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An Agile approach to designing and deploying leadership development programs

Business alliances are living systems, evolving progressively in their possibilities… We are happy to announce that two human organizations are blossoming and entering a new relationship. This new connection—CoachingOurselves and Pyxis Technologies—will offer unforeseen training opportunities … creating new value together that changes the world!

Better together!

An Agile approach to designing and deploying leadership development programs

By Phil LeNir, President of CoachingOurselves

In May of 2017, we attended the Spark the Change Montréal conference. We were curious and interested in this concept of a gathering of change leaders from all industries and walks of life with one mission only: to work together to create lasting and total change. After all, isn’t this perfectly aligned with the mission of CoachingOurselves?

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CoachingOurselves is a Henry Mintzberg program. It uses short peer-group coaching sessions to develop leadership and management capacity in hundreds of organizations around the world. The process is iterative and emergent, very different for your typical monolithic classroom based programs.

CoachingOurselves felt right at home surrounded by specialists in human resources, organizational development, change management, and agility, all dedicated to improving their organizations and being the spark for change. This vision of the human being as a vector of change in the organization is nothing less than our raison d’être.

CoachingOurselves strongly believes that an agile approach to designing and deploying leadership development programs is essential to translate these efforts into improved organizational performance. Leadership development is often messy and complicated. Experience and studies show that a formally structured analysis-design-deployment process tends to have little impact on business results. We believe that the agile approach applied in the world of learning and development will greatly improve the results, both at the level of the individual, the team, and the organization.

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Also, very interesting at this conference was the emphasis on connection, reflection, acceptance, mutual help … and love! At CoachingOurselves, we have been spreading this connection message for several years, and reflection is at the heart of Henry Mintzberg‘s pedagogy. We are convinced that by creating strong and authentic bonds within a team, the organization can only grow and flourish. And it is with great enthusiasm that we are seeing an increasing number of people turning more and more naturally towards this type of approach.

In the days ahead, we look forward to learning more and more from the agile world and leveraging them in our universe of leadership development programs. Henry Mintzberg will be sharing his vision of social change, balance, and developing managers at the Agile Tour Montreal 2017 event, and we will be there with our friends from Pyxis to learn and share with the agile community.

If you like agile and are interested in developing leadership and management capacity in your organization, you’ll be CoachingOurselves! All details are here: www.coachingourselves.com

About the author:

PhilPhil LeNir is co-founder and managing partner of CoachingOurselves, which is a peer-coaching program developed by Phil LeNir and Henry Mintzberg that enables managers and leaders to learn from and coach each other, and organizations to build capacity for self-development. Phil has authored numerous articles and published a book in Japan on Social and Informal Learning for Managers.

Prior to CoachingOurselves, he spent 15 years in management positions in high tech companies specializing in speech-recognition systems. He has a patent on Speech Recognition and Speaker Verification using distributed speech processing, and he holds a Masters of Management and Honours Electrical Engineering degree from McGill University (Montréal, Canada).