Empowering Senior Managers | CoachingOurselves

Strategic Thinking as Seeing (60 min)

Strategy is not something reserved for so-called “top” management. There are plenty of examples of regular employees coming up with ideas that changed their company. But here our intention is less ambitious: to recognize that every manager has to think strategically in his/her job, whether it be a sales manager finding a new approach to reach customers, or a hockey coach figuring out how to beat a rival team. One way to do it is to “see it”.

This session will not make you a strategic thinker. No session or a book can do that. But it can enhance the strategic capabilities you already have—we all have some!

The objectives for this session are to:

Better understand what strategic thinking is.
Enhance your capacity to “see” strategic issues.
Work as a group in addressing some of your key strategic issues.

Silos and Slabs in Organizations (35 min)

Many of today’s organizations are highly-structured and complex, which can make communicating and getting the job done difficult. We look at two characteristics of their formal structures – silos and slabs – and the challenges they present to managing, and then investigate ways to manage across and beyond them.

This session will provide you with an opportunity to:

Understand the effects of silos and slabs within organizations.
Understand how these structures can act as barriers to getting things done.
Challenge yourselves to manage together beyond formal structure.

Climate Actions for Every Employee (2025 template)

Public opinion has shifted in the last few years. Now most people — regardless of their political orientation — have realised that climate change is happening and is caused by humans. There is a shared understanding that we all need to act fast to avoid dramatic consequences for ourselves, our organizations, our communities, and everyone on the planet.

However, while there is a willingness to act, many are unsure which climate actions they should take, both in their private life and especially in the work place and within their sphere of influence.

In this session you will:

Create a vision for a positive future.
Gain clarity around some of the key terms underpinning the best solutions such as Net Zero and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (CO₂ e).
Focus on practical climate solutions for at work and in your home, especially the ones that have a high impact on reducing global warming.
Begin to design an action plan together.

Active Hope for Employee Resilience (2025 template)

Higher rates of absenteeism, burnout and turnover are forcing organizations to recognize that they must play a key role in supporting their staff’s emotional and mental wellbeing. This topic acknowledges that we are living through challenging times and that climate change is having an impact on mental health and workplace behaviours. To completely suppress our deep feelings about our world while at work would be to miss a powerful opportunity: the physical or virtual workplace is an ideal place to build individual and organizational resilience, in addition to promoting creative, breakthrough solutions for all.

This session will help you to:

strengthen courage for individual and organizational resilience;
appreciate the growing impact of eco-anxiety in the workplace;
practice a simple yet powerful guided process that helps people move through stuckness, despair, or resignation into strengthening their ability to bring about positive change.

Reflection (2025 template)

How often do you wonder not just about what happened but why it happened and how it differs from other happenings? This topic introduces the importance of reflection in managerial work.

Reflection is about getting the meaning from everyday experiences. Managers may too easily allow ‘doing’ to drive out ‘thinking’ and ‘thinking’ might miss out on the clues provided by feelings and intuition. By bringing conscious awareness into the moment, the result will be more informed, effective action for the future.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Learn from your own experiences and the experiences of others through reflection.
Appreciate the importance of collective and individual reflection in managerial work.
Find ways to combine managerial reflection and action.

Engagement: Beyond Buy-in (2025 template)

People that are engaged with their organizations describe their work experiences in marked terms. They talk about how alive they feel, how creative and emboldened. They talk about how much they’ve grown through their work and how much they look forward to entering the organization each day, even when things are difficult or stressful. Not only are they highly engaged, they are supple and responsive to shifts in both their external and internal environments or job descriptions. During this session we will explore some of the key dynamics underlying this kind of engagement.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Reflect on six of the most powerful practices that we have seen within engaging organizations.
Explore what is possible within your own organization.
Look at what you can do personally to contribute to this.

Appreciative Inquiry: Discovering the Best of What Is (2025 template)

Appreciative Inquiry (Ai) offers an alternative to the problem solving approach that dominates most organizations today. Ai focuses on what is already working within an organization and why it works in order to build from strengths that exist but may be hidden from view.

The famous management writer, Peter Drucker, argued that the task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths, thus making weaknesses irrelevant. David has argued that organizations grow toward what they persistently ask questions about. In this session, you will ask questions to reveal the positive core within your organization.

The objectives for today’s exploration are to:

Differentiate between problem solving and appreciative inquiry.
Learn how to ask appreciative questions.
Appreciate how the strength and potential of your organization can flow from your personal stories and imaginations.

Awareness-Based Systems Change: Planting Seeds for Change (2025 template)

The key leadership challenge of our times is to cultivate creativity, innovation, and leadership capacity at all levels of our systems. But what makes the difference between an organization where people regularly take new action and step into new territory and one where people prefer to ‘keep their heads down’ and play it safe? It likely has much to do with the quality of the social field.

This topic challenges you to dive into the “soil” of your organization to see and sense behavioural patterns within the social field which may be giving rise to unwanted results. When we can attend to what we see, say, and do (what is visible) while simultaneously attending to the inner source of attention and intention from which we operate (what is invisible), we can break free of patterns rooted in past experiences to create powerful breakthrough ideas.

This session invites you to:

Understand organizations from a social field perspective;
Gain insight into the deeper qualities of the social field of your organization;
Reflect on your own role shaping the social field.

Developing Our Organization as a Community (2025 template)

Community – people’s sense of belonging to and caring for something larger than themselves.

In our hectic, individualistic world, the sense of community has been lost in too many places. Organizations need to rebuild themselves into places of engagement, where people are committed to one another and to the larger enterprise, so anyone and everyone can exercise initiative.

But how to get the organization from being a collection of human resources to a community of human beings? This CoachingOurselves topic presents six guidelines and asks you to consider how you can apply them in your own organization.

The objectives for this topic are:

To appreciate how an organization can develop as a community.
To come up with ways to do so in your own organization.

Gender Inclusive Leadership (2025 template)

“Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” Verna Mayes

Organizations with gender inclusive cultures consistently achieve superior business results in retention, productivity, and profitability. Gender inclusion goes beyond diversity quotas and affirmative action to ensure that both men and women feel recognized, valued, and believe that they have full access to growth opportunities. Inclusion strategies promote a deep sense of engagement throughout the organization which is critical for innovation and the bottom line.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Appreciate the importance of gender inclusivity in the workplace.
Introduce a range of reflection tools to help identify the current status of gender in your workplace.
Encourage practical actions that will help you develop and shape your organizational culture into one that is more welcoming and inclusive.

Strategic Thinking as Seeing (60 min)

Silos and Slabs in Organizations (35 min)

Climate Actions for Every Employee (2025 template)

Active Hope for Employee Resilience (2025 template)

Reflection (2025 template)

Engagement: Beyond Buy-in (2025 template)

Appreciative Inquiry: Discovering the Best of What Is (2025 template)

Awareness-Based Systems Change: Planting Seeds for Change (2025 template)

Developing Our Organization as a Community (2025 template)

Gender Inclusive Leadership (2025 template)

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