CoachingOurselves in Australia

Monica Redden owns http://www.monicareddenconsultancy.com.au/ down under in Australia. She specialized in facilitation, organizational development and strategic planning and consultation.

She has been running with our approach in Australia. Below is a wonderful animated video she put together with her perspective our unique approach to learning, development, and organizational change




Monica has had great success using CoachingOurselves in her interventions and projects with a number of organizations.

No money, No time, but we need leadership development that actually works!

I originally put this together for a Moonshot at the Management Innovation Exchange....

Moonshots 

Focus the work of management on a higher purpose

Embed the ethos of community and citizenship

Increase trust, reduce fear

Summary 

Three rounds of layoffs, just off-shored our software dev. to Eastern Europe and got acquired by our competitor. The management team and I figured some sort of management development program might help, but we had no time, no money, and needed immediate and glaringly obvious results from whatever we did. I asked Professor Henry Mintzberg for advice, and this is the story of what happened.  

Context 

I was a Montreal based software engineering director in one division of a medium sized software firm during the tail end of the dot com crash in 2002-2003. As with everyone in the high tech industry at the time, we went through several rounds of layoffs. All of us in R&D were struggling through the fundamental cultural shift that occurs when you go from having nearly unlimited budgets to develop loads of highly innovative software, to being a very expensive cost center that needs to downsize and continuously focus on lowering costs. 

 

We had almost no time and no money, terrible morale, and immense pressure to change quickly.

Triggers 

- No time and no money, which means we had to innovate.

 

- Enormous external and internal pressure to change, which means we had to do something. 

 

- The feeling that it is better to do something rather than just keep my head low and try not to get canned in the next round of layoffs.

 

- A strong bent towards the practical, down to earth, just get on with the job of managing, solving problems and making things happen. We were a team of engineering managers.... we didn't know much about the theories of learning and development but we certainly knew when something was making an immediate difference and helping us do our jobs as managers. And we had a good sense of agile methodology so we knew how to quickly iterate and adapt our way into a solution.

 

- And of course, the opportunity to have long conversations with Professor Henry Mintzberg. 

Key Innovations & Timeline 

I was very lucky to be able to talk to Professor Henry Mintzberg, who has many ideas on management development and about my management challenge: "No time, no money, and I need management development that really works. What can I do?"

He suggested I start by reading his book; Managers not MBAs, which I did. In the book he says "Thoughtful reflection on natural experience, in the light of conceptual ideas, is the most powerful tool we have for management learning.”
I figured that the team and I don't need to be in a classroom to reflect on our own experiences, we can probably do that just fine in my office. We also don't really need a professor to give us a lecture or anything, we just need their "conceptual ideas" in some sort of format that we could use to run our own learning meetings. As managers we had loads of experience with meetings... we run crisis meetings, planning meetings, status meetings... so why not a learning meeting?

And that is exactly what we did. 

I opened up my Microsoft Outlook, found the next available 90 minute time slot and invited my team to a learning meeting. The stated objective was to "learn something new about management to make things better around here". We would do this by "spending some time reflecting on our own experience in light of conceptual ideas". In others words, we would talk about what's going on around here stimulated by the different perspectives, concepts, or frameworks articulated by the professors, and then figure out what little things each of us could do to make things better. And if we thought it was useful then we would do it again in a week or two.

It was completely up to each one of us, individually, to decide if we wanted to follow through on anything or not. I simply said that if you come to these learning meetings, and talk, and talk, and then come up with some simple, practical ideas on how to improve things without doing anything about it, then don't bother showing up next time because you are wasting your time and might as well go to another status meeting or something.

During the weekend prior to each learning meeting, I spent my time madly editing and crafting the stuff Henry and his colleagues provided from their Masters level management courses into a type of workbook we called "the topic". It had the content, agenda and challenging questions and exercises for our learning meetings.

To make a long story short... it worked. This became the space in which our team made many of our most important management decisions. We bonded as a team and began helping one another with loads of pretty personal management stuff.

And other, unexpectedly interesting, things happened. 

Within a couple of these sessions we stopped relating to each other like "the head of engineering talking to the head of QA, talking to the head of tech support", and became what we really were, which was "Phil talking to Hakan, talking to Eric and Sam etc..." Just plain human beings doing the best they can to get on with the job of managing, solving problems and making things happen. 

Soon, some other managers in the office picked up on this concept and started it with their teams.
And so several years later Henry and I founded a company called CoachingOurselves. It is a concept for practical management learning in a team meeting setting. No facilitators, no trainers and no consultants. The only requirement is a print out of the management topics, and a pen -- no laptops.

There are now thousands of managers around the world using our growing catalogue of over 60 management "topics" specifically written for CoachingOurselves by over 40 different management thinkers such as Henry Mintzberg, Philip Kotler, Marshall Goldsmith, David Ulrich, and Edgar Schein. We support managers by periodically asking for their top 2-3 management issues and suggesting topics that may stimulate productive discussions around their issues. Through these discussions the management teams do whatever they need to do to make things better for themselves, their teams and their organization.

It's still only just starting, but is already being used in 8 different languages by over 50 organizations around the world. With lots of hard work and a bit of luck, through CoachingOurselves we hope to help as many managers around the world as possible do a better job at managing, solving problems and making things happen.

Challenges & Solutions 

We have had, and likely will continue to have loads of interesting challenges as CoachingOurselves spreads around the world. 

 

My very first challenge was simply convincing my original team of engineering managers that I hadn't fallen off the deep end with this crazy "learning meeting" idea. After all, we were a group of engineering managers, we did things. We didn't spend our time reflecting!

 

I remember suggesting to the team that we think of it like this: "Right now we all spend some 50+ hours a week running around making things happen, doing things etc..... Now imagine if we spent 1 hour a week talking about what's going on, reflecting on some recent experiences around current management challenges, and discussing what we could do to make things better all stimulated by some really cool management topics developed by some of the best thinkers in the world. Then we could work with more focus, making things happen for the other 49 hours. Do you think we might get more done during the 49 hours then the original 50 hours?" 

 

Off course, since we always tended to talk about current management challenges, issues or subjects of interest in ways that never happened during other meetings because of the content the professor prepared for us, most everyone wanted to have these discussions now rather than later. 

Benefits & Metrics 

Things continue to evolve rapidly as this spreads. At the moment we hear lots of personal stories from individuals and teams, but in organizations where 15% or more of the management population is involved, there are stories of broader cultural changes occurring, and as Henry says in his HBR article, the organization is (perhaps!) being rebuilt as a community.

 

We have many testimonials of obvious, tangible changes such as teams:

 

• Coming up with and following through on a change to a filing system in a satellite office to make it easier for people to get what they need, 
• Enhancing the telephone script for how an admin worker answers incoming calls resulting in an increase in the number of sales,
• Developing large impact business changes such as coming up with and agreeing to a radical new production process that speeds up a major production cycle by 30%.  

We also have numerous stories about personal changes that come from self realization, with results such as having  loud people becoming less loud, and quiet people beginnng to speak up. There are also lots of stories of how the new ideas that came from the discussions, based on the professors' perspectives of different aspects of management were immediately used in different business contexts.

 

And off course, lots of people just plain love it, and thank us enormously for the sense of well being, community, strength, empowerment etc... that comes from simply having a space to talk with your colleagues about what you are really thinking about oneself, one another, the organization, the situation, and how you can help each other make things better for everyone.

 

 

Lessons 

Many times you just have to try something to see if it will work. And always be flexible and reflective.. then you can pretty much learn your way into anything.

Credits 

This idea was developed between myself, Phil LeNir, and Professor Henry Mintzberg.

Materials 

- CoachingOurselves website

- Henry Mintzberg website

- Business Week article "Management Education on the Fly", introduces CoachingOurselves

- Business Week article "The best leadership is good management", though it does not discuss CoachingOurselves directly, this article helps explain why I think CoachingOurselves is a story of "redefining the work of leadership" 

- Article in strategy+business "Management by Reflection" telling the story of CoachingOurselves through an interview between Art Kleiner and Henry Mintzberg. (Registration required but it is free)

- Recent article in the Economist discussing CoachingOurselves (Registration required but it is free)

- Video introduction to the work of Henry Mintzberg, also introducing CoachingOurselves

- Video introduction to CoachingOurselves by Henry Mintzberg

- CoachingOurselves in Facebook, CoachingOurselves on Twitter, CoachingOurselves on Linkedin

 

Videos 

Rebuilding American Enterprise: Henry Mintzberg and ‘Kittens are evil’: Heresies in public policy

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

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

Article –Rebuilding American Enterprise (Henry Mintzberg, June 2013)

Mintzberg has had it. "The root cause of the American economic crisis is not economic, and so will not be resolved by economists. That cause is managerial: too many corporate “leaders” have been trashing their enterprises for quick gains, instead of managing them for sustainability. The

American economy will have to be fixed one enterprise at a time, to restore the country’s renowned sense of enterprise."

On shareholder value: "Corporate correctness dictates that publicly-traded enterprises maximize “Shareholder Value”. Don’t confuse this with anything of real value, let alone any human values. Shareholder Value is a fancy label for pumping up the price of a company’s stock as quickly as possible, so that those in the know can cash in and run before the stock sinks."

Article - 'Kittens are evil': Heresies in public policy (Simon Caulkin, June 2013)

Great analysis by Simon Caulkin of why managing by targets and incentives is harmful. The article concludes with 4 case studies.

Caulkin: "When Tony Blair remonstrated some years ago, ‘No company would consider managing without targets,’ he was nearly right. Whether organisations using them call it that or not, results-based frameworks for performance management have come to dominate management thinking in many parts of the developed world, in both public and private sectors (...). Paying people for the results they achieve – it sounds rational and plausible; indeed it sounds like management’s Holy Grail. But if that is the case, why are two of the most enthusiastic proponents of results-based management, the banks and the NHS, conspicuous for producing outcomes that are the opposite of those they were set up to deliver – impoverishing the world rather than enriching it in the case of the banks and killing patients instead of curing them in NHS hospitals? And is there an alternative?

The answers that emerged from a fascinating and disturbing event organised by consultancy Vanguard in Manchester in March were, respectively: because people persist, and have a strong vested interest, in believing that making it work is a technical problem that we can solve if we’re clever enough; and yes, there is an alternative, and not surprisingly it’s the opposite of outcomes-based approaches – starting not from the back (the result) but the front (what’s happening now)."

Simon Caulkin is a writer and editor who for 16 years was the Observer’s management columnist, writing on subjects ranging from rock ‘n’ roll to the banking crisis. He has contributed to the Economist, the Financial Times, and many national and international business magazines. Aside from journalism, Simon has worked on books with prominent business academics and leaders such as the late Sumantra Ghoshal, Andrew Campbell and John Seddon.

Establishing a Democratic Workplace with Ricardo Semler and Payment by results: a ‘dangerous idiocy’ that makes staff tell lies

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 newsletter.

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

Video (20 min) - Establishing a democratic workplace: Interview with Ricardo Semler (YouTube, May 2011)

From the site: "Some call it anarchic socialism, some cutting edge capitalism. At Brazilian manufacturer Semco, the workers have sacked the boss and run the company themselves. For nearly 25 years, Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco has let his employees set their own hours, wages, even choose their own IT. The result: increased productivity, long-term loyalty and phenomenal growth. "

With Ricardo Semler, we at CoachingOurselves created a themed discussion workbook called Democratize your organization: Rethinking the 21^st Century Workplace. Management teams use this topic workbook during a self-directed 90 minute session to generate solutions to increase trust and engagement within their organization.

For more information contact us online or call +1 781 489 3418.

Article - Payment by results: a 'dangerous idiocy' that makes staff tell lies (Toby Lowe, The Guardian LocaL Government Network Blog, February 2013)

From the post: "Payment by results is a simple idea: people and organisations should only get paid for what they deliver. Who could argue with that? If your job is to get people back to work, then find them a job dammit. Plenty of people working in local government and public services are already starting to realise this is nonsense, and a pernicious, damaging nonsense at that. The evidence is very clear: if you pay (or otherwise manage performance) based on a set of pre-defined results, it creates poorer services for those most in need. It is the vulnerable, the marginalised, the disadvantaged who suffer most from payment by results. 

Who has the greatest impact on Innovation? The VP of HR of course!

Most will agree that the people in the organization are the most important component to sustained business results.  Weighing the accuracy of this statement, it follows that HR is your organizations most critical sector, affecting the people in, and thus the success of, your organization at all points from hiring to policies and programs, performance management, and succession planning.  I realized that HR can also form the basis for innovation.  It is well recognized that business value is generated and regenerated through innovation and your people strategy department (HR) can be the key channel to increasing innovation through people in the workplace.

But to be a key driver of innovation, HR must be innovative!

Imagine an organization with a head of HR that focuses on measuring their department against best practices, plays it safe, and ensures every initiative has a quantifiable ROI. Sound familiar? HR is supposed to drive and support an innovative workforce but all too frequently caution and risk aversion is their main priority.  These organizations that hold fast to traditional approaches to HR and discourage experimentation, risk operating machine-like enterprises, following, but incapable of rising above, industry norms. 

The mindset and culture of your HR team has an exponential impact on the entire organization: everyone is influenced by HR.  Therefore, changing your organization and becoming more successful and innovative begins by teasing apart your beliefs on this role.  

Who is in a better position to campaign for and express the culture and needs of your organization at all touch points (hiring, policies and programs, new employee on-boarding, succession planning, performance management, etc.) than HR?  Who promotes and embodies everything your organization stands for?  

HR leaders translate your organization’s business strategies into cohesive and efficient people strategies.  They are the link between the leaders and the business enablers – your people.  Strategic HR management plays a critical role in the organization but if your organization’s prevailing mindset is conservative, your HR will fall prey to this strategy.

So, how do you push your HR team into a more innovative mindset?  

It starts when you stop following herd. Innovation at Google does not come from their HR team and employees measuring themselves against best practices. Similarly, Zappos did not become a billion dollar industry in less than 10 years selling shoes online by following industry norms in HR – they innovated. Imagine an HR policy that offers all new employees a $2,000 incentive to quit.  This is what Zappos does, and though it goes against the grain, it is perhaps one of the most cost effective means of ensuring everyone in the organization is happy and satisfied with their jobs. 

Ask yourself this question: How many experiments in HR policies have you allowed in the past twelve months?  How about making everyone’s salary public knowledge.  Watch this video below to understand how Ricardo Semler changed his company, SEMCO in Brazil:

Companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, offer many examples of innovations in HR policies leading to large success.

Innovation is never a sure thing.  In fact, it is almost always a gamble.  Any venture capitalist will tell you that while they are always looking for greater than 10 times return on their investments, they also expect a pile of failures along the way.  This contradicts an HR mainstay: ROI.  Organizations with HR departments that avoid risk-taking for fear of not justifying every new policy through a black and white ROI stifle business growth and potential.

Perhaps it all starts in the beginning: do you even expect HR to be innovative?  If not, ask yourself who cares about the bottom line.  To increase innovation in the organization, leaders must work together with HR towards the edification of innovative business and people strategies. 

This article was co-authored with my friend Diane Boulet, Senior Director of Corporate Development, Brother Canada.

Engineers should run the Human Resources Department

I’m an avid follower of Josh Bersin, who runs Bersin by Deloitte. They do research in Enterprise Learning, Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, and strategic HR Solutions.

Every year Josh publishes predictions for upcoming year; a view forward, perspectives and important trends to consider in the enterprise learning, talent management and HR space.  This report is completely free, and I look forward to it every year.

After reading through predictions for 2014 I've come to the conclusion that in the future, engineers will make the best Chief Human Resources officers.  Not the social inept, introverted engineers that make great computer programmers but those with natural people skills, strong analytic skills and vision. The engineers that can ‘feel’ complex systems and love hacking away at complex problems will make the best chief human resources officers to drive a business forward.

Josh talks about 5 key roles of the chief human resources officer. First and foremost they need to run HR well. All the hiring, onboarding, training, payroll, labor relations, and benefits must just work. Many of the best run organizations in the world are managed by engineers, because engineers pay attention to the details required to make the nitty-gritty of administrative operations work smoothly.

Next, the Chief Human resources officer is responsible for the corporate talent system. They need to build the performance, learning, succession, onboarding, career management, and compensation systems that drive productivity, engagement, and performance. This is a systems engineering job. I’d want somebody with years of math, systems design, and logic education under the belt, along with the vision to see and feel large complex systems in one breath.

The Chief Human resources officer is the keeper of the culture. It is, and always will be, the senior executives and CEO that create and drive the culture. But the CHRO should monitor its health and provide feedback. Engineers implicitly understand feedback, setting up feedback systems, and monitoring the state of complex systems.

The Chief Human resources officer must transform and upskill the HR team. The team must not only serve as strategic consultants, they need to understand analytics, implement complex new software tools, and understand the role of changing technology. Are you thinking engineering yet?

Finally, the Chief human resource officer must have a vision and plan for the future.This year, Josh predicts that innovation comes to HR. He calls this the new bold chief human resources officers. It’s the innovation that engineers brought to almost every industry on the planet that needs to be brought to bear in HR. An engineer’s implicit grasp of innovation, their desire to tinker, to create new ways of getting things done, to change the world, and to work through complex problems by taking measured risks that makes them ready for the future role of HR.

Now I'm not really saying engineers should run the human resources department! Most of the guys that went
through the McGill engineering degree with me would make an absolute mess of things. But a chief human resource officer with a strong engineering flair, along with everything else one needs to be a chief human resource officer, will almost certainly make for better business results in the future given the changes happening in HR today.

There is a trend to bring non-HR business leaders into these roles. Liberty Mutual, Time Warner Cable, Yahoo and many others companies are promoting business leaders in the Chief Human Resource Officer role, attempting to drive bold and innovative thinking into the people part of the business. This trend will accelerate given that it's HR that makes the biggest single difference in most large organizations.

So keep an eye out for those engineers with strong people skills, or those HR types with a flair for partial differential equations... you might just be looking at your future CHRO.

An article on a similar trend was recently published in HBR on how Google sold it’s engineers on management. It's very much worth the read to understand one aspect of the very sophisticated job of human resources in this new day and age.

And please don’t ever put someone from finance to run your HR… that is the kiss of death. That’s like putting an accountant to run your company. Can you image what would happen if someone from finance started making decision in HR, or an accountant was put in charge of Apple of Google? Look at what happened to Nortel when the accountants took over.

Much of this blog is paraphrased from Josh’s predictions for 2014. If you want the full report please click here to get Bersin by Deloittes free prediction for 2014 report. And for those that follow us at CoachingOurselves, you'll notice an ongoing theme that developmental coaching is one of several key growing trends in 2014.

All the best in 2014!

Phil LeNir

President of CoachingOurselves

http://www.CoachingOurselves.com/

How HR kills innovation in HR

"Whatever you do, please don't mention this to anyone in HR, they will kill it".

That quote may sound odd but it is real. The ‘it’ being kept secret from HR is an innovative learning program. I am sure the same thing happens with all sorts of HR innovations, not just learning. When HR hears about a manager who is doing things a little bit differently their first reaction is to want to kill it outright or wrap it in a deadly python of bureaucracy.

One client spent two or three hours on cross-continent video conference calls trying to decide if they would try one experimental 90 minute learning session. Another leader reported he was going to have to write a business case to justify spending $1,500 to continue a small leadership development pilot program.

The literature on innovation recognizes the value of small experiments; but even though HR tends to be aware of this kind fact, they tend to treat experiments with extreme distaste.  There are good reasons for this, as well as bad ones, and these need to be disentangled before we can get to the meat of how to improve innovation in HR.

The obvious bad reason is simply that HR wants to protect its turf; if it’s an HR related effort they want to control it and any associated budget. This is however linked to a good reason which is that organizations don’t want managers running off doing things that are risky or ill-considered.

We often see the same thing in IT. Managers may have experienced the wrath of IT when they try to bring in a Mac into an organization that has standardized on PCs. There are both good and bad reasons for IT’s inflexibility. They need to prevent any actions that would undermine the security of their system and also they need to protect themselves from the user demands that can arise when someone has an incompatible hardware setup. They may also just be difficult for the sake of being difficult. But the right steps are relatively clear.  A good IT department will look at the issue, assess the risks, see if there are reasonable steps to mitigate the risk, and if it makes sense then allow the user to go ahead with the non-standard system.

Yet HR does not seem to have this risk assessment / risk mitigation mindset. There are several reasons for this.  One is that many HR professionals grow up in a quasi-legal world where their job is all about ensuring the organization does not fall foul of labor laws. This, along with their frequent role as the policy police, have led them to get used to saying “No you can’t do that!” instead of working as a partner to determine the best thing to do. Another reason is that historically HR has championed enterprise-wide programs; if there is on-boarding then it will be for everyone, not just for a critical subset of jobs. If there is a dress code, it applies to all, even if it’s only needed in customer facing roles. When HR sees an innovation they immediately think in terms of an enterprise-wide roll out, which is expensive, risky and time consuming—all in all better put to death than permitted.

So we need a radically new mindset in HR. They need to encourage managers to experiment and simply provide a limited overview to ensure that there are no undue risks. When the cost of the experiment is less than the cost of the business case they should cheer on the manager to go ahead and try it out. When experiments don’t work HR can draw useful lessons. Where experiments do work HR can consider applying the approach to other areas of the organization. But you don’t get to learn from failed experiments or build on successful experiments if you kill experiments before they can begin.

HR often suffers from a bad reputation. They are seen to get in the way of the business rather than help it along. HR can go a long way in building rapport with managers if it encourages them to experiment with things they think might work, providing only enough support to ensure there are no uncontained risks. This will lead to rapid learning, happier managers and a better loved HR function.

If you'd like to try a 90 minute experiment with a completely new, group based approach to leadership training, visit us at http://www.CoachingOurselves.com/ 
This article was co-authored with my friend David Creelman, of Creelman research.