Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
The key ingredient to success? Passion.
Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.
Technovate in the Era of Industry 4.0
Is Industry 4.0 is the next step of human evolution human civilization? Dr. Jorge Calvo seems to think so. Join him to learn how the past can help you set goals for an exciting future of digital innovation.
What is possible for an organization when everyone’s voice is heard and respected? For over 20 years, I have been on a personal quest to guide companies to this ideal. The best method I have found is through the creation of a systemic coaching culture. Organizational coaching cultures are a competitive advantage. These organizations enjoy high performance, they attract the right talent, and have high levels of engagement. People learn and grow together, united in a shared purpose. In the end, everyone, including clients, benefits.
What is a coaching culture?
A coaching culture is an organization where the interactions between employees provoke the best and more creative problem-solving thinking. Instead of a top-down command and control style of leadership, a coaching culture honors the inherent greatness within each person. It provides a framework of communication that reinforces the values of the organization.
It empowers individuals and creates synergistic relationships among employees and teams. Collaborations are more efficient as people create something greater than what could be accomplished alone. New research shows that organizations should think of themselves as a network of dynamic ecosystems or a web of relationships. The health of those relationships is the health of the company.
In a coaching culture, employees are highly engaged and excited to go to work due to the following benefits:
- The opportunity to take on challenges bigger than themselves for both their own development, in alignment with the company’s purpose
- The promise that everyone’s ideas are considered when making decisions
- The ability to learn together and work towards a shared vision
Constructive and appreciative feedback is also part of the coaching culture’s fabric. Leaders ask open-ended questions, listen actively, and make follow-up inquiries. They put principles before policy and are willing to fail with the understanding that failures are opportunities to learn.
A coaching culture can help organizations transition leadership principles from static to dynamic or from the power-over paradigm to the power-with paradigm. As the world becomes more and more interconnected and chaotic, this transition is becoming mandatory.
Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
The key ingredient to success? Passion.
Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.
The power-over paradigm
In the power-over paradigm, “leader” is a title you earn. The man at the top, and it was usually a man, was expected to have the answers. He would dictate the direction, and employees were paid to follow, or else fear losing their jobs.
Goals, as well as the steps to achieve them, were identified from the top. These were further broken down into small steps, and then into even smaller action-oriented goals.
The power-over paradigm gave rise to a command-and-control style of leadership. It comes from a mechanistic, reductionistic world-view attributed to Isaac Newton. This view perceives the world from the outside and breaks it into smaller parts. Tasks and needs are simple, static, and separate. A basic set of rules and starting states make it possible to accurately predict the future to maintain the status quo.
In the past, isolating the rules of an organization into a small set of simple linear rules, such as an automatic promotion after ten years in the company, helped to simplify things. However, this system doesn’t honor the dynamics of the market nor the complex dynamics inherent when you bring people together to work towards a common goal. In these complex times, we need a worldview that is more adaptable and holistic.
The power-with paradigm
The new worldview follows the power-with paradigm, in which leadership isn’t a privilege reserved for those at the top. Instead, it views leadership as a quality found in all. Everyone has the potential to participate in leadership based on will and capabilities. Leadership is expressed through one’s courage to be authentic and by aligning words with actions.
Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science, makes a clear case for the rise of the power-with paradigm: “Why would we stay locked in our belief that there is one right way to do something, or one correct interpretation [of] a situation, when the universe demands diversity and thrives on a plurality of meaning?”
A coaching culture embraces the power-with paradigm and empowers employees to adapt to changing times.
How dangerous is staying the course?
Considering the speed of business today, the competitive global marketplace, and the drive towards faster innovation, companies that do not adopt a coaching culture risk:
Technovate in the Era of Industry 4.0
Is Industry 4.0 is the next step of human evolution human civilization? Dr. Jorge Calvo seems to think so. Join him to learn how the past can help you set goals for an exciting future of digital innovation.
- A disengaged workforce
- Limited ideas and knowledge across all levels of the workforce
- Loss of key people due to lack of challenges or professional development opportunities
- Failure to meet strategic goals
- Too much focus on what could go wrong, rather than what is possible.
Despite these risks, one of the common concerns of organizations resisting a culture of coaching is the doubt that everyone has the potential for leadership.
Can anyone really be a leader?
In a coaching culture, leadership is considered a quality that everyone possesses inherently, rather than a privilege reserved for those at the top. Leaders are tasked with fostering accelerated learning to help employees develop emotional intelligence and become adept at human dynamics.
Coaching cultures use communication reminders that distill organizational culture and values into a digestible and easily referenced format. Internally and externally, these create transparency for all stakeholders.
The good news is that adapting a coaching culture is not difficult. It takes time and dedication, but perseverance will pay dividends in the long run.
4 Fundamentals for Building a Coaching Culture
To create a coaching culture, your company should have several things in place.
- A clear purpose (beyond turning a profit), a clear vision, and clear values—everyone must understand your unique value proposition.
- Honest and direct communication habits—these must be demonstrated staff-to-staff and staff-to-stakeholder.
- An authentic brand message—this should be congruent with the culture so that authenticity is expressed inside the organization and externally with its stakeholders.
- Trust—this, too, must be present throughout the organization and nurtured by its values and principles.
Companies that support a culture of coaching realize that their greatest assets are their people. Getting the “right people on the bus” is paramount. From there, a coaching culture with a clear purpose and goals will help you achieve well-organized action and the best positioning in a quickly changing business landscape.
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