RM Tomasko in Coaching Leaders Leading Change LO11169 discussed his
perspective on OL as it relates to the old paradigm of trainer as trainer
and picked up on a few of my comments in a previous post of mine.
I, too have seen Big Money wasted on lots of change efforts and RM hits on
a key point when saying,
>"Every manager was run through these and top professionals hired to
>customize and deliver the content. And their net impact - at least in
>the ones I've been asked to examine - was minimal."
Methinks that's the problem -- Who owns the program? And who owns the
results? Whose budget? Being an observer / participant (aka Trainee) is a
whole different thing than being an owner / driver of this vehicle.
And there has been a LOT written over the past 50 years about leadership
that would certainly incorporate a sense of involvement as an important
factor in long-term success. It sure wasn't invented by me but, as I
mentioned in a post a long, long time ago, it took me a few years of
failure after high initial sucess to recognize that the critical factor
was something that I had _stopped_ transferring when I became an expert:
Ownership was the genuine key to others' success.
After all, why else would the car rental companies want to sell off their
vehicles after 6 months or so? There may be a few tax advantages and
accounting principles at work here, but there is also the factor of how
well the renters treat their vehicles. Me, I treat the cars I purchase a
bit better than I treat the ones I only lease.
So, these days when I find a supervisor with good results, I can also
generally observe he or she does a better than average job of transfering
ownership to the team they manage. There is often a longer-term focus on
employee development and the building of human capital.
This thread is about coaching. Maybe it's also about leadership. And
don't these both relate to improving human capability in the learning
organization?
The round wheels are already in the wagon.
--Scott Simmerman Performance Management Company 3 Old Oak Drive, Taylors SC 29687-6624 USA 74170.1061@compuserve.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>