Henry Mintzberg

It has been popular to see organizations as chains: linear sequences of activities. But many organizations don’t fit this, and even ones that partially do can benefit from considering alternative perspectives: organizing as hubs, webs, and/or sets. This can make a huge difference to how you manage.

In this topic you will:

• Be introduced to four ways of thinking about organizations: as chains, hubs, webs, and sets
• Understand how varied managing can be in these different forms
• Appreciate the impact of considering management not just atop a chain or set, but at the center of a hub and within a web

Frustrated with how things currently work within your organization? Overwhelmed about where to start and what exactly to do in order to bring about change? Most people approach change in a piecemeal manner, failing to achieve lasting impact.

This topic provides you with frameworks of “change what?” and “change how?” in order for you to better do so within your scope of responsibility. Whether you need to command dramatic change, engineer systematic change, or socialize organic change, you will develop a clearer idea as to what needs to be done within your organization, using what methods, and by what means.

In this session you will:

• Understand different ways to think about changing your organization.
• Appreciate how the various processes of change interrelate.
• Identify what you need to change and suitable methods to do so.

A decision is a commitment to action; a managerial decision is usually a commitment by the manager for other people to act. This means that much of decision making is about controlling the activities of other people. In this topic, we show how the important function of control can be understood through the lens of decision making.

The objectives for this session are to:

• See the relationship between control and decision making.
• Appreciate the different forms that control can take.
• Consider how you can be more effective in your decision making and controlling

Strategy, defined as plan, pattern, position, and perspective, is used to derive four distinct processes of strategy formation: planning, visioning, venturing, and learning. Each is considered as it applies to your organization and the session concludes with an integrative model that includes all of these.

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Understand better the concept of strategy.
• Develop an appreciation for the various processes of developing strategy.
• Consider this in light of the needs of your organization, or department and what you can do about it.

The pressures of managing are constant, not temporary: in other words, pressure in this job is business as usual. This topic looks at the popular myth of the manager as fully in control and replaces it with some of the facts about the characteristics of managing: the hectic pace, the fragmented work, the orientation to action. How is anyone supposed to think, let alone think ahead, amidst all this?

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Bring managing off its pedestal, into its realities.
• Appreciate the inherent characteristics of managerial work.
• Consider how best to deal with these challenges.

Sometimes we think too much about our decisions. Perhaps we would do better to see them more insightfully. Or just act on them in order to think about them better. This session contrasts “thinking first” with “seeing first” and “doing first” as approaches to decision making, using examples from finding a mate to handling decisions at work.

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Get beyond thinking in decision making to seeing and doing.
• Appreciate that we have to act in order to think, as much as think in order to act.
• Approach some key decisions differently.

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.

We hear a great deal these days about being “global”. It’s like motherhood: who could possibly question that? Maybe we all should! If you think this topic has little to do with you as a middle-manager, whether you are working in Toledo or Timbuktu, read this and you may be surprised!

What we all really need is to be more “worldly”. To be worldly has been defined: “experienced in life, sophisticated, practical.” Imagine more companies like this. To be worldly means travelling into other people’s worlds, whether at home or abroad, in order to broaden your own worldview. The discussions in this topic are designed to get you thinking about striking a balance between being global and being worldly.

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Understand what “global” and “worldly” mean.
• Appreciate that many companies have to be more “worldly”, and not just more global.
• Discuss which direction you and your company need to go towards and how to get there.

I-phones, I-pads, Blackberries, Androids, and Kindles are transforming our lives: at work and at home, for better and for worse. These technologies offer obvious benefits but also pose hidden threats that managers need to understand.

This topic asks you to evaluate the impact of these technologies on your managing and then generate some ideas for taking command of them.

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Appreciate the benefits and threats of these technologies.
• Harness the technology to improve your effectiveness.
• Understand the importance of soft information in managing effectively.

Our objective is to be competent, right?  Companies pay a lot of attention to “management competencies”. The list of possible competencies is so long that it would take you a lifetime to learn them—leaving no time to manage! The objective of this one session is obviously not to master all of them. Rather, it will help you deepen your understanding of management competencies and reflect on how you use them.

You may have heard of “consciousness raising”. Here we are concerned with what might be called “competency raising”: raising your consciousness about competencies. You will be more aware of how you practice the key competencies by sharing your own experiences of what works well for you, and listening to what works well for other managers. In doing so, you will enhance your overall competence to practice management.

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Increase awareness of the range of competencies used in managing.
• Become conscious about how you practice some of these management competencies.
• Expose yourself to alternate ways of practicing competencies.

Management is a practice where art, craft, and science meet. Most managers tend to tilt one way or another: toward creative art, practical craft, or organized science. The trouble is that when you tilt too far, your managing can go out of  balance. This session asks you to consider your managerial style: how do you see it and how do your colleagues see it? How might you want to adjust it and how can you get there?

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Learn about some basic styles of managing.
• Understand your style and those of your colleagues.
• Consider modifying your style.

You, as managers, generally spend as much time “managing on the edges” – in other words out of your unit relating to other components of the organization and to the outside world – as you do inside the unit. Here we consider various roles related to this important work with a concentration on “buffering”: how to manage a delicate balance of outside forces coming into your unit.

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Appreciate that managing on the edges is as important to most managers as managing the unit itself.
• Understand the key roles by which managers do this.
• Probe into “buffering”: how can managers better protect their units from outside forces without completely disconnecting them?

This topic addresses the essence of managing: what is it that managers really do. The answer proposed is that managing happens on three planes: through information, with people, and to direct action. All are necessary, but managers often favor one plane over the others, depending on their situation and style.

In this topic, you will:

• Come to appreciate the essence of managing.
• Consider your own approach to managing and how you can improve it.

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.

You may have noticed that people play political games in organizations. Not you of course – other people. Nevertheless, it is important to understand how they do it and why. Little time needs to be devoted to the dysfunctional role of politics in organizations. It is divisive and costly, burning up energy that instead could go to the pursuit of the organization’s mission. It can also lead to all kinds of distortions – the sustainment of outmoded powers or the introduction of unjustified new ones. Less widely appreciated, however, are the conditions under which politics serve a functional role in organizations — the positive side of politics and what it can do to help an organization. This topic gives you an opportunity to understand why and how political games are played and when they can be useful.

In this topic, you will:

• Look at the various types of political games most commonly played in organizations.
• Understand when and how they can advance the organization’s goals.

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.

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.

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:/p>

• 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.

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.

Understanding how your organization functions can seem overwhelming; where to start? In this session, we start with four common forms of organizations and investigate their strengths, weaknesses, and implications. You will come to a better appreciation of your organization and others, seeing them as the interplay of specific forms and forces.

The objectives for this topic are to:

• Understand the various species of organizations, in particular four forms: entrepreneurial, machine, professional, and adhocracy.
• Appreciate the dynamic forces of each form.
• Clarify how your organization fits into this framework and where it could be strengthened.

Some decisions defy pure step-by-step logic. Excessive analysis with words and numbers can kill “vision”, so today we’re asking you to be “visionaries” by collaborating on a visual representation of a key organizational issue. Instead of dissecting your issue through analysis, you will integrate your differing perspectives through pictures and visual symbols to “see” the bigger picture and experience first-hand another mode of decision making. This can be a powerful way for managers to access insight, to explore, and to innovate.

The objectives for today’s topic are to:

• Contrast “seeing” an issue with just thinking about it.
• Appreciate how creating a piece of collaborative art can change your perception of a key issue and of decision making in general.
• Enhance your capability as a “visionary”, seeing a cohesive whole from seemingly separate elements.

Our world is out of balance.

We face severe problems: climate change, income disparities, globalism beyond the reach of many, and the degradation of our democracies.

So how do we get to balance? Businesses and governments have a role to play, but change will have to begin with us not “them”: each of us and all of us. We need to challenge destructive practices and create constructive ones: in the organizations where we work, the communities where we live, and the governments we elect. It’s time to start.

Today’s session will provide you with an opportunity to:

• Understand how we ourselves can move towards balance;
• Decide what we can do, starting now;
• Appreciate how to extend this to our organizations, communities, and governments.