Individual coaching affects organizational learning

Coaching is widely accepted within organizations as a method to achieve specific goals and/or develop behavior or skills. In the past decade, the coaching industry has experienced a significant increase of attention and has become somewhat of a trend in businesses and in business psychology. The benefit for the individuals participating in coaching processes are apparent but too little is known about the influence coaching has on our organizations, negative or positive.

For example we don’t know what the effect on a team is, if one of its team members, let’s say the leader, is being coached externally. Equally interesting is to examine how individual external coaching affects organizational learning. In our efforts to find answers to these questions, we discovered that research within this particular area of expertise is not available. Both client organizations and the coaching industry seems to agree that coaching is necessary – although neither of them seem to relate critically to possible downsides. Hence the idea for this study, where we set out to combine relevant theories and hands on experience from a Global Toy company.

Our research

The focus of this study is ‘How coaching of individuals affect organizations?’ and in particular ‘how individual coaching influences organizational learning’. In the report, we do not relate to the benefits of coaching for the individual who is being coached. We limit ourselves to the impact of coaching on organizational learning. The amount of interest for the topic surprised us: out of a group of 70 leaders in the Toy Company, 51 chose to participate in our research.

The foundation of this study has both a quantitative and qualitative character – as we distributed and collected electronic questionnaires (multiple choice) as well as conducted face to face interviews. The main benefit of this combination of analysis methods is that it enables us to triangulate and to test the reliability of the data we collected from participants.

As mentioned before, this is the first study of its kind and we feel there are a lot of aspects that we have not been able to prioritize due to the nature and the time frame of this study. We however consider the results to be valid and relevant for both organizations and coaches that are interested in learning more about how external coaching influences organizations.

Get organized

Evidently there’s a rub off from individual coaching processes and group processes – and as such our assumption that coaching influences both the organization and organizational learning proofs to be correct. Since apparently it is not ‘comme il faut’ to share what has been discussed during coaching sessions with the organization, there doesn’t seem to be any structured process for it. It is very much up to the individual coachee what he or she would like to share with the organization. Any rub off effect on organizational level therefore is to be seen as an indirect effect, since the impact of coaching is a result of the development of individuals being coached and importing their learning into the organization – in opposition to a structured and shared development by the team or the organization.

In this study we limited ourselves to interview leaders of teams and have not focused on team members that experience the indirect results of their colleague being coached. It would be beneficiary for a deeper insight into the influence of external coaching to investigate how team members perceive this development.

Reason to worry?

However, based on the results and the main conclusions of our study, we believe there’s a reason to worry since the organization misses out on a lot of intrinsic learning. You can argue that the learning process is taking place outside of the organization in a more or less isolated room between an external coach and the coachee. The other team members are not a part of this process, but experience the result either because the coachee shares the insights deriving from the process and/or because there’s an immediate change in action or behavior initiated by the coachee. Either way, the rub off effect is indirect and there are none or little learning for the organization from the process itself: “how do we learn what we learn?” The participants of this study without exception mention a lack of forum for this kind of knowledge exchange.

What to do

In our opinion organizational learning will increase significantly – if the transparency of what happens and how it happens around coaching of individuals also increases. The question we need to ask is not ‘what did you learn?’ but ‘how did you learn it?’

We suggest that prospect learning organizations:

1. Formulate standards after which coaching must take place, and that they choose external coaches that live up to these standards.
2. Educate a number of internal coaches whose job it is to quality-assure the individual coaching processes taking place – i.e. sit in on the first coaching sessions involving external coaches who are new to the organization, to make sure that the methods and ethical standards are adhered to.
3. Leverage organizational learning by introducing systems like tradition, coaching-forums and databases in order to absorb the essentials of the learning processes.
4. Put the acquired learning to work!

If you decide to get organized in the above respect – you will soon see how much learning and knowledge you haven’t pulled on yet and how much of a difference you will be able to make when you do.

Are mid managers less important than top managers?

In my work as organizational psychologist and adviser I get to discuss a number of interesting topics with business professionals such as HR officers, COO’s, CEO’s or line managers. Ever so often their concern is with one of the leadership teams handling blue-collar employees, typically addressing matters like the team’s inability to truly understand the purpose of the organization – or simply their own role as managers. And I find that what they are very often looking for is a quick fix, solutions that doesn’t take up more than maximum one day, and is practically free of charge. Why is that?

Passed over education wise

For some reason the low-end of the leaders in our organizations seem to be passed over when education budgets are made. There might be budgets for educating the production managers, finance managers, IT managers, sales managers and so on – but rarely ever for the team-leaders and the supervisors. It is almost as if these guys don’t even appear on the management radar. Typically they report to the next layer of leaders, i.e. production managers or maintenance managers who in turn are supposed to make them perform, regardless of their educational background and ability to comprehend the needs of their typically blue-collared team. Top executives like senior vice presidents and executive vice president are also rarely given any education. Probably because they are already top-managers and should have proven their worth and be in the know at this point. I don’t agree with these arguments but the problem is not nearly as evident as it is in the opposite end of the leadership ladder.

It doesn’t make any sense

My problem is that it just doesn’t make any sense. Any organization with uneducated blue-collar leaders is an amputated organization in more than one way.

• The number of direct reports is typically twice the size of that of higher ranking leaders which should also indicate that they have a lot of people management experience after a few years in the job. Should they not be in the leadership pipeline? Is that at all possible without any education?
• Their ability to understand the strategy and the mission of the organization they serve is no less important than that of their managers. Should they not push the same agenda as the rest of the leaders in the organization rather than focusing blindly on the manufacturing of units? Are they expected to succeed with that without any education?
• Imagine an organization in which everybody strives to succeed with one joint mission, naturally carrying out different parts of it but sharing the purpose and the understanding of the need for change. How is that possible without proper educational background?

Responsible for 70 % of the employees

In a typical industrial organization the layer of supervisors and team leaders are extensive and likely to handle up to 70 percent of the employees. Some of them know to some degree of detail what the purpose and the mission of the organization is about, but most managers at this level don’t – hence the amputated organization. At this level the leadership is typically directive and the flow of information limited to a need-to-know basis unfortunately leaving the main body of the organization in the dark.

Given the opportunity I’m certain that they would rise to the occasion, enjoy the attention to their needs just as much as the rest of us – and assume responsibility for using their education and new understanding of the organization and its purpose.

I’d like to encourage you to share your beliefs and experiences on the blog http://heintzelmann.wordpress.com
Please refer to http://www.pro-found.dk   for further information about the education of mid managers.

Increase your productivity

Change of topic is the new LEAN

Far too much of our energy is being spent talking about poor leadership, fear of losing our jobs, political priorities making no sense to us, salary stagnation or the long dark winter!

All dialogue and contemplation consumes time and energy. Some of it, depending on our job-role works as productivity increasing and another part as counterproductive. Every time we think of a reoccurring worry or frustration like those just mentioned, we seem to slide right out of our job-roles. The energy is invested in the dialogue with a colleague and more colleagues join. You grab a cup of coffee while turning over the subject ones more, and you often end up agreeing about the injustice or annoyance in the situation – and that there is nothing you can do about it. This is an example of the counterproductive dialogue. Worry is paying interest on a problem that hasn’t occurred yet!

The other kind, the productivity increasing kind is the positive story that you share with a colleague, about an easier way to do things, a positive client experience, the story about how fortunate you are to have a job in this day and age, the great light that the snow provides by reflection in this otherwise dark season and so on. Other colleagues will join, you’ll grab a cup of coffee while you turn over the positive subject again – and before you know it, you’ll end up agreeing that life is good! Rejoicing is receiving interest of a fortunate incident that hasn’t occurred yet!

How much time do we spend on the productivity decreasing dialogue?

To be honest the dialogue often doesn’t last much longer than 10 minutes, but before you’re back in place and you’ve picked up your work where you left of – more time will pass. It’s been proven empirically that 10 minutes pass before you have reached the same momentum. If you had this dialogue with only two of your colleagues, the three of you would in other words have spent an entire man-hour discussing the weather! Round about two-thirds of all employees initiates a counterproductive conversation 2-3 times a day. Let me share this example with you.

Let’s take a look at an accounting department with 30 employees situated in an open office. The counterproductive dialogue will consume:

20 (two thirds of 30 pers.) x 2.5 (average of 2-3 times a day) x 2 (dialogue with at least one other colleague) x 20 minutes

The result being 2000 minutes per day. Now multiply that with 221 workdays (standard average number of workdays annually in western Europe)the time spent will amount to: 2000 x 221 = 442,000 minutes. These minutes amount to 982 workdays, or approximately 4.4 years of work, and the figures are conservative.

So what can you do about it?

You can stop all the negative talk and use the energy on subjects that add value and relevance. One thing you need to know in this case however is: you can’t boss it away!

Our contribution is insight, motivation and process facilitation that’ll help you reshape the counterproductive dialogues into productivity increasing ones. In doing so we’d like to share a relatively simple consideration that has already helped a number of departments and companies to succeed.

You can distinct between that which you can influence; we call it variables, and that which you can’t influence; premises.

Premises you can learn to accept and not focus on during your average workday. Just as soon as you succeed in doing so your despondency and anxiety of getting laid off, losing orders or facing cutbacks goes away. Of course is doesn’t vaporize completely but it’ll stop hindering you from having a brighter look to the future, and it won’t steal so much time from you. Focus on negative subjects and negativity is what you’ll attract – and vice versa.

The variables could be the customers that we are about to meet, campaigns making a huge difference, efforts adding to the success and survival of our organization, a positive attitude towards work and our workplace and faith in the fact that together we can succeed!

This is all achievable!

In the above paragraphs other considerable time consumers like: The loss of momentum stemming from colleagues that didn’t actually participate in the dialogue but merely overheard it, time spent on updating your private contacts via email, texting or social medias on what’s on your mind (neither business related nor productivity increasing).

Action!

We are a team with multiple competencies comprising famous musicians, senior communicators and military experts and organizational psychologists. Together we have learned how to work our way around crisis and hard times. We’d be happy to learn about the challenges you meet on your way to fulfil your ambitions. www.pro-found.dk

Reinventing ourselves in Social Media

In my last article “Seven organizational characteristics of social networks” I promised to get back to the prospect of “Reinventing ourselves” in Social Media.

In so many ways our idealized selves get suppressed at work or simply won’t come out. There are so many things we would love to do better, perhaps be more accommodating in our communication, or maybe be more outspoken and self-confident.  At other times we just need for other people to perceive us differently and to realize who we really are – and respect us for being just that.

Having said that, changing ourselves or our behaviour is not all that easy!

If we want to change the way we are or the way we come across we often have to change the way we live.

I’d like to share this story about a friend of mine who woke up one morning determined to change his life. For quite a while he had been aware that he was no longer happy about his job as legal affairs manager in a large software company. Or at least that was what he thought at the time. The company however was not the problem, his employees, his boss and his colleagues weren’t either and he was quite happy about his role with the company. So, quite naturally he started looking for other reasons for his unhappiness.

Soon he started wondering if he should look to his private life for a reason. He was married to a nurse working night shifts mostly, and he had four beautiful kids with her. He took a good long talk with her about all the daily logistic routines: Getting up early every morning taking care of breakfast, sending the big girls of to school and taking the little one to kindergarten, spending hours every weekend driving the kids to different kinds of sport. He also had the house and the garden to take care of.

A month went by and he called me asking me if we could meet up and talk.

We met and he told me the story that I just shared with you.  But he also told me that he had come to the conclusion that there was nothing about his life with his beloved wife and the kids he wanted to change – and that his job was fine as well. But there was so much more he wanted to do and he also very much missed being engaged in energizing conversations and debates like he used to be before his children were born. He said: ‘If only I could have both worlds life would be so sweet’ and I can still hear myself saying ‘sure thing, who wouldn’t want that – but let’s be realistic’…

This is about a year ago. He’s doing fine today taking care of that same old job and leading the same life with his family, but something did change. Rather than working less or ridding himself of any domestic duties, he added two hours of activity every night to his already busy schedule. Two hours of Social web crawling.

Inside the Social Media he found a place to be that part of himself that he missed in his life. Last time I met with him I felt the change immediately. He looked kind of different and he seemed to me to be a lot more enthusiastic about most anything we touched upon. He found a way to have both!

The Social Media offer this frame for being our all, perhaps the one we want to be – or maybe just be different from what we are at work, and for once I’m not thinking that this is mentally unhealthy, identity destabilizing or role confusing. I think that this is a chance to sublimate some of those forces and instincts stemming from some earlier stage or even dreams in our life. And even more so, if living in here can make living out there more fulfilling and even reactivate our passion, by all means – let’s engage!

Stories as unique openers of human doors

Please read this brief announcement by my good friend Bobby Ricketts. He’s a world renown artist, a great connaisseur of people and a story-teller beyond belief. I’m very excited about our cooperation – and look forward to share future tales!

Thomas Heintzelmann                                                                                                                                                                                                      Owner pro:found

Leadership, Team Building, Motivation, Inspiration and Creativity

You and I face the same challenges for making an impact: time constraints, budget constraints, local infrastructure, availability of materials, cultural barriers, language barriers, recruiting skilled co-workers, motivating and inspiring these new colleagues to unite as a team to deliver and exceed the expectations of the people on the receiving end of what we have to offer.

My “product” or “service” offering is music, my clientel are an audience of listeners spread across several continents, each of whom invest at some level in order to witness me reach the ultimate objective, which is a chance to connect through music, by delivering a performance hopefully beyond their expectations.

Even when provided with the same tools for preparation and a template for the desired ideal in the form of a recorded CD, every group of musician colleagues I encounter reacts, works and performs differently. Each new scenario is entered with the odds against me… over-hyped and preceded by my reputation, it is my job to unite the skeptics, be open, sensitive, tolerant, flexible, diplomatic, humorous, exude confidence without arrogance, motivate, inspire and lead my team of music colleagues to a peak performance – all the while never losing sight of the intended goals and objectives or compromising the integrity of my art.

Success criteria are inspired performances from each musician, thunderous applause, standing ovations, personal and artistic satisfaction, and a unilateral emotional commitment from musicians, venues and audiences that results in word of mouth, further collaboration – and most importantly, an invitation to return in the future for yet another concert. Parameters for growth and development. Then on to a new destination, different venue, one more group of musicians and yet another fresh, expectant audience.

Allow me to share my stories with you, of how I dreamed and planned my entrance to the world stage… tales of fear, apprehension, action, faux pas, failures and of course, success. How I stay positive, motivated, inspired, prepared and poised for the next challenge – and what I do to spread inspiration and positivity – the best form of PR – to every person I encounter.

In this unique collaboration with Pro:found, we seek to move you with engaging stories, create new images in your mind, and leave you sharing our belief – and the ability to spread this belief – that with the right mindset, a healthy portion of diligence, and the will to succeed, anything is possible.

Sincerely,

Bobby Ricketts
Artist, Producer & Music Director
Freelance Senior Consultant, Pro:found

Seven organizational characteristics of social networks?

Members are driven

Have you ever found yourself wondering why you still have that same old job? Maybe you ticked of the box ‘interested in job offers’ on different business/social networks? Those lucky few that find their jobs so rewarding that to them, it is in fact a calling, might never experience having these thoughts. In “Don’t kill the messenger” Chris Rock (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3YWszftWWg) says “the people in the audience with careers need to
learn to shut the f… up – when you’re around people with jobs’!

I think that a lot of us find our time occupied by a job rather than a career, and I wish to God that we could all have ‘careers’. In some high performing and high spirited organizations you’ll find driven employees. They will typically not consider themselves employees but rather fortunate members of the organization. Driven translates into ‘self motivated’ or ‘high spirited’ in this context.

We don’t need to convince ourselves that we have to spend time on Social Networking do we? We do it early in the morning, during our day, in the evening and at night. We’re ‘driven’.

Social acceptance depends on actions rather than money, breed or good intentions

In society at large as well as in Social Networks we have to establish some sort of proof of our worthiness to be socially accepted by other people. Status is typically linked to wealth, breed, power or extraordinary achievements. Presidents are elected on intentions to do good or intentions to bring about change.

In Social Networking actions count! If you’re only in for the ride without contributing anything you’re not worthy. If that is the case you won’t get any attention, you won’t have any followers and your word won’t get around.

However, if you are contributing by volunteering important or interesting information and by giving just as much as you take out you’re accepted! Of course you need to refrain from profanity and obscenity but otherwise even the language is free.

Rules are substituted by empathy

Every society or organization has rules. If they didn’t we wouldn’t know how to manage the members of them or how to control the development and growth of them. In the same way the traffic on the web in general is heavily guarded and censured.

In the society as well as in the typical workplace the members are physical beings. In the Social Medias however we are mental entities represented by an account, a name, a picture and perhaps a gravatar and defined by our actions. For whichever reason there doesn’t seem to be any need for regulations, reductionistic filters or any other restraints in here.

Inside the Social Medias our empathy is our compass. It will provide us with direction and guide us only as far as the depth of it allows.

Roles are neither given nor static – they are taken and they are dynamic

When we enter an organization we assume a role. No matter what end of the organization we enter we will have to adhere to a role description encompassing a list of what is expected of us, what charge and place we have in the organization and how we can expect to be compensated for our efforts. Also the culture, policies, vision, mission and values are likely to be expected of us to adhere to.

In the Social Medias no such preformulated and static roles exist. You yourself decide what role you want to take, and your efforts determine if you get it and/or keep it. If you find that your role no longer fit your needs, fantasies, dreams or wants you simply change efforts and actions.

In so many ways the Social Medias offers a safe haven for reinventing yourself. (I’ll get back to this in a later article) You can ask questions out in the open, address matters of personal interest or concern or offer your reflections.

Leaders are randomly substituted by individuals with mental affluence and willingness to share

And this is really interesting! You can enter the Social Medias as a business leader and if you’re well known and respected you’re likely to get a lot of followers. However if you have nothing to offer your followers in these same Medias or if you don’t share, you will get nothing back – and you are not a leader in the eyes of the Social Medias.

Individuals with mental affluence are those that look like the next person but are so much more. More because of their mental surplus, energy level, insight and willingness to unselfishly share their knowledge and insights. Those are the ‘true leaders’ of the Social Medias.

Inherent Political Influence of social networks is potentially enormous

In my company our slogan is: “Imagine all the people, we do”, which we struggle to live up to everyday. Our point is that if you imagine all the people in the world or in your organization, in the classroom or perhaps in your family it gets so much easier to avoid the rash and bad decisions. All of a sudden you can see that change, development or help offered to any one unit alone won’t do the organization any good. The context is extremely important and should always be a part of the basis for action.

Large social groups or organizations as the “Twitter community” hold a tremendous potential power, especially if you consider all the people in it! Imagine that all the twitters in the world decided to boycott one specific Television Channel because of their serious misbehaviour? Or decided not to buy products from one specific company and at the same time decided to spread the word on Facebook? That would amount to almost half a billion people.

Now, imagine all the people decided to help the Haitian people for instance? Imagine all the people getting together to do good!

There’s no organizational strategy

Even though Jack Dorsey (Jack Dorsey^[8 ) without any doubt had a plan with Twitter (which it might even follow), the organization in itself hasn’t got any strategy. It is doing whatever we decide it should be doing which in itself is a historic organizational accomplishment.