About Babette
Babette is best described through her 5 values:
Authentic Connection
Boundary breaking Curiosity
Open Fairness
Adventurous Freedom
Intrinsic Development
Authenticity is very important to her, she will always strive to be the most authentic version of herself in interactions and invites this in others. She will address continuous inauthenticity in working with clients and organizations, as she believes that this hinders reaching intrinsic motivation. She often feels like a bee, a pollinator tasting from different sources and applying these insights in another area. Her insatiable hunger for insights and knowledge is turned concrete by always trying to apply it to her personal and professional growth. She offers clients this variety of insights to find the right approach or metaphor that hits home for that particular person or situation. Her previous working experience enables her to quickly understand business dynamics and offer potential insights that could equally be inspired by pioneering leadership and organizational work as well as further afield settings like education, parenthood and spiritual practices. She strives to combine her cognitive speed with somatic intuition to try to inspire insight and action in the people she is working with. Her larger-than-average appetite for change means she is quicker to adopt but also expect change in situations. This means that she thrives working in environments where the pace of change needs to be quicker rather than slow. Her look at life: 'I will only regret the things I didn't do', meaning she has a strong focus on trying out things and new experiences.
Born and Raised in the Netherlands, she has always felt that the country was too small for her and she had a deep interest to interact with the world at a more international level. This was shaped by traveling since being a child, attending several exchange programs (London, Taiwan, Beijing) and informed her choice for a university degree: International Business Administration as well as her first career choice as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Her corporate career was finalized by accepting a place in the leadership Program of Alibaba at their headquarters in Hangzhou, China. In her work for TheoryY, she still strives to work in an international setting, which is concentrated around China, the Middle East and Europe.
Her own development is not only driven professionally but also personally by being a mom of three young kids, which is a unique opportunity to reevaluate historically grown beliefs and mindsets and be lazer sharp around the values and purpose that we want to adhere to as a family.
Origin story of TheoryY
TheoryY is founded in 2018 in Shanghai, China by Babette Lockefeer, in first instance out of frustration with what she saw happening in the big organizations she had worked for or consulted for. Babette noticed that the way organizations were lead and structured, did not result in the outcomes that they said they wanted to achieve. In the meantime, employees were not engaged and wern´t bringing all their capabilities to their jobs, as this was not what the ´system´required´ from them. With so many external, global challenges happening in the world, and so much need for concrete, systemic transformation, Babette found it very hard to wrap her head around the fact that so little of that was achieved in the organizations she encountered. She didn´t want to keep on working in such settings with unclear missions, and the feeling that a lot of energy that was put in work, wasnt turned into impact. Her own intrinsic motivation about work was crumbling. It was clear though that she also didn´t want to leave the ´commercial organization´ world for good, as she did see the amount of change that was necessary in this sector, which is in a lot of ways more influential than nation - governments are.
A personal quest for solutions evolved and shaped into a certain direction when she discovered the book 'Reinventing Organizations' and was exposed to 'The Leadership Circle'. Both were true aha moments in finding the answer to the 'then what' for organizations. Coincidence or not, but the writer of Reinventing Organizations was someone she had met before, as the facilitator of her very first official training at McKinsey & Company. This book gave her the confidence to know that organizations can be (structured) differently, meeting the needs of the people involved in the work AND securing the impact that needs to be made. The leadership Circle gave her for the first time an approach and explanation about leadership that resonated, as it was both growth-based and history-acknowledging, scientific and spiritual at the same time. This propelled the decision to leave her Corporate management traineeship at Alibaba and set out on her own.
The foundations of TheoryY were laid by these external influences, combined with solidifying her own transformational journey through her (education) to become a facilitator of group processes. Since then, dozens of books, podcasts, courses but most of all client interactions have led to a company that knows what it is here to bring to this world:
Unlocking intrinsic motivation in leaders to authentically lead themselves and their organizations towards Trust Based Organizations.