The organizational context and objectives of the coaching process: The general manager of a local branch of a multinational organization with more than 200 employees believed that the organization’s potential was much higher than the numbers showed and proposed to increase performance by at least 30%. The performance growth strategy was possible by increasing people’s accountability, autonomous teams, focusing on ambitious results and with a high level of professionalism and learning, solution-oriented and the ability to move from “working hard to working smart.” This strategy meant for the company to change the current organizational culture that had produced good results through a high managerial input – on the one hand, the managers being very control-oriented and with a very large contribution in the operational area and, on the other hand, the specialists acting only as executors – into the development of an organizational culture in which they were value-oriented, solution-orientated and proactive, innovative thinking, but also meant ambition, challenge and high scores, regardless of the roles in the organigram.
The project was conducted for 1 year and focused on the organic growth of people. The coaching approach has helped to facilitate team work with the help of team coaching:
- creating a common vision and aligning all key employees to it
- training the management team to act as an autonomous, high-performance model, focused on ambitious solutions and outcomes;
- optimizing internal processes to facilitate and value the desired behaviours in the organization
- creating a team of champions of change that would shape and sustain the development of desired behaviours and results across the entire organization
One key point of this project was the perseverance of the General Manager and a few “allies” (key people) who understood the phenomenon of resistance to change of the organization and the pressure resulting from the opposition resistance. They themselves needed to believe in the transformation they were doing and to learn about change in the course of a few relevant lessons. They have learned that if they continue to protect their people (not telling reality as it was, without “cosmetizing”, not showing the consequences of their actions and not letting them take responsibility even for mistakes) this behaviour did nothing but maintain their present state of balance, but if they had chosen to support them, listen to them, invite them to find solutions, appreciate their contribution, people would make the jump to a new way of functioning in the organization, acting with increased efficiency and responsibility.
