Jonathan Gosling

This topic explores the difference between the traditional way of doing business and doing business the wiki way. A wiki is a democratic process in which people share information in a way that allows others to easily review and update their knowledge. Everyone is familiar with Wikipedia, but if you looked closely, would you discover similar processes all around you? Are there informal ways in which knowledge is shared in your organization and could they be enhanced by certain policies and practices?

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Understand what the wiki approach to managing involves and how it differs from traditional approaches.
• Explore the extent and limitations of wiki-like knowledge creation.
• Consider the possibilities and implications for transformative change.

Leadership: we have competency lists, conferences, and camps to cultivate the qualities of leadership. We make it exciting… and we make it complex. While everyone has an intuitive understanding of what leadership is, what does it really mean for your own day-to-day work? As you will see, leadership is a complex interplay of factors that requires balance.

Today’s session challenges you to enhance your capacities for leadership and to work with your peers to create an organizational environment where everyone feels that, when appropriate, they can take the lead.

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.

In today’s busy work environment, we spend so much time doing that we often forget to just stop and take notice of what is happening around us. When we are really able to observe, we are more able to pick up on clues to overlooked problems and opportunities.

But observation is a skill far more complex than just noticing details; this topic asks you to turn a critical eye on how you observe in order to shed light on how you manage.

The objectives for this session are to:

• Improve your observation skills;
• Appreciate how you observe the world and interpret events;
• Understand how this impacts on your managing.

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.

Managers often face challenging predicaments from responsibilities to humanity at large, through stakeholders, shareholders, and customers to the individual colleagues that a manager works with. This can lead to moral and social isolation as managers struggle to resolve their various dilemmas.

Today one or more of you will present a current predicament, hope, dream, or plan and open this up to your colleagues for collaborative exploration and learning. Friendly Consulting provides a structured, responsive, and supportive environment to get feedback, insight, and advice from colleagues and peers. This is an opportunity for you to use a process developed by Professor Jonathan Gosling that is used in world class programs such as the International Masters Program for Managers, International Masters for Health Leadership, One Planet MBA, Forward Institute, and in many organizations where problem solving is crucial to progress.

The goal of today’s exploration is to:

• Draw on participants’ personal experiences of the practice of managing to provide
  insight and possible solutions.
• Gain insight into some of your own current managerial issues by helping others with theirs.
• Benefit from the support of peers.

When you take up a role at work or change the way you perform an existing role, you naturally face many challenges, including expectations laid on you by others.
These come with the role, but you have much choice in how to behave. Roles involve the obvious tasks but also potentially provide opportunities, power, and, yes, occasional drama.

Taking up a new role requires thoughtful engagement, beyond superficial presence, and key to success is the ability to listen. By attending to the role of listener, we can hear and respond in ways that engage with and modify mutual expectations and improve co-operation overall.

The objectives for today’s topic are to:

• Clarify the process of taking up a role;
• Improve your listening skills;
• Realise the value of emotional as well as factual communication;
• Understand how to work with the mutual expectations that come with role-relatedness.

This session allows you to expand your listening skills into your role as a coach.

By shifting the focus from solutions to genuine curiosity, you will support a peer in clarifying a current work challenge. Through active listening and open-ended questioning you can facilitate illuminating their preconceptions, blocks, and concerns. With this approach, coaching becomes a reciprocal process whereby the coach also gains new perspectives on their own work issues.

This topic asks you to:

• practice coaching by using a prescribed set of questions;
• focus on curiosity and wonder;
• challenge your concept of what it is to coach someone.