in the years to come. How will I do this? Again, by thinking deeply and innovating constructively, in the interest of my clients.
Where is your leadership going? What benefits do your clients are getting from your company in this competitive world?
My leadership is built on trust. Everyone talks about trust and how it is important. Yet trust has many different aspects, and in the end, you still cannot put it in a box. Let me show you what trust is for me:
- Trust that you do what you have promised you will do.
- Trust that you understand my best interests and will not knowingly act against them.
- Trust that you have the skill and competence to do what you promise.
- Trust that you will let me know if you cannot do it.
- Trust because we have a good personal connection – the most elusive component.
What benefits will my clients get from that? Well, the best possible solution. In addition, if I don’t think I am the right one to deliver it, they will get the benefit of not being stuck with me.
What services/solutions or products are offered by your company at par with the current industry standards? Tell us something about your upcoming products or services?
I offer a wide range of formats – always depending on what the client wants:
leadership coaching, team coaching, advisory projects, organizational training, workshops, facilitation, webinars, guest lectures, and speaking engagements.
Tailored solutions add value in each individual case, and that is actually what drives me. But often, I see that organizations face similar challenges in creating strong collaborative cultures and structures to achieve the best possible results. These are, for example, communication, work organization, performance measurement, emotional intelligence in groups, among others.
So, I am putting together my knowledge and experience into trainings to offer on digital platforms. On-demand trainings on digital platforms are the future of the training and learning industries, and technical possibilities to make it nice are truly mind-blowing.
Connect with Nataliya Wiedemeyer on LinkedIn.