CoachingOurselves was born out of the desire to change the practice of management. Here’s an excerpt from Henry Mintzberg’s blog and a link to the rest of the entry. Henry describes the primitive way we talk about our organizations and the problems this can create.

There are species of organizations just as there are species of animals. Don’t mix them up. A bear is not a beaver; one winters in caves, the other in wooden structures they build for themselves. Hospitals are not factories; advertising agencies are not fast food companies.

This may seem obvious, but while we recognize the different species of animals, we often mix up the different species of organizations. How often have management consultants come into one kind of organization and treated it like another—say tried to deal with a hospital the way they have just dealt with an automobile factory. (It might work in the cafeteria, but how about geriatrics?) Of course, we do use these kinds of words—hospitals, advertising agencies—but they designate industries, not the nature of their organizations.

Our vocabulary for understanding organizations is really quite primitive. We use the word organization the way biologists use the word mammal, except that we can’t get past it. Imagine if this was the case inbiology.

Find out which species your organization is on Henry’s blog!

The chief executives of some of the world’s largest public companies have received a letter from Laurence Fink, chief executive of Black Rock.  In this letter, he tells companies that “they need to do more than make profits – they need to contribute to society as well if they want to receive the support of Black Rock”.  Why does this matter? Black Rock manages more than 6 trillion dollars of investments, making it one of of the largest and most influential investors in the world. The New York Times states this will “cause a firestorm in corner offices of companies everywhere”.

This is just one of the many changes that began as a small trickle and is now becoming a waterfall of change.  As the CoachingOurselves director Warren Cohen says: “In the past, the public would recognize and celebrate organizations that made contributions to society.  In the very near future, the public will recognize and punish any organization that does not make a contribution to society”. This change is now happening at lightning speed.

Our co-founder Henry Mintzberg, has long been proclaiming this need for change.  In his book Rebalancing Society, he writes: “Enough! Enough of the imbalance that is destroying our democracies, our planet, and ourselves. We require a form of radical renewal unprecedented in the human experience.”  He traces the tipping point for our current imbalance to 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the end of the communist regime in Eastern Europe.

Today’s MBA and EMBA programs have turned a corner and are helping young people learn about morals, ethics, and social responsibility because they realize these themes will form the basis for leadership in the future.  Unfortunately, in-house leadership programs in organizations have not caught up and are still focused on innovation, collaboration, and performance.  All good, but not sufficient.  Letters to CEOs, like the one sent by Black Rock’s Laurence Fink, will mean organizations will be looking for help changing their leaders’ mindsets and the culture of their communities.  Leadership development professionals can provide the solution.

What are we doing at CoachingOurselves to contribute to a more sustainable society?  We’ve been updating our library with topics to help organizations make positive change and be part of the solution. This includes our new topic categories: Diversity and Inclusion, Higher Purposes, and Wisdom: Beyond Knowledge that offer topics that help develop organizations that are beacons of purpose for employees and society at large.

Similarly, One Planet Business: Sustainable Organizations examines how sustainability can be a driver of innovation and value creation in organizations.  CoachingOurselves’ peer learning is based on dialog and collaboration to create more empathetic and connected managers, and can now be delivered around themes and topics that will help organizations contribute to a more prosperous society.

Over the years, we have  met and collaborated with many wonderful people, but Mike Cook stands out as one of the most experienced and interesting partners we have ever worked with.  CoachingOurselves co-founder Phil LeNir and Mike developed a close relationship and decided to write a book together on the importance of experience and human based management learning.   Unfortunately, Phil was unable to keep on the project, but Mike began writing on his own and just completed the book “Thriving in the Middle”.  This book contains a wonderful set of stories and concepts for operational leaders and learning and development professionals.  It will stimulate your thinking and open your eyes to a very humanistic perspectives on organizations and management.

Read the synopsis below and click here to purchase the book.  Enjoy!

“How does your company train its operational-level managers? Do they go offsite, learn new information from a management expert, receive a training manual, or something similar? Most businesses fall into this development category, treating managers as our academic system treats students. The results, unfortunately, consist of short-lived bursts of enthusiasm and little measurable improvement, in part due to the lack of day-to-day applicability and personal accountability. Thriving in the Middle looks to replace this ineffective version of management development with a more culturally founded, experience-dependent model. Based on decades of leadership experience and breakthrough studies, Mike Cook establishes the case for “Distributed Development Communities,” in which application takes place in a near-real-time, experiential environment using actual situations faced. In this model, process-driven development is more frequent and delivered in small doses, and operational-level managers are coached and groomed to become great operational-level managers without the subtext of upward advancement. Learn the attributes and processes of better management improvement. Your bottom line and your front line will thank you for it.”

Our president and co-founder Phil LeNir recently had a conversation with one of our partners on how to implement and select topic for their client undergoing a cultural merger.  We want to share this with you to show how CoachingOurselves can be applied.

Some context:

Our partner is challenged with helping a new organization being formed from the merger of two separate organizations.  They are currently merging operations and their next step will be integrating cultures and management.  This is, understandably, a complicated task. Our partner needs to help managers align values, merge cultures, and work through the many human issues that arise in this complex and often muddled process.

Step One: Building Buy-In

An important first step in establishing CoachingOurselves in any organization is making sure senior leaders see the value in and are committed to the process.  How do you do this?  Organize a pilot with a small group of 4-5 senior leaders, using topics such as Strategic Blindspots or Probing into Culture

Senior leaders on board?  Great!  Now you can use their support to implement a CoachingOurselves program across the organization. A cascading deployment approach is best. We begin by having the change champions work through a series of CoachingOurselves topics related to change, resistance to change and change management. This is followed by a short but intensive program consisting of 8-10 peer learning sessions, 90 minutes each, over a 6 month period hosted by the change champions.  It is better to move quickly and uncover any potential issues before they fester and impact the new organization.

The peer learning groups can consist of cross functional or intact teams made up of a mix of people from the old organizations. It’s important that the teams are on a smaller side, 4-5 participants, because they do not know each other and will see bigger gains from a smaller and more intimate group setting where they can gain trust and form real relationships.

Onto choosing the topics. What’s our strategy?  First, you will need at least one that is going to be easy for the group.  This will contain content they actively want to discuss, is stimulating, and does not touch on uncomfortable subjects – broad themes such as culture or strategy are the way to go. This will help them get to know and increase their confidence in one another and the change champion.  Assuming groups are composed of middle to senior team members we recommend you choose from one or two of the following topics:

• Five Ideas about Teamwork
• Accountability: It’s a Tricky World
• Strategic Blindspots
• Developing Brand Leadership for Every Manager
• Four Pathways to Customer Insights
• Probing into Culture
• Understanding Your Organizational Culture
• Leading Change in Difficult Times
• Managing Time and Energy
• Silos and Slabs in Organizations

Once the group is warmed up and starting to trust each other, they are ready to work together in this new and larger organization and it’s time for more challenging topics that will initiate self reflection and address some of the difficult issues around the change. The change champion use these sessions to communicate the aspects of the new culture and support the process of integrating this through dialog. We recommend the following topics:

• Smart Investments in Talent
• Talent Management
• Understanding Stakeholders
• Leading with Humility
• Influencing Others: Leading through Trust
• Lenses for Leadership Insights
• Thinking Entrepreneurially to Grow Your Business
• Managing on Tightropes: The Inescapable Conundrums of Managing
• Political Games in Organizations
• Opening up the Moral Senses
• Building Purpose at Work and In Life

To conclude the program, we want to catalyze action and change amongst group members.  At this point, the merger will be in the past and everyone will be focused on dialog around the present and future.  You can choose topics that focus on broader actions for change or on specific issues relevant to the team:

Topics for change:

• Changing Things: What and How
• Rethinking Structure: Chains, Hubs, Webs, and Sets
• Ten Ways to Release Change
• Silos and Slabs in Organizations

Topics that address specific issues:

• Virtual Teams: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
• Knowledge Sharing for Innovation
• Practical Tips for Leading Meetings that Matter
• Managing Culture Change: Beyond the Status Quo
• Crafting Strategy

We also highly recommend our specialized topic Friendly Consulting to conclude programs.  This topic is different from the other CoachingOurselves’ offerings, as it asks one or two participants to present a current issue, while the rest of the group act as friendly consultants.  This is effective at exposing preconceived notions and biases while generating new ideas and insights on around the culture change.  Friendly consulting is a great way to wrap up CoachingOurselves programs and to support the human side of mergers.

Is your company going through a merger or another difficult transition?  CoachingOurselves can help with a program tailored to your individual needs.  Contact us!

We received some wonderful feedback from Ryno from SIGSIM,  our friend and partner in the Dominican Republic, on his success using CoachingOurselves in powerful and creative new way.

Why did you decide, as an HR/L&D consulting company, to start offering CoachingOurselves to your clients? What problems is it helping them solve?

Every since we got acquainted with CoachingOurselves, our primary goal was to find a way to implement it within the academic market.  We wanted to enrich specific subjects using the CoachingOurselves’ reflective discussion methodology to help participants link relevant theories to their respective business practices.  I believe this knowledge transfer is the weak link in most major academic programs. By adapting CoachingOurselves sessions to complement academic courses, learning becomes less about theory and more about helping people identifying opportunities to improve their performance within the workplace and better contribute to organizational objectives.

2) Can you give an example of how you are using CoachingOurselves with your clients?

To seize this opportunity in the University market, we have started a pilot project called Reflection Cafes.  We are inviting teachers from different subject areas to experience and become familiar with the CoachingOurselves structure.  These promo sessions will help them understand how easy it is to blend the CoachingOurselves content with their subject curricula, and how efficient it is as a dialog and reflection tool – core competencies for developing managers.  In order to make academic usage scalable and manageable, CoachingOurselves has already developed an electronic portal that enables us to assign specific modules to a group of students within an academic course.  This is a crucial admin tool to control access and invoice according to actual usage.

3) How did you get started with CoachingOurselves and how did you get your clients started with CoachingOurselves?

The CoachingOurselves Reflections Cafes are still pending deployment, but we have already had success adapting similar approaches at the University Level.  One of our learning portfolios was similarly introduced in a very large University by gathering teachers from specific content areas to demonstrate an e-tool and discuss how it could be implemented in their courses.  Over a year, we gathered 10-12 teachers every month and presented them with a different tool.  By the time the activity was concluded, these tools were introduced in six different courses, some with several groups each season, resulting in more than 1500 users each year.

We also expect to introduce this idea to the Business Market, where invitees to the Reflection Cafes would be HR/Area Managers of companies.

Want to learn more about how to optimize your impact with CoachingOurselves?

In 2014, Professor Henry Mintzberg published his online manifesto: Rebalancing Society…Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center. In this work, Mintzberg explains that our fundamental understanding of society, politics, and systems is being distorted by our tendency to see everything from a linear, black and white, perspective.  For example: right vs. left, public vs. private, capitalism vs. communism, and so forth.  In reality, our beliefs exist somewhere in the middle and as a result, we define them in relation to these extremes.  This has not only propagated many of the political and societal issues around the world today, but it has also resulted in pendulum politics and political paralysis that stymies attempts at change.

What is the solution?  Mintzberg proposes a completely new design; a balanced society based on three sectors: the private, public, and plural.  The plural sector is communities, citizens, and civil society… it is us, caring and working together for change.  Yes, it has always existed, but it has never been granted equal importance to the public and private sectors.  This plural sector balances the extremes in our society, politics, and the world to solve many of the problems we are facing today.

How does this relate to agile organizations?  The agile approach is a humanistic approach that balances the often rigid, analytical, and mechanistic approach to leading and running organizations.  In the typical approach to project management, people are called resources and projects are broken down into tasks for these resources.  What a dehumanizing view of real people in organizations!  Unfortunately, most people are primed for this style of management from very early on, reviewing case study after case study that remove the human aspect from managing, turning them into cold and calculating leaders.  No wonder most organizations today are led by people who can easily take advantage of their workforce, communities, and society as a whole to ensure their own success.

In comparison, the agile approach to management and leadership development results in a caring and engaged form of managing that greatly enhances an organization’s effectiveness.  Though it can be challenging to switch to an agile management style, once achieved it’s hard to imagine how your organization ever functioned or was productive before.

So, how do you do it?  CoachingOurselves is a great example of an agile approach to management and leadership development.  Co-founded and based on the teachings of Henry Mintzberg, CoachingOurselves’ peer coaching methodology promotes modern, engaged, and people focused management that helps train better leaders and build organizational culture through learning and collaboration.  We believe that by training better managers, we will make organizations and communities better places.  CoachingOurselves compliments and helps create agility in organizations and around projects, changing the nature of organizations and, in broader terms, contributing to a more balanced society.