In 2003, I was a senior director of engineering at a high tech firm that was struggling to deal with multiple rounds of layoffs and business changes due to the dot.com crash. My management team and I were spending too much of our energy trying not to “get noticed,” because if we were, we feared we might be the next to go.
Necessity Leads to Innovation
I eventually came to the conclusion that I needed to do something. Just coming to work and trying not to get laid-off wasn’t doing anyone any good. I felt the need for some sort of management and leadership development, but HR was not going to be able to help. Because I figured we would all lose our jobs anyhow, there was little risk to experimenting with something completely different.
I turned to local business school professor, Henry Mintzberg from McGill University, renowned for his innovative pedagogy in management education. The traditional approach within MBA programs is the case study method, and Mintzberg is very critical of its effectiveness in developing managers and leaders. He had been establishing MBA type programs in universities around the world based on his approach of “natural reflection in light of conceptual ideas.”
I had no budget and little time, so I couldn’t just go to one of his programs. Instead, I was forced to innovate. I decided to start running my own weekly 90-minute “management learning” meetings, using his reflective learning approach and some of the content the professors in his programs had developed. My team thought I had lost my mind when I told them what we were going to do, but I was their boss, so they had no choice but to show up to their “learning meetings.”
Impact Was Immediate
We started to make significant management decisions and take action as a direct result of our meetings. What’s more, after several sessions, our relationships had evolved to a completely different level of trust and honesty. This fed the reflective dialogue, which rapidly evolved into peer coaching.
We were helping each other come to conclusions about what to do, how to appreciate what others were doing, and what needed to change to increase the impact of our individual contributions and collective efforts. To make a long story short, we succeeded in changing existing business processes, our individual behaviours and more.
I eventually became an entrepreneur with Professor Mintzberg, co-founding CoachingOurselves. We have spread our peer coaching program to numerous countries in eight languages, guided by a catalogue of 80 modules developed by leading management and business thinkers.
Our Lessons Learned
Here are three key lessons that will bring important elements of peer coaching into any leadership and management development solution.
Follow Mintzberg’s 50-50 rule.A trainer/facilitator should never talk more than 50 percent of the time, and this includes answering questions. Indeed, the moment the trainer stops talking is when the learning really starts for management and leadership development. The 50-50 Rule is the first step towards creating seminars and workshops in which the participants truly dialogue with each other. And make sure people talk about their experiences rather than the content. Lhis is the essence of peer-coaching.
Leadership development should always be a small group activity, never an individual activity. Your organization needs people to become better at managing and leading. This is very different than learning about managing and leading. When we design programs for individuals, we typically end up teaching about management and leadership. Learning to be a manager and leader is fundamentally a social and reflective process—essentially about joining a community of practice under the guise of a program. Designing solutions for small groups of learners fosters a notion of “learning to be.”
Keep it short. Management or leadership development sessions should never be longer than two hours per “event.” The typical approach of taking people out of work annually for one or two days is a very costly way to make a small impact. Recent neuroscience confirms what you probably realized after cramming for a university exam in one sitting: long-term recall is far better when you learn over several sittings. So split up the eight or 15 or so hours you would spend in an annual leadership program into a series of 90-minute sessions. For the same amount of time, the difference in your end result will be exponential.
Bottom line: Use these basic rules of thumb to introduce important elements of peer coaching into the design and delivery of your management and leadership programs, while reducing costs and increasing impact. Above all, rely on creativity, experimentation, and good judgment to learn for yourself – the biggest risk we take as L&D professionals is to stop learning ourselves!
