A DEEP-COACHING STRATEGY for ORGANIZATIONAL COACHING

When and how to best accompany successful organizational-culture transformations? 

This is the million dollar question many shareholders, CEOs, executives, HRs, consultants and coaches increasingly ask themselves. And most don’t always get or deliver proof of their very different answers. 

If comprehensive corporate transformations are often wished for by the above stakeholders, not to speak of most employees, the means to achieve these are measurably uncertain when not utopic. Furthermore, in the face of today’s urgent shorter-term business priorities, most decisions are all but strategic, often based on scarce time, limited resources and theoretical approaches that seem to be more ideologically seductive than measurably effective.

Indeed, no matter the program, deep and lasting organizational transformations are rarely achieved. This is usually due to deeply engrained behavioral habits that reveal the shadow of mainstream history tainted with alpha-male harassment cultures, lack of internal alignment on a vision that stirs-up a deep sense of purpose, waning engagement, motivation and commitment resulting in inexistant follow-up, and a history of boastful change-management programs that have been kicked-off with enthusiastic corporate drum rolls only to peter off like wet firecrackers within six months to a year. To most line empoyees, corporate change management is a stale joke.

Meanwhile the urgency for radical organizational culture change is widely measured: 

World-wide, burned-out managers, browned-out competent employees, disillusioned younger generations, discriminated minorities and women, and more are increasingly participating in the great resignation. Interestingly many of those become external trainers, coaches, consultants, experts. In short all those who could input intelligent diversity in the widespread present-day corporate blues are dropping out. Organisations world-wide increasingly know they need to radically reboot, if they are to keep their people. But they don’t know how.

Part of the reason is that signigficant organizational change has been heralded by headquarters in most national and international companies for the better part of the last fifty years. In all-too-many corporations, seductive consultant-driven management and organizational-culture models have been marketed with great success, and then have achieved equally dismal measurable results.

This state of affairs should be expected when one observes the lack of creativity displayed in copy-paste change-management processes when it comes to transforming organizational cultures. Notice here that the word process refers not to diverse models of organizational changes on which most intellectually agree, but to how that change is to be implemented. 

• Almost invariably, organizational change is first confidentially explained to, sold to or prepared within the executive team cenacle, behind closed doors.
• Almost invariably, once intellectually debated in endless meetings and officially validated by these executives, the subsequent roll-out to the rest of the organization is driven and controlled top-down by higher management and experts.
• Almost invariably, idealistic promises of change are sold to the masses in leadership speeches laden with concepts, illustrations, numbers, buzz-words, often accompanied by folders, pins, posters and other tourt paraphilia (love of appearance) 

These marketing campaigns are as well-orchestrated as political party electoral conventions, and their lot of advertisements, caps, whisttles, TV shows and leadership heart-to-heart fireside chats. Here, prefered executives compete on-stage to publicly stand out as potential CEO successors.

• Almost invariably, the leadership and executive team will then delegate the implementation of promised changes to lower functional systems such as HR training departments, internal or external trainers, coaches and consulting companies. Much more realistic operational leaders go back to their business-as-usual.

Consequently, the process that had symbolically involved onboarded executive team levels lose steam when rolled-out to operational levels. Indeed, the latter had never been consulted more than symbolically and cannot really understand how their everyday work-lives are really going to change, if not with an increased work-load to reduce short-term costs and ensure more production and profits.

• Almost invariably, one or two years down the road, the need for real organizational change re-surfaces with renewed urgency to remedy ever-increasing dissatisfaction and all forms of manager burn-out and employee resignation.

Obviously, we’ve all been there and have done it.  Change management radically needs to change itself!

There are, however, a few organizations that have successfully achieved rather outstanding, measurable systemic changes. To implement these, a number of process conditions seem to help ensure lasting results.

• The first condition rests on the nomination of a new organizational leader clearly mandated and deeply motivated to pilot the organization’s radical cultural transformation. 

It is indeed much more difficult for an existing and installed CEO to think and act differently within context he knows too well, for being an integral part of it.  Within a month or two of their arrival, newly nominated leaders have a much fresher perspective on what needs to be done on the long term. Existing or tenured CEOs are much more prone to focus on lower-risk shorter-term goals, in order to embellish results to ensure themselves better future career proposals. Furthermore, considering that most corporate leaders are assigned for an average of three to five-year mandates in the same position, radical change cannot be initiated and followed-through by those who are expected to be leaving within the next eighteen months. 

• The second condition rests on acquiring buy-in for the need to radically change by a much larger core-team than just the pre-existing executive team exclusive club.

Indeed, when a new CEO is appointed to lead a pre-existing executive team, the latter is generally much too engrained in historical behavioral habits, political maneuvering, shorter-term operational imperatives, territorial or silo competition and personal career-oriented stakes and strategies. More often than not, at least one of the non-cooperative executive team members considers that he or she was competent if not entitled to be the next CEO. This disappointed if not distraught suitor will most often need to be replaced.

Consequently, to really support the newly appointed CEO’s will to provoke the organization’s radical cultural change, an enlarged group of at least twenty key players should be involved from the start. The purpose of this larger initial base is to clearly communicate that the organization’s transformation will take place regardless of the executive team’s active support. This larger buy-in base is designed to clearly by-pass a probably significant number of routinely conservative executive team members. Note that this strategy is in total coherency with the systemic principle that historical executive teams are kin to national governments, in fact the most conservative body in an established organization. They are the one most resistant to implement measurable radical change. That would clearly undermine their hierarchical power, outlandish benefits and comfort. Tehy have too much to lose.

With a systemic-coaching approach, this preliminary buy-in or collective change-contract definition phase can be successfully implemented within two days.

• The third criteria stipulates that following this initial buy-in or contracting phase involving an enlarged leadership team, an even larger population - up to a hundred top managers - needs to be simultaneously behaviorally trained. They will then be massively mandated to implement new individual and collective operating principles, processes and procedures that will install the needed radical changes.

These new operating processes and procedures are designed to replace historical behavioral habits to radically modify : team-work and team-meetings, decision-making, follow-up, information-flow, bottom-up consulting, risk-management, goal-setting, budgeting, measurement, transversal collaboration, etc. within and between all top executive departments or divisions. These next-level change agents generally include managers from all operational departments or divisions such as Manufacturing, Sales, Supply Chain, etc. on the one hand, and all support-system departments such as Financial, HR, Quality, I.T., legal, Strategy, Marketing, etc.on the other.

The purpose of simultaneously onboarding such a large and significant population of top managers along with the executive team is to immediately embark a large-enough mass of leaders and managers, one that manages up to 900 employees, on a shared meaningful vision and ambition for the immediate cultural future, based on common values, sahared principles and linguistics, radically new system-wide processes and procedures, observable and measurable behavioral habits, etc. An active and measurable new management culture.

• Within the executive team and each of the involved departments working as sub-groups and teams, the third condition rests on anchoring the above culture-behavioral changes within very concrete, every-day operational activities. 

Consequently, during the above-mentioned three-day organizational culture-change process, each of the concerned teams runs operational meetings focused on making decisions on how they will apply radically innovative processes and procedures within their own team, in all their day-to-day activities and teamwork, in their own team-meetings, decision-making processes, follow-up, information-flow, botom-up consulting, risk-management, goal-setting, budgeting, measurement, transversal collaboration, etc

Indeed, corporate culture is not a concept that exists separately from operational work. It is operational work. It affects all the individual and collective values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors within a given system. It is not a separate field to which collective systems pay lip service while behaving in a totally incongruent way. To be powerfully effective, radical cultural change therefore needs to be simultaneously introduced to the largest possible number of system members who measurably embody the change, while they address all individual and collective operational behaviors in day-to-day interactions. 

With a systemic coaching approach targeting a population of up to one-hundred top managers, this second phase to initiate radical cultural-change and development can be successfully implemented within three consecutive days. Note that the whole two-plus-three-day organizational-coaching process described here can be implemented within less than two months. With a systemic viral approach such as this, significant corporate cultural change brings results within months. Within much larger corporate systems, similar subsequent three-day organizational-coaching processes may need to be introduced in other peripheral or overseas divisions, in order to seed a more distributed cultural-change process.

• The fourth and last condition for radical cultural change within large systems concerns designing and implementing company-wide measurement systems and tracking procedures that will serve to follow-up on all the decisions that emerge throughout the three-day organizational coaching process and after.

Much as with financial and other results-oriented tracking procedures routinely implemented by accounting, sales and quality departments, such company-wide follow-up measurement systems focused on cultural indicators precisely and routinely track each and every team meeting rhythm, personal attendance, quality of decisions and follow-up, absenteeism, turnover, risk-management, internal and external reactivity or time-to-market, perceived quality by clients, on-boarding and off-boarding, yearly assessment processes, loss and breakage, pertinent information flow, etc. 

The design and distribution of these team-specific tracked measurements often gain to be shared, on company-wide intranets. They ensure that any system-wide radical cultural change process will be seen, communicated and validated, and continue to be implemented and imbedded for years.

To conclude, note again that all the above criterium for successful organizational culture change do not address the prefered direction or model of the desired change. They are merely process criteria that ensure transformational success no matter the desired results. One can surmise, however, that by and large today, most modern organisations could implement such a systemic cultural-transformation process to achieve measurable results in the following key areas:

• Increase and improve company attractiveness, employer brand, management and employee ownership, motivation, reactivity, delegation; intrapreneurship, collaborative behaviors, client satisfaction, product and service quality, not to mention financial stability if not profits, etc.
• Reduce operational loss, time and material waste, breakage, costs, centralization and control, micro-management, administrative paper-work, time-to-market, absenteeism, illnesses, stress, brown and burn-out, all forms of resignation, internal and client turnover, etc.

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