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

Some links:

- 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)

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

- Link to brief video introduction to CoachingOurselves by Henry Mintzberg

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

Videos

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June 24, 2010 at 3:17am

Matt Shlosberg

Phil,

Thank you for the post. I've actually used a process very similar to the one you are describing and I'd be very interested to learn more about it.

Do you have any metrics in place that measure your program's success or would you consider this a soft science?

June 24, 2010 at 4:52am

Mireille Jansma

Matt,

I think you worked with CoachingOurselves already? You wrote in your reaction to my Challenging Minds hack: “I've actually been running a very similar program for one of my clients. It included (...) Mintzberg's "Coaching Ourselves" program”.

Would love to hear about your experiences! Please share?

All the best and thanks,

Mireille

June 25, 2010 at 6:35am

Matt Shlosberg

Mireille -

I apologize, I picked the wrong words. I didn't use CoachingOurselves but rather the same model. I put together a list of questions, got people in the room and got them to discuss answers to these questions.

Initially this was a waste of time. People would discuss questions and answers and forget about their discussion the moment they left the room.

Then I changed the approach. After every discussion, I'd ask managers how their behavior would change now that they have this new knowledge. I would ask them to commit to changes and put them in their personal leadership development plan. I would then follow up to make sure they execute on what they promised. As a result, some discussions became more productive than others. Some resulted in minor organizational changes although a lot of them still had no results.

I am still experimenting with this model. It would be interesting to see how results will differ if I follow the exact CoachingOurselves model...

June 25, 2010 at 9:40am

Phil LeNir

Hi Matt,

There are two broad ways in which we help ensure that CoachingOurselves is helping.

First we ask that the managers themselves judge whether the time spent using CoachingOurselves is productive and helpful. In CoachingOurselves managers are responsible for their own development and the results as well... which means they measure it themselves in anyway that they think is suitable to help them judge the value of this activity. Actually, I would think that managers are always trying to judge to one degree or another the value of everything they do, not just CoachingOurselves, and continuously adjusting.

To help this along you want to encourage people to be critical, thoughtful and reflective about what's going on around them, including CoachingOurselves, and think for themselves as much as possible. For example, at the end of each session the topic asks the management team or group to spend two minutes answering a simple question: "We just spent approx. 90 minutes of our organizations time, and our lives for that matter, having a discussion about some of the management issues going on around us all stimulated by this CoachingOurselves topic.... was it worth it? And if not, what are we going to do about it?" (Probably a reasonable question to ask about most activities/meetings we have on a regular basis!)

And the answer could very well be that they will never do CoachingOurselves again, or that they will change the way they do it, or they will do it a couple more times and try and make it better, or whatever... but it's up to them. This might even bring out the interesting realization by some people that they participate in the discussion, have all these great ideas, but never seem to do anything about it for one reason or another in which case the group might help them drill down into some very fundamental issues etc...

Secondly, we are always asking for stories from all the groups using CoachingOurselves. We just send them an e-mail every couple of months asking if they have any stories to share. We would like to hear about what people have done, what specific changes they may have initiated as a direct result of the time spent with CoachingOurselves etc...

These stories are compiled and then sent to the business stakeholders so they can judge the value of CoachingOurselves to the organization. Some of the stories show very obvious direct impact.... e.g. a topic stimulated a discussion around such and such issue, which led to the decision to make a specific business change, which was then implemented, and sales increased by nn% or costs went down by nn% or whatever metrics they choose to share.

We also get many stories around the soft side of things, how it makes people "feel better", how they have begun to "think differently" etc...

All of these stories, and the strong message from many participating managers that this is a really helpful process and they don't want to stop, allows business stakeholders to judge results.

So yes, people measure the results of CoachingOurselves, but not in the sense of putting numbers on a report somewhere.

Your comment does make me think of measurement and management in a broader sense in that we might be inclined to ask we can compute some metrics of other management activities in isolation, which I think would lead us down a terrible rat hole!

(BTW, I fear I may have misinterpreted your question in some way, and I'm sorry if that's the case!).

Good question!

Phil.

June 25, 2010 at 10:15am

Jordan Cohen

Phil,
This is great!
Very relevant for today and pragmatic. Video was very effective part of the story.
I have a question – in the first meeting(s) how to you defend against the group discussion getting to negative and becoming a downward spiral? And...about how long until a group feels or sees an impact (ok that 2 questions)? Jordan

June 26, 2010 at 9:46am

Phil LeNir

Hi Matt,

A couple of thoughts on the model you shared in the comment. Perhaps adding some conceptual content before the questions, and asking people to relate what they experience with the conceptual view. That may help stimulate more interesting/novel discussions than questions/experiences alone.

You might also suggest to everyone that it's honestly up to them to make the most of this and step back to let everyone sort things out for themselves. That will probably change the dynamics of the conversation, as well as lower costs.

Good luck!

Phil.

July 24, 2010 at 1:58am

Ellen Weber

Thanks Phil! What I like about your Coaching Ourselves program is that it draws on talents of people and nudge them past the problems or naysaying that pulls people down, and into mind-bending solutions! Thanks for sharing this story of innovation for a better way to work. That is the place of refreshing - and it sounds like you get there frequently in fine style, using these approaches. My work is the same and it’s also different – so I can learn from your experiences.

The MITA Brain Based Approach uses a few similar tactics and is also a bit different, in that it factors in new insights about the brain’s plasticity to change. Like yours – it too is an approach to help move players from the sinking ship onto a new raft until their innovative vessel gets built by the talents within the group. There are 5 straightforward components to the renewal method.
In phase 1 we start with questions and go for possibilities. We encourage curiosity by asking - What would happen if … and we help people to build curiosity for ongoing movement forward.
In Phase 2 – we target innovative solutions - that borrow from differences across genders, cultures, backgrounds, ages and intelligences. You could say we look at problems that hold us back – with solutions in mind.
In phase 3 - we list specific criteria by which each venture and team will be measured. It’s quite easy and it works! People make metrics more than we find they are. If a group of people decides on a checklist of criteria for a venture – and then uses that list as a checklist to complete the work – as well as to measure its success – you can track progress in what we call intelligence fair ways.
In phase 4 – we move multiple intelligences into action so that people develop new skills as they build together. We work from the premise that all humans come with at least 8 unique intelligences, in different mixes, and all can be developed to higher levels. The old idea of fixed intelligence has given way to new discoveries about the plasticity of the human brain to grow and learn and innovate far beyond what most thought was capable – and until we are far older than we thought IQ could still be raised. We milk the new theories and use people’s unique set of capabilities in delightful ways to solve stubborn problems and grow new products together.
In phase 5 we reflect together to ensure ongoing growth by asking questions such as – Where to from here? At this phase we also hold an even called a “Celebration of Innovation,” where we share new ideas created – with the wider community and get their input. I laughed at your engineers’ response to reflection – when the best engineers reflect to invent and so can they
It’s much like much like Joseph Conrad stated in The Heart of Darkness, MITA brain based methods were created on the life-changing belief that:
The mind is capable of anything – because everything in it, is all the past as well as the future.
When we see how our brain is highly capable – as you and your group too discovered - we begin to accomplish things never before accomplished by using parts of the brain never before used. Have you seen it happen?

August 30, 2010 at 6:46am

David Creelman

Organizations often have protocols they follow for projects. They will be certain standard things that get built into how the project gets done as a matter of course. Organizations should build "reflective, learning sessions" (which is what Coaching Ourselves is) into the standard protocol.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen argues that the step of organizing your work should be taken very seriously--it is work, it is the key to being productive, it is not an extra, it not something you do when you have time. Similarly, the reflective, learning sessions are part of getting the project done--especially if you are over budget, behind schedule and have no time.

August 31, 2010 at 4:27am

Michel David

A new school for entrepreneurs, the École d’Entrepreneurship de Beauce-EEB (www.eebeauce.com) will use CoachingOurselves materials as part of its curriculum starting September 2010.

We think the CO approach is a particularly great fit for entrepreneurs.

Michel David
Member: Pedagogy Committee

August 31, 2010 at 6:52am

Rosangela Vidal

What I most like this program is that you have a range of subjects and great authors easily available and also you can share and practice them immediatly during the sessions, in a very simple way. I had a meeting in Brazil with our leading Airline Company (TAM) and i heard from their HR Director that she worked before at Ford, and while there she had proposed a group (6 persons, she included) to read a very important book and every monday they would sit for 30 minutes to discuss it. She said it was amazing in the beginning but after 7-8 meetings they didnt proceed because - 1st: free discussion without a method; 2- same subject all the time. So when I presented CoachingOurselves to her she said - this is just wonderful, ready-to-go, diversified subjects and organized sessions, can't go wrong with that!

August 31, 2010 at 9:02am

Monica Redden

Thanks for all the ideas on using Coaching Ourselves. You might be interested to know that I am working with the Rapid Results Institute (RRI) developing a joint approach to strengthening management capabilities pariticularly in African and some Middle Eastern countries. The Rapid Results Institute has developed an approach designed to break through performance barriers using 100 day projects. We are exploring how to integrate CO topics into the 100 day process to strengthen the learning that emerges from the projects to build the confidence and capacity of individuals in leadership and management positions. We are at the early stages of developing the joint approach, however we are getting positive indicators that enhancement to the RRI approach is working well. Intergrating CO with existing programs is very feasible. I have found that there is a universal relevance of the topics and the ready-made structure of the approach is a low cost and highly effective strategy to strengthen capabilities.

September 1, 2010 at 4:18am

Sharon Flanagan

The thing I have noticed that is consistent among groups I have observed using CoachingOurselves is that the groups invariably become more closely knit. Their relationships strengthen and they begin to work together better. That may seem ridiculously simple and basic... but the reality in organizations is it takes informal networks and connections to get things done. The better people know each other and the more they trust each other, the better the working relationships and outputs. This is a really practical and inexpensive method of building teams.

September 26, 2010 at 8:55pm

Bruno Weiblen

My name is Bruno Weiblen, I´m from Brazil and I was introduced to CoachingOurselves 2 years ago. This solution is the most effective and practical approach for management learning & development I´ve ever heard about it. I could have experienced some real impact in a publishing company which was running CoachingOurselves sessions. In one of the sessions, Dealing with the Pressures of Managing, one of the managers mentioned that she was overloaded and that she realized she needed to have time to reflec and time for action. Then, she decided that one day, she would focus on concentrating and on reflecting on the recent management happenings. This is just one of the success stories that I could mention about the power of this learning approach.

September 27, 2010 at 5:39pm

Graham Barkus

Excellent case study; my comment is that the title might be slightly misleading, or may downplay the benefit of this approach to management development. In my role as head of organization development and change one of my biggest challenges is appropriately aligning organizational need and personal growth in development programs. I have found the CoachingOurselves methodology highly effective in this regard. It creates an ideal platform for participants to progress their own challenges - issues, questions, opportunities as the individuals' case may be - through the natural process of discussion, illuminated both by leading-edge academic thought, and the experience and insights of their peers.
We use it as a method of choice for development - not simply in cases where other more traditional methods might have a higher financial or time cost.

September 28, 2010 at 2:48am

Phil LeNir

Hi Jordan, For many teams in very difficult circumstance some of the first discussions will almost certainly get pretty negative. All the standard stuff that many of us do when under stress will come out. Many of us (myself included!) might complain and moan about how unfair everything is... how all these other teams, departments, their bosses, or the market conditions make it impossible for them to do their job, how the people above must be crazy and how horrible everything etc.... This is exactly what myself and my team went through when we started... as you can imagine given the nightmare situation we were going through. But you get this out of your system pretty quickly... maybe 2-3 times and everyone kind of starts asking the obvious question, and so what are we going to do about all this? Since it's only the team in the room, people start to feel a little stupid if all they do is complain and whine. And this in itself is a pretty inexpensive price to pay to help ourselves through the destructive negative frame of mind we can get into when things are changing for the worse around us (that's only 3-4 hours of our time, not bad!) The topics help move this along in that they offer some simple guidance on how much time the group might want to spend discussing each piece of content, and they provide some questions to help focus the discussions. So even though the first page might lead to an unproductive discussion because everyone is negative, within 5-15 minutes the group moves to the next page where they are presented with a fresh perspective on some aspect of management, and some new question(s). This keeps opening up the conversation. And yes, most groups pretty quickly have someone implicitly or explicitly take on the role of timekeeper (or it's shared)... just like in any other productive meeting. And if they don't, and they choose not to follow any of the recommendations, then that's up to them, we just try to help make sure the group decides upon this explicitly rather than implicitly. And so we do not try to defend against the discussion getting negative... if that's what people feel is important to talk about then so be it. CoachingOurselves just seems to help it be "productively negative", if that makes sense.... and so it doesn't stay negative for long. In terms of how long until impact, I'm really not sure yet. It seems to be all over the map. A team that knows each other well, has a burning issue and selects a topic that provokes a discussion on that issue in way that has never happened will likely get an immediate and direct impact for obvious reasons. Other groups take a couple of sessions before they warm up to each other enough to have the "deep" conversations which result in novel perspectives and new ideas on current issues and management challenges. And still others use CoachingOurselves as a way to kind of boost the teams performance. They might be a relatively new team, and so this becomes a way to build the group into a team. This doesn't happen right away, CoachingOurselves just kind of speeds up the process. In general I have found that so long as the group is relatively small (around 5-6) and they get together at decent frequency (every second or third week), then after the 4th meeting or so most everyone says that the dynamics of the conversation change dramatically and new ideas, inspirations, initiatives start to come out of this. And in many cases these tend to be small little things. But if lots of managers are coming up with lots of small improvements every second or third week throughout the organization... well it adds up pretty quickly, and I suspect becomes much more than the sum of its parts. Most teams also gets very private and will not likely share details of the conversations they are having after this stage, but they will talk about what they are doing as a result of the discussions. Hope this helps! Personally I'm very much hoping that as many management teams as possible use this, or similar approaches, to help themselves... whether they choose to purchase access to the library of topics authored by the management thinkers that work with us, or people develop and use their own content, it can only result in good things for managers everywhere. Phil.

September 28, 2010 at 1:24pm

Søren Raaschou

When you look at the most amazing innovations in the world, they are gamechanging and yet so simple that you think for yourself, that you should have come up with that yourself. But you didn't!!
CoachingOurselves is one of those: Of course reflectioons over practice in the light of brilliant material is the way to go - and I have seen amazing results ranging from individual transformations to effective teamwork and organizational progress.
Try it!

October 4, 2010 at 10:46am

Warren Cohen

Finally, something for managers that actually works and doesn't take them away from the office!

October 8, 2010 at 10:17am

Aman Motwane

This sounds and feels very good. However, it has one very important and one very fundamental thing that's missing.

The best way to explain is through an example:

I teach people the importance of learning the right questions rather than emphasize finding the right answers.

In one of my workshops, after participants have already learned to emphasize asking the right questions, I invite them to bring one of their favorite books of all times — a book that they might even call life-transforming. Invariably, I've found that the books they bring are heavily marked and highlighted and well-used.

After each participant has given a brief overview of their favorite book, the participants split up into small groups, with each group picking one of the books that was presented. Their goal with their selected book is to examine it through the lens of asking the right questions and identify:

(1) a key, leveraging insight on the subject that is either missing from the book or is not identified in the book as the insight that leverages the success of all its other insights.

(2) a key, leveraging insight that can be gained from the book on a subject that is beyond the scope of the book, and as such, is not mentioned in the book (e.g. gaining a key, leveraging insight into leadership from a book on innovation).

The ahas that come as a result of focusing on asking questions rather than on learning answers is absolutely amazing. And because they uncovered these answers on their own, they become even better at asking the right questions.

The questions, in other words, become the foundation of everything they learn.

And that's what's missing from CoachingOurselves

October 8, 2010 at 12:18pm

Phil LeNir

Hi Aman,

Thanks for the comment. I very much appreciate the idea of helping people thinking about the question rather than the answer. There is huge value in helping people get better at asking the right questions.

But CoachingOurselves is neither about asking questions or answers, rather it is simply about spending some time to reflect on one's own experiences stimulated by some conceptual material. A team of managers gets together every couple of weeks, for an hour and a half, to discuss major topics of management in light of their own experiences and challenges. There are no facilitators in CoachingOurselves, no trainers or formal coaches, just managers helping each other learn from their own practical experience and pursuing the consequences for change in their organization.

This may lead to discussion and reflection on the questions they have recently been asking, if that was important part of their recent managerial experiences, or perhaps a debate about their different perceptions of recent event, or something else... we never know, nor do we ever get to find out since teams do this on their own.

At this point we have several thousand managers in about 60 organizations around the world using CoachingOurselves, and I still always find it difficult to explain what it is, or what might happen in the discussions. And this is even though I use CoachingOurselves myself with my own team on a regular basis as a key tool to drive my small business forward.

Phil.