Empowering Senior Managers | CoachingOurselves

Managing on Tightropes: The Inescapable Conundrums of Managing (2025 template)

Managing is full of conundrums, paradoxes or predicaments. Every way a manager turns there seems to be some strange dilemma lurking. These are part of the management process itself—they are managing! Think of them as the tightropes on which all managers must walk. This means that most of these concerns cannot be resolved or eliminated, but have to be faced, understood, and alleviated in order for managers to be more effective. That is our purpose today.

The objectives for this module are to:

Explore a few of the conundrums at the heart of managing:
- How to connect when managing is inherently disconnected?
- How to go deep when the pressure is to get it done?
- How to be confident in managing without becoming arrogant?
Share ways to face these in order to be more effective in your managing.

Some Surprising Things about Collaboration (2025 template)

The word “collaboration” has a very positive connotation these days. Collaboration helps us break out of our “hierarchy fix” as well as our “market fix”. It also helps us direct more attention to how people connect with each other as capable adults. But we also have to appreciate the negative, as well as positive.

So the four of us have collaborated on this topic to bring together a set of points that we have found surprising about collaboration.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Distinguish the various types of collaborative relationships with which you may be involved.
Realize what contributes to effective collaboration.
Apply this to enhancing your collaborative relationships.

Simply Managing: From Reflection to Action (60 min. 2025 template)

Welcome to CoachingOurselves! You will be getting together on a regular basis for 90 minutes to learn about management, while developing yourselves, each other, and your organization. This first topic introduces CoachingOurselves through the lens of five “mindsets” basic to the practice of management. We call them Reflection, about managing self; Collaboration, about managing relationships; Analysis, about managing organizations; Worldliness, about managing context; and Action, about managing change.

In this session, you will:

Appreciate the basic mindsets that underlie the practice of managing.
Understand how CoachingOurselves works in terms of these mindsets.

Stimulating the Entrepreneurial Imagination (2025 template)

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping from the old ones.” – John Maynard Keynes

The word entrepreneur is derived from two words, entre, meaning to ‘enter’ or to ‘penetrate in between’, and prendere, meaning to ‘grasp’ or ‘seize hold of’. Therefore, an entrepreneur is one who penetrates the spaces between established boundaries and seizes opportunities that are overlooked by others. It is precisely this ability to challenge the dominant worldview and ‘think the unthinkable’ that gives those with an entrepreneurial imagination a decisive advantage over those who pursue strategies based on conventionally held ideas and beliefs.

This topic provides you with some thought strategies to stimulate your entrepreneurial imagination and invites you to shift the focus of your attention to creating added value for your organization.

The objectives for today’s session are to:

Understand how the entrepreneurial imagination is created through shifting paradigms or worldviews.
Develop paradigm-shifting strategies to innovate new value-adding products/services/practices within your organization.

Developing Brand Leadership for Every Manager (2025 template)

This session takes branding out of the marketing department and puts it into your hands. A brand is more than just a product; it also represents the values and promises made to your customers. Does the brand experience you personally provide live up to your organization’s brand promise?

This topic presents a holistic approach to branding in which all activities of the organization are aligned, interdependent, and integrated.

The objectives of this session are to:

Appreciate the concept of brand.
Be exposed to a holistic theory of branding.
Realize how you as an individual impact your organization’s brand.

Psychological Safety at Work (2025 template)

Psychological safety is foundational to high performing teams and resilient organizations. A sense of psychological safety allows employees to voice their ideas, seek assistance, and even challenge leadership without fear of judgement from peers or senior management. Employees in workplaces with high psychological safety feel more engaged and are more likely to innovate. This atmosphere of openness and honesty has proven to promote appreciation for the contributions of others, greater inclusion for all, and importantly, reduce errors.

There is no exact recipe for psychological safety at work; it emerges out of the relationships within groups. However, certain behaviours and skills have proven to be key ingredients. Let’s take some time today to reflect on the role each of you can play in cultivating psychological safety in your workplace.

This session invites you to:

Deepen your understanding of the concept of psychological safety;
Reflect on the crucial role of psychological safety for team effectiveness;
Explore your unique contribution to fostering psychological safety in the workplace.

Probing into Organizational Culture (2025 template)

Wherever a group shares enough common experience, a culture emerges. Culture exists at various levels such as national (Brazilian), industrial (software, film), ethnic and religious (Muslim, Christian), professional (engineering, nursing), and departmental (sales and marketing, manufacturing). You yourself are a multicultural entity, displaying different cultural behaviors depending on which cultural groups you have belonged to and the current situation you are facing.

Here we are concerned with the culture of an organization, including corporate culture, which can be defined as:
“The deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic take-it-for granted fashion an organization’s view of itself and its environment.”

But how can you investigate culture, especially when it operates unconsciously? This CoachingOurselves topic successively probes into the three levels of organizational culture, from the very visible to the invisible.

Strategic Blindspots (2025 template)

Is your decision making guided by assumptions which are out of touch or out of date? Organizations invest a lot of time and energy in strategy but invalid beliefs and biases may be derailing your success. These strategic blindspots distort your perception of competitive reality, so that even the most seasoned managers may fail to foresee major events affecting the environment. The consequences for your organization can be frustrating at best and disastrous at worst.

In this topic, you will be introduced to some of the most common organizational blindspots. You will then investigate a number of your taken-for-granted assumptions and discuss how your organization can move beyond them.

The objectives for this session are to:

Increase your awareness of strategic blindspots and specifically those most prominent in your organization.
Investigate unexplored opportunities.
Decide how you can capitalize on your insights.

Managing Culture Change: Beyond the Status Quo (2025 template)

If you are to lead a successful cultural change initiative, then you require a basic understanding of change dynamics, including the nature of resistance to change. Without this knowledge, most change projects are doomed from the start. In this topic, you have the opportunity to use a “force-field analysis” to clarify the forces presently maintaining the status quo in your organization. You will understand how you can best decrease these forces and strengthen those that are already working toward the changes you want to achieve.

The objectives for this session are to:

Specify a cultural change goal.
Understand what forces are already working towards this change and which are restraining it.
Decide the next action steps to start the change process.

Talent Management (2025 template)

This CoachingOurselves topic challenges you to diagnose and clarify your own talent “mindset”. How can you best maximize the talent around you and build on your employees’ strengths? Discuss and create strategies with your colleagues to bring the talent mindset into action.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Understand what talent management is.
Appraise your own talent mindset.
Decide what you can do in your day-to-day work to get the most out of the talent in your unit/ organization.

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