Grooving To a Different Tune...continuous learning and management development

The following is a guest post by Monica Redden... my favorite Australian CoachingOurselves partner :)

I was driving up to my mother’s 90^th birthday party last week, it was a beautiful day and I was contemplating life and reminiscing over the early years with my family.  I found myself choosing and listening to a CD that was from way back in my history and realised how comfortable I was with the tunes and songs; I could predict the words, I could groove to the tune and I felt at ease with the world. 

I reflected on the experience of feeling so at ease and being able to predict every song and word.  It made me think of some feedback I received from clients that have been in a CoachingOurselves management development group for over two years. 

During the interviews I enquired with a number of the participants about what they liked, their favourite topics and why; and whether it had made a difference to them as managers.  Each person identified a different topic and spoke of why it was particularly important or relevant to them and the impact it had on their actions as a manager.  One woman said how Beyond Bullying (by Marilyn Aitkenhead) was very good.  She went on to say ‘you would think as a manager that [managing bullying] would be something you would already have in your kitbag of knowledge-but it was really good to review and reflect and made me act differently to a situation I had, it was very useful.’

Her comment made me think about how managers might be tempted to think we know all that we need to know; or that there is not much more to learn and that it is very easy to remain in a comfortable situation where, like me in the car driving up north, everything is comfortable, predictable and you just keep repeating the same tune or management response over and over again.

In reality, change is occurring constantly in the workplace and managers and leaders need to keep developing their competencies to be effective in their role.  It is not to say that what they now know is of no value, to the contrary, sharing and building on this knowledge with other managers is what strengthens and shapes management practices that fit the circumstances.  The 70:20:10 framework identifies the building blocks for continuous and ongoing learning; particularly the 70% where learning is done on the job and knowledge is shared and skills are developed. 

The CoachingOurselves participants highlighted the value of providing a structure around on-the-job learning so that it is not left to chance that managers will meet together and share knowledge. CoachingOurselves offers over 75 management topics; each is designed to lead discussion and learning from their experiences

and from each other.  Each CoachingOurselves topic has been written by a leading management and business thinker such as Mintzberg, Schein, Kotler, Adler, Ulrich, Goldsmith and others. Instead they met for the purpose of learning and developing new management practices.  Managers valued the learning together and the sharing of expertise and knowledge that related to their workplace and commented on the improvement in collaboration and willingness to work together to deliver strategic results.  They liked the fact that the topics were contained within 90 minutes, were held in the workplace and that there was an array of topics to choose from to suit their interests. 

A quality management development tool such as CoachingOurselves, delivered with minimum fuss or disruption for busy managers, makes it possible for managers to practice management differently. It is just like changing the CD occasionally and learning a new tune, it may be a bit uncomfortable but my repertoire is a bit more diverse and interesting.

If you want to know more about CoachingOurselves contact Monica Redden Consultancy, Australian partner for CoachingOurselves International, check out the three minute introductory video , call Monica on +61 8 8357 1296, go and visit www.monicareddenconsultancy.com.au or www.coachingourselves.com

Henry Mintzberg: It’s time to rebalance our sectors and society and Six Sigma ‘killed’ innovation in 3M

Two friends of mine publish the J&E Alert, a fantastic newsletter highlighting thought provoking thinking on leadership, management and business. Below we share two snippets of their recent newsletter.

You can subscribe directly by sending an email to the editors (Mireille Jansma & Jurgen Egges)

Article - Henry Mintzberg: It's time to rebalance our sectors and society (Guardian Sustainable Business Blog, April 2013)

From the post: "That we face serious problems – poverty amid plenty, the degradation of our physical, social, and economic environments, terrorism by fanatic cells and rogue states, and so on – is clear. But how our established institutions – governments and businesses – deal with them, even when responsive and responsible, is not. We need another way."

Video (3 min) & article - Six Sigma 'killed' innovation in 3M (Ryan Huang, ZDNet, 14 March 2013)

Firms must define innovation and how it fits into the company's objectives. They should then provide the right support and avoid rigid processes hindering the creative process, says Geoff Nicholson, former 3M exec behind the Post-It note.

CoachingOurselves Provides Immediate Results
by Johanne Houle, Director of OD at McGill university

McGill OD team began using CoachingOurselves in 2012 to support rebuilding a sense of community and to offer collaborative learning opportunities to 1700 managers and supervisors. This is their story.

"Like many universities, we face a combination of organizational challenges: budgetary constraints, complex labour relations, and continual changes in higher education. We need tools to strengthen and maintain a vital sense of community among our managers and employees. With decreasing time and resources, we look for affordable and strategic opportunities for employees to learn, develop, and collaborate together. We strive to keep our talent engaged and to encourage our employees to share best practices.

In 2013, we launched a series of CoachingOurselves Reflection Cafes (90-minute workshops) with managers and professionals from cross-sections of McGill University. These sessions were easy to administer: we could choose from the CoachingOurselves catalog of over 75 management and leadership topics and facilitate them ourselves. The C.O. team was extremely helpful in recommending topics that were appropriate to readiness, participant profiles, and emergent needs in the face of important culture change.

The workshops provided immediate results. Feedback from the sessions was overwhelmingly positive and participants kept returning and encouraging their friends to attend. The 90-minute learning format allowed people to engage in shared learning without missing a day, or even a half-day, of work. There was rapid alignment among managers, and the network- ing and collaborative learning provided benefits beyond the material itself. Clearly, the topics and guided conversation format gave us “permission” to talk about concerns that were critical to us. We had a context for surfacing important issues, without blame, and realizing that they were not alone in our experiences and challenges.

Within a couple of months, various units and departments began requesting

CoachingOurselves sessions for their management teams and some managers in turn adopted the approach with their small, intact teams. Managers who had volunteered to support and facilitate groups during the reflection cafes were now acting as champions, volunteering to support new management teams throughout the university. The results have been excellent, with continued success and growth of the concept throughout our internal population of almost 1700 managers and team leaders.

The CoachingOurselves approach allows us to have a very broad and deep impact—with low overhead. Departments are free to select topic discussion guides that suit their needs, internal manager champions support them, as needed, and we can set and guide the overall context to meet broader organizational needs.

CoachingOurselves is priced and structured in a way that allows large-scale deployment. One ‘unlimited use subscription license’ allows us to impact hundreds of managers. This is less expensive than sending one manager to a typical executive MBA program!

I highly recommend that other organizations try CoachingOurselves as it has proven to be an invaluable tool for learning and organizational development at McGill University. In turn, we look forward to learning more about the creative ways in which it is rolled out in our sister institutions."

For more information, contact Warren Cohen at 514-973-3242 or visit CoachingOurselves at www.CoachingOurselves.com