Resistance to all new – unfamiliar – things is a normal phenomenon, because it is in human nature to be skeptical and incredulous towards unfamiliar and indefinite things that enter our environment and claim for the extension of our existing experience. Knowing the function of the human brain, it is clear that the primary brain ‘filter’ applies to security. So everything that is new and unknown automatically means ‘unsafe’.

The same happens with the strangers we meet. So we found it interesting to find out the emergence and development history of coaching.

History in brief

Etymologically, the word “coach” is a derivative of the kind of vehicle, which comes from the Hungarian word ‘kocsi’. This word means “vehicle” – a horse-drawn carriage (in English – coach). The word ‘kocsi’ comes from the name of the village in Hungary where it was first built. (Americans the word ‘coach’ also use to describe a type of bus (large vehicle) and cheapest places on board of aircraft.)

The concept of coaching with the meaning of “instructor” or “trainer” was first used around the 1830th in Oxford University jargon (slang) denoting the transportation of people from their current location to the desired location.

The coach Inta Santa in her blog describes this process figuratively: “The client desires to get somewhere, he boards the carriage and says to the coachman:” I want to get to the place ‘x’.” The coachman sits on the coach-box, hurries horses, and the trip begins. The client talks all the way with the coachman (the coachman is very curious and asks plenty of questions) and thus the way to desired destination becomes quicker and more enjoyable… in other words, the client achieves what he wanted.

In 1980-s, the term “coaching” meant a particular form of psychological training for athletes who were looking for excellence (in tennis and golf).
Timothy Galway – the author of the concept of inner game that formed the basis for coaching. First used the term ‘coaching’ in his book The Inner Game of Tennis (1974).

Inspired by the success of sportsmen, businessmen, politicians and public figures began to demand coaching as an effective method for achievement of high results.
John Whitmore – establisched business coaching, the author of the bestseller Coaching for Performance (1992).

Very soon, the effectiveness of coaching became known all around the world. This tool helped people grow, learn new skills and achieve great success in all areas of their life.
Thomas Leonard – the founder of the Coach University (1992), the International Coach Federation (ICF, 1994), International Association of Certified coach (IAC) and otherorganizations.

Today, coaching is successfully applied in personal life and career development, pedagogy, medicine, and other sectors. The base of its popularity forms the awareness that people are using just a very small part of their limitless possibilities. Business managers are starting to understand that the employees have a huge potential that must be opened and used effectively.
 
Coaching development

Historically, the development of coaching in the very beginning was affected by different research areas, such as personal development, adult education, psychology (clinical, organizational, sports, social and industrial), as well as a variety of organization and leadership theories and practices. Since mid-1990-s, coaching started to develop as an independent discipline. Various professional associations such as the International Coach Federation participated in the establishment of training standards.

PhD Vikki G. Brock in her dissertation on the history and emergence of coaching raises three important conclusions:

• Coaching sprang from several independent sources and birthplaces at the same time and spread through relationships;
• Coaching came into existence to fill an unmet need in an interactive, fluid world of rapid change and complexity;
• Coaching emerged in response to shifts in social, cultural, and economic conditions.

In USA and UK (in the countries of origin), coaching began to spread mostly thanks to economic development from 1975 to 1995. People had more free time and money they could invest in personal development and enhancment of their well-being. Other disciplines, such as organization development, leadership, management consulting, and productivity, developed rapidly too.

Self-help psychology has a great role in coaching development. It is now a multibillion-dollar industry. Some 2000 self-help books are published and countless workshops are organized each year. Anthony Robbins, Zig Zigler, Tom Peters, Bryan Tracy and others have influenced the development of coaching.

Also positive psychology has much in common historically with coaching. Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi state that the aim of positive psychology is to begin to catalyze a change in the focus of psychology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities. The numerous coaching practice examples show that the outcomes are not only practical – growth, success – but also emotional – positive emotions, joy and confidence in your abilities.

The linguistics as well goes hand in hand with coaching. James Flaherty references linguistics and language in coaching as follows: Humans swim in language as fish do in water. The horizons of what is possible for us are bound by the way we speak and listen to ourselves and others. The thinkers John Austin, John Searle and Fernando Flores studied how language coordinates action and brings about our social world. Thus coach provokes client’s inner dialog and brings it to the action.

Concerns with biology, society, culture, and language link anthropology to the coaching field.
The aim of coaching – an exploration of human potential – is connected with human development. Coaching also uses feedback, language, and the concepts of acceptance and change to support deep and lasting change.

However, the strongest link historically coaching has with business. Coaching has been viewed as a managerial activity, a leadership competency, a form of consulting, and an organization development intervention. Models for counseling and coaching conversations between superiors and subordinates showed up in management literature in 1978 in the US and UK with common characteristics being one-to-one conversations focused on performance improvement.

Early management coaching literature identifies coaching as a set of functions which icludes supervision, directed discussion and guided activity to learn to solve a problem or perform a task better. Only during the last 10 years, coaching has become an ongoing and committed partnership, a communication style and relationship, and a communication that transforms or stretches visions-values-abilities and is forward-looking.

Roger Evered and James Selman viewed coaching as the heart of management and defined it as the managerial activity of creating, by communication only, the climate, environment, and context that empowers individuals and teams to generate results.

Other books influencing coaching include Peter Drucker’s 1967 book The Effective Executive, whose principles were re-presented in Stephen Covey’s 1989 book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey published The 8th Habit (2004) focusing on finding your voice and inspiring others to find theirs, which is the tenet of coaching.

The rise of business coaching specific books has increased dramatically since 1995. Many authors described various models of business coaching – transforming coaching, management coaching, leadership coaching, team coaching and other.

Anthony and Michael Cavanagh state that the coaching industry has reached a key important point in its maturation in 2004. This maturation is being driven by at least three interrelated forces: (1) accumulated coaching experience; (2) the increasing entry of professionals into coaching from a wide variety of prior backgrounds; and (3) the increasing sophistication of management and Human Resource professionals.

Coaching also developed in parallel with the theories and practices of organization development. Like the organization is a set of systems, each person belongs to different systems and functions – a couple, family, work, community, nation, etc.

Everybody needs support in work and daily life and thus the aim of coaching coincides with the aim of mentoring where experienced businessman passes on his knowledge and experience and gives advice to young or prospective businessman (disciple).

Coaching and counsulting has common features as well. Although consulting and coaching nowadays are two completely different practices, the historical relationship persists through common features – the search for solutions based on relationships and mutual trust. Also, a common thing is the fact that neither one nor the other has been recognized as professions.

There are also opinions that the coach should combine in himself the role of consultant and be able to flexibly switch in accordance with requirements of the situation. But let’s leave this topic open for discussions, as we don’t know how and where to coaching is developing.

The word coach was first used in the modern sense of a sports coach in the 1980-s when referring specifically to one who trained a team of athletes to win a boat race. Historically, coaching in sport was not what we would now call coaching, but instead instruction. Timothy Gallwey’s inner game approach to sports was based on the concept that the opponent within is more formidable than the one outside.

One of the reasons that coaching is called ‘coaching’ and not management consulting or workplace psychotherapy is that hard-charging corporate types, especially men, are likely to be happy to have a coach, but unwilling to enter therapy. Most identify with sport and would love to see themselves as athletes, or at least, high performers. Counseling is associated with weakness and inadequacy, while coaching is identified with successful sports figures and winning teams.

We all know such terms as a career counseling and career development, established by Frank Parsons in the early 1990-s beginning to help people achieve job and career satisfaction. The lines often blur between coaching and career counseling. Coaching is generally more results oriented, less structured, and more guided by clients’ agenda. The common features are identifying strengths, skills, and interests with the intent to achieve desired results.

Nowadays, many managers (at different levels) hav recognized the potential of coaching and have began to use it in their daily work. This is a coaching style of management, whose main features are a leader’s ability to create results-driven, success-oriented and positive work environment in which all have common goals.

In soaching development, the impact of philosophy can not be ignored. Eastern, Western, and other philosophies form the basis for various models and approaches to coaching. The vast body of philosophical knowledge is an important foundation for evidence-based coaching. Philosophy is at the heart of many coaching issues, such as the nature of good corporate governance, business ethics, questions of self-identity and personal values.

Eastern philosophy is concerned with the big picture, sees knowledge as a state of mind and an approach to life, and believes that spirituality and intellect work together. Coaching principles reflect these ideas: listening to one’s heart, balance, taking action and stepping aside, acceptance and nonjudgment. For example, Hinduism provides an action orientation. Buddhism provides the concept of Karma (cosmos has inherent balance and justice) etc.

Western philosophy, in contract to Eastern philosophy, is traditionally scientific, makes sharp distinctions between things, and tries to understand reality to master and control it, while Eastern philosophy emphasizes oneness, harmony, and adapting to changes. Existential philosophical concepts of being, the unpredictability of things, individual freedom, subjectivity, individuality and context, choice, intensity, learning, and self-responsibility have influenced coaching. Coaching is directly influenced as well by analytic, existential, humanistic, phenomenological, and theological philosophy.

The theoretical foundations of health psychology underpin the wellness and leisure industry, and are a key area of coaching focus on work and life balance. This allowed the development of the life coaching direction, which is required as much as business or leadership coaching.

The growth of coaching has been influenced by communication skills development within the corporate world. The growth of NLP has been driven to an extent by this. There has been a large body of work done on listening skills, on speaking in a way that keeps people’s attention and on the way we process information. All of this has contributed to the development of the coaching world.

From creativity, coaching has adapted models for unique ideas or possibilities, reframing, shifting perspective in ways that may seem unconventional, being aware of what brings out the best in us, suspending boundaries and taking chances, synergy, balance of imagination and ideas, requiring steps to convert ideas to realities, and lateral thinking that provokes new patterns (promoted by Edward de Bono).

Finally, coaching has borrowed something from ecology too – the scientific study of the relations between living organisms and their environment, which indicates that all things and processes in the world are interconnected. Ecology in coaching means being aware of the responsibility for changes that impact man and his environment. There are are three very important and inter-related areas in each person’s life and business, which are related to the coaching process and require ecological (considerate) approach – it is the formulation of goals and objectives, decision making and change implementation. The easiest way to find it out is to answer the question of what’s the price of those goals or changes.

Coaching and its various approaches developed differently in different countries. As I already mentioned, USA and UK were a starting points from which coaching spread to other countries. Economic development and globalization (later) ‘took care’ of popularization of coaching all around the world. In Latvia and region of Eastern Europe / Russia, coaching appeared in 1991 thanks to Erickson College International (Canada) established by Marilyn Atkinson. It started to spread really rapidly after the first coaching conference in Moscow and St Petersburg in 2002.

However, coaching came in in Latvia even before Russia. Marilyn Atkinson visited Latvia in late 80s. It was the time when coaching has only started its development in the United States and wasn’t very common on this side of the ocean. Of course, it was just the beginning, and a real coaching development began only in the first years of this century.

One of the first publications in which coaching was mentioned as a business tool was the article in the newspaper “Dienas Bizness” in May 2004 called “The modern work education of a team”. More regular publications about coaching were observed starting 2008 / 2009. In that time the first professional organizations of coaches emerged (Latvian branch of International Coach Federation, etc.).

A brief summary at the end of development section – the coaching development stages:
1) 1970-1980-s – emergence and formation;
2) 1980 – 1990 – expansion and flourishing;
3) beginning of 1990-s – diferentiation;
4) mid and end of 1990-s – promotion;
5) since 2002 – depth professionalization.

We can largely agree with the conclusions made by Vikki Brock that coaching is an open process – the social movement that is spreading through communication and interaction.

Today, coaching has become a communication style and a way people interact with each other, a social phenomenon and a multidisciplinary field that is constantly changing. Referring to the study of the newspaper National Post (Canada) coaching is now one of the fastest growing industries in the world.

From a countless variety of definitions I would like to mark these two which quite accurately express the essence of coaching:

• John Whitmore (1992): Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
• Anthony Grant (2003): Coaching is a goal-directed, results-oriented, systematic process in which one person facilitates sustained change in another individual or group through fostering the self-directed learning and personal growth of the coachee.

 
In conclusion

For coaching to become a global phenomenon, the knowledge and skills applied in coaching process should become more accessible to everyone, not only for specialists.

It is difficult to predict development of coaching and opportunities that coaching would become a recognized profession; it is a dynamic process in social and multidimensional environment. Usually there are no common standards, definitions or borders of practice at the beginning of the emergence of new profession. Therefore it takes some time and there must establish variety of conditions until it could happen.

The study of TNS Latvia shows that there is a prevailing opinion among senior managers: “Coaching is a trend of XXI century” (66%). It is satisfiing that 65% of those who already practice coaching are confident that it “contributes to achievement of company’s business objectives.” Dissatisfinig fact is that 73% of those managers who have heard something about coaching, does not intend to use it as a tool in their work.
 
* – Vikki G. Brock, „Grounded theory of the roots and emergence of coaching” (2008), http://www.vikkibrock.com/

Sorry, the posts of the column “4 questions” are available only in Latvian.

Sorry, the posts of the column “4 questions” are available only in Latvian.

If we want to live as before, then we have to carry out the same activities as before. If we want to achieve something more and something new or better, then we have to change the way we act and seek solutions for change.

It is easier to implement changes if there is support from colleagues and staff. Various studies have shown that only 15% to 30% of employees are confident that they are completely engaged in their work. An old joke reveals a little bit promising figures:
- How much people are working in your company?
- About a half.

If seriously, what the employee involvement means?

The term ‘employee involvement’ is not an academic concept, so it should be read in its broadest context.

Employee involvement means that every employee is treated as a unique personality who can help the company to achieve its objectives. And only in the hands of the company’s management is how to make best use of each employee’s potential.

Employee involvement also means awareness that workers are those who are able to detect and eliminate different obstacles and problems that hinder the company to achieve its objectives. And for this to happen, employees are granted with appropriate tools and powers, as well as the system – a motivating environment – is created which supports and encourages continuous improvement and employee’s involvement.

Numerous examples in the world show that such organizations are able to more quickly respond to customer demands and market changes and adapt to them. The most vivid example is the Japanese business success on a global scale. In their business culture, staff integration with business objectives and operational processes has a very high value.

I wonder if employee involvement is the only true path to success.

A high level of employee involvement is not an end in itself; it is not even a guarantee of excellent sales results if, for example, your product or service is poor. Employee involvement is not regarded as a success cliché or a panacea. Employee involvement approach is effective only if it becomes a business philosophy and culture – ‘the way we do things around here’.

Employees who are fully involved in the development of the company and whose contribution and achievements are properly assessed, see their job and company from a totally different perspective. They feel like the company’s co-owners in the sense that they feel personal responsibility for its successes and failures.

Engaged employees believe that they really can influence success of the company or organization they are working for and are able to awaken changes and affect ongoing processes.

How does it relate to motivation?

Unmotivated employees devote their time to work, but not their effort and passion. Truly engaged employee feels a close relationship with what he/she does; this work is interesting and exciting to him/her, it inspires him/her, and he/she is ready to do more than it is provided in his/her contract.

Probably every one of you has thought about what is important to your employees.

There are three processes that are important to every employee in the company: communication, involvement and development (growth). This is illustrated by one example. Once, a technician of General Electric, before retirement, said to his manager the following: “25 years you used my hands, but for the same money you could also use my head.”

If a manager actively communicates with employees and openly provides information about a company’s performance, allowing employees to participate in the setting up of common goals, to track its accomplishment and to present suggestions for performance improvements, the result is awareness that “my work is important”.

Although it may sound strange, the most important communication skill is listening. Listening (not hearing) is a powerful employee involvement tool. An employee who is not heard does not want to get involved as he/she concludes that his/her opinion is not important to company. Active and open communication, including sharing of information, creates insight, while desire to listen creates desire to share.

The first step is recognition and regular feedback: Love me, hate me, but just do not ignore me!

In large organizations, very much depends on each manager – whether he/she is willing and able to involve their department team in work planning and is able to pass this information to the next level of management.

Do you know how much does an employee with a low level of involvement cost your business?

International experience shows that such people are mostly unproductive and leave companies on average within next 12 months. It means loss for a company. However, there is a greater threat is if such people remain in company and continue their low efficiency activities.

Involvement of employees do not have the desired effect if the employees are doing just what they are told to do, and if they have to follow the company’s values which mean nothing to them. Employee involvement has value if employees are given the opportunity to express themselves and act in accordance with their own values which coincide or consistent with company values.

There is a great example: Brazilian entrepreneur Ricardo Semler and his company (group) Semco. He has created a truly democratic working environment where there is absolute mutual respect and trust, where employees set their own goals, budget, salary, work schedule and choose their own leaders, where everyone can get acquainted with the company’s financial data and receive growth dividends and so on. This experience demonstrates that the true leaders in every organization are employees.

What does the theory say?

A research of Fortune 1000 companies made by the management professor Edward Lawler from University of Southern California (USA) shows that employee involvement strategy directly affects the company’s financial performance and the return on investment is an average of 19.1%, which is much higher compared to other business strategies (such as Total Quality Management etc.).

Employee involvement does not necessarily mean waiving the existing operational framework. Most probably, many of the existing principles of the company are already in place and you simply need to put the right emphasis and priorities.

Each company as well as every person is unique. Therefore, there is no one ‘most adequate’ or ‘the best’ strategy of employee involvement. Either way, this process should occur naturally and according to the business owner/company values.

You don’t have to be a champion to start, but you have to start to become a champion!

Our experience shows that the Open Space method is a very good tool to start. More about it read in one of the next blog entries.
 

 
If I have a problem with someone, I will talk to him in person.

If someone has a problem with me, I want him to talk to me in person and I’ll try to be open to him.

If someone has a problem with me, but he goes to you, send him to me. (I will do the same.)

If anyone doubts to come to me, say, “Let’s go together, he certainly will listen to us.” (I will do the same.)

Be careful how you explain my actions or what I say – I’d rather want to do it myself. (I will be careful how I explain your words and actions.)

If it is confidential, I will not say it to anyone (unless it doesn’t harm anyone).

I will not pay attention to anonymous letters or notes. Information should be “signed”, so that it can be checked if necessary.

I will not manipulate with other people and will not let to do it with myself.

If I have any doubt, I will express my concern or question.

I will always express myself as precisely and plain as possible.

I am aware that the answer I get depends on the question.
 

(There is a video of this interview at the end of the text.)
 

 
- What does Coaching Style Management mean in the 21st century?

A coaching style management is very critical part of leadership in large scale organizations today. What it means is, first of all, that people interact with their direct report in such a way that meaningful ongoing, unfolding execution takes place. That’s pretty important because execution makes all the difference in whether or not a corporation succeeds. Whether the employees are implementing well depends on their relationship with the person who they directly report to. And if that person is able to, first, support them in getting inspired.

Secondly, assistance as they build the stages of a difficult plan, and that may mean conversations from time to time, but it means that the manager is aware of where it’s difficult, where it’s working, and where the manager has the ability to assist that person to build plans, discover what needs to be done to take the step in difficult situations and also to self-evaluate, to really build a self-understanding whether the plan is really working or not.

Now, that style of management is critical in organizations today because with it employees stay inspired, they stay with the company, they love to come to work, they experience that what they’re doing makes the difference, they continue to build their leadership potential, and the company moves ahead. Without it, with a level of competition in a world today people will easily be bought off by head-hunters; they’ll easily go for a different salary because they won’t have a level of meaningful interaction that has them stay connected to a job.

- How easy it is to train managers in that type of leadership?

When the manager understands how to assist to team to have a meaningful dialogue, to put together plans, they let go of their need to control every step of the way. They begin to make a difference between those people who need training, those people who are committed, those people they can coach, and those who can actually build the joint plan and deploy it well.

That takes a huge burden off the manager. The manager then becomes someone who is working through the employees, working with the employees, working in such a way that the employees get the real support they need.

- How coaching style management overcomes silos and creates integration and cohesion?

It simply means that people protect themselves from giving out too much information in case that it’s used against them. And they run their little fortress their own way. Now, that means that awful lot of information gets missed through the whole organization. The only way organization works well if there’s a lot of information flow between all the people who are building results together.

Fundamentally, we want to have the kind of company where people don’t even need their offices; they can move from a meeting to meeting, they can bring their offices with them on their computers, they can settle in and work with one group of people or another group of people, they can sometimes manage and sometimes be on a team. In other words, the need to have rigid walls around them becomes a thing of the past.

- How Solution Focused Coaching at workplace is transforming the way people think about their work and how they value it?

I have worked with about 3 companies that discussed the ROAD warriors that mean Retired On Active Duties. And these are people who simply become, if you want to call it, stones in the path of the stream. They’re doing their job but just barely. And they are not really contributing in the critical areas where the company needs to move up level of team relationships, discover next level of integration of styles and skills – all of things that allow a company to compete in a world.

So, yes, this is one of the only ways we can work with people who have become passive in the job. Usually they become disappointed at some earlier stages of their work; they’ve decided, well, I’ll do just for the money. “I’m not really part of things around here, I’ll just coming in; my 95 is what I give.” And that’s very disappointing. Think about it! We spend 60% of our life at work. If that time is just used to do some basic pen-pushing and filling in correct forms or thinking through the basic plans, it wastes people’s lives! They have no fun at their job.

We’ve got to have fun at our work – 60% of our life is a lot of our life. So, yes, solution focused coaching, workplace coaching is transforming the way people think about their work and the way they value their work and rightfully so, it’s a long time coming that makes a big difference in the organizations which are bringing solution focused coaching in today and watching these changes happen. And I want to tell you – THEY ARE WONDERFUL!

- How can Coaching Leadership go beyond fear and survival mode in the current period of economic instability?

It’s simply about people not knowing that they can swing out and express themselves creatively. And so, they focus more on protecting themselves and their job than they do about doing the job. To do a job well requires that we need to really, really know what we are aiming for.

Fear comes from lack of leadership. A great manager versed in solution focused coaching methods assists his team to relax, assists his team to move out of a survival mode and feel safe. A good coach knows a lot of ways to make people feel safe. They know their job is on a line, they know their life is fine, that they’re OK, they’re being supported. And they feel freedom move ahead in to the kind of thinking that really gets results for the company.

- How to properly install a coaching culture in an organization – what level of management should be involved first?

I have been involved in about five major corporate coaching deployment episodes where a large company has moved to install a coaching style management. In one company we started at HR level and that was very effective. The HR department built a plan; they started, after The Art and Science of Coaching, the 60-dy program. The whole team started coaching, upper level leaders and some of the managers at different levels, to work with their own teams. And gradually, bringing in a variety of other programs from Erickson, especially the team programs, a coaching style of management is moved through a company.

And there was another corporation, a big one (80 000 people). We started right below the vice-presidents of the company. That also worked, but it worked in a different way. It allowed the top leadership to, domino style, start training managerial coaching with the people below them using a lot of the coaching tools and coaching the leaders who reported to them. Both worked and each was an effective method. In one case we started lower than that, in a couple of speciality areas of a company that did not work. It made the difference in that company’s area but wasn’t moved throughout the corporation.

- What qualities are required for highly effective leadership at this stage of the 21st century?

I perhaps can briefly mention some of them. Leadership and coaching go hand in hand. So, we train strong coaches and we’re also developing leaders. And that’s the reason the coaching is so valuable in companies because leaders need to support the integrity of the company. That means they need to support the vision of the company and connect it with the values and be able to talk that at every level. They need to speak for the heart of the company and the mind of the company in the aims and goals of the company to the people around them, and to keep people inspire about the work they do. So, that’s number one.

Number two. A leader needs to have a strategic focus. He constantly needs to know where the bottom line is and keep the company’s integrity with that bottom line organized around the future goals. He or she needs to have great strategies for bringing in new initiatives, for supporting new initiatives, and noticing when it’s time to find the next blue ocean strategy if you like to move things forward.

In other words, a great leader needs to be a great possibility thinker. Truly! They can’t just follow the same old, same old, because even if it was a great strategy that worked ones, times are changing far too fast for that. So, we need to be able to think possibilities and we need to be able to think opportunities.

Thirdly, a great leader needs to know how to prioritize. They need to be able to prioritize for themselves, also for those people around them who are attempting to organize around those priorities. And that’s no small thing because the goals we have are getting thicker and faster all the time. There’s so much information coming at us from so many directions. And to find the difference that makes the difference and focus on that and to keep the company focused requires that leader’s attention.

Fourthly, a leader needs to think people. He needs to know the ways in which people form habits, the ways in which those habits are talents, the ways in which each person is different and can do a different kinds of work and to support those talents effectively, and to celebrate people in their diversity. To really seek diversity is something of a great value.

A great leader in this world today in the 21st century needs to think cultures because we always work internationally except in some very small companies. We need to be able to talk to people from different countries, understand the difference in how to inspire our team’s products and services with different people, and to enjoy different people from different cultures so that our products and services can spread. I know, in China, they need the leaders as huge and they really need that ability to go from vision all the way down the ladder through the planning stages and deployment stages to on-the-ground thinking, to link all of these together into effective strategic building of corporate intelligence.

- How does Solution Focused Coaching unlock leadership potential?

I assess leaders to have an alignment at all times with their vision and values. So, as they’re on-the-ground assisting a group to execute a plan or as they’re talking to a group of people about how to build the next step in something that’s difficult and they’re still trying to unfold it they’re constantly accessing a visionary aim and the values that support that.
 
 

An interview with Dr Marilyn Atkinson from Erickson College on Vimeo.

The lifecycle of a company and its development phase correlations have been investigated by several researchers. A popular American economist Ichak Adizes has developed a theory of corporate lifecycles. The theory is based on development stages of any living organism – it is born, grows, ages and dies.

In theory, everything looks simplified and understandable but in reality, in each of development phases, companies have to overcome very different – larger and smaller – challenges. Although a lifecycle consists of many development steps or stages we offer to look at companies and their key challenges through a prism of the “Z-model”.

The conventional author of the model is a process management expert Andris Balodis who has collected a variety of visions and incorporated them into one model. The model is based on different theories, including Adizes’ theory of companies’ lifecycle. Why Andris has named it Z-model – you will find it out by getting to know the model.

Efficiency and productivity are the main challenges of every company in two time categories – short and long term. Graphically it can be represented as follows:
 

 
The ‘task’ included in the 1st quadrant may seem obvious, since everyone aims to create a product or service which is appreciated by customers. However, the key criterion in this quadrant is to create a product or service which makes customers return again and again. It is crucial factor for most businesses so that they could exist.

The task of the 2nd quadrant – to create a system – does not mean to load you with extra amount of work by implementing complex operations and process analysis and making descriptions. On the contrary, to create a system means to quit ‘needless’ operations that have no added value in order to save time, avoid errors and defects in production or communication, and make the daily work simple, easy and understandable to increase sales and profit.

3rd quadrant. Even if your product is unique and irreplaceable, it is only until competitors come up with even better solutions. Therefore, the third quadrant predicts that, in the name of future stability, you have to create new, innovative products or services – the potential income generators in the future.

4th quadrant. Companies exist in an environment that is constantly changing. No system, no matter how perfect it is, can exist forever. Those who are able to adapt to changes most quickly are still able to maintain a high working efficiency. Jack Welch (the former CEO of General Electric) once said: “If the rate of change inside an organization is less than the rate of change outside… their end is in sight.”

The correlations and the ‘transcript’ of the Z-model name can be seen in this picture:
 

 
The key principles that apply to this model:

• The transition from one quadrant to the next is possible only successively (as shown in the picture).
• Successful organization’s existence and development cannot do without one of these four quadrants.
• An organization at the same time can be in only one quadrant; it is not worth it to create a system if there is no product created which makes customers return again and again. The sigh for moving to second quadrant is a growing number of customers who return and, as a result, you have motivation and ability to meet the demands in high-quality and with minimal resource usage.

 
Why you cannot jump directly from first to the third quadrant? The third quadrant, in essence, represents R & D function that requires financial resources. This money should be earned and it is not possible to do this (in long term) if you are working only in the first quadrant. Moreover, an innovation can become a source of long-term success in an environment with efficient processes and systems.

What happens if a company ignores the third quadrant – innovation? In a competitive environment, sooner or later, another company enters the market with a new, innovative product or service. It’s is only a matter of time.
 
The questions you can ask to yourself as a manager:

• To which quadrant is given the greatest attention in my company?
• To which quadrant should be given the greatest attention in my company?
• What are the major challenges working in a particular quadrant?

 
It should be noted that these quadrants can be attributed both to the organization as a whole and to particular departments, product or service groups, or business branches.
 
The highest stage of development
 
According to Adizes theory, a “new” organization is flexible and capable of relatively simple change, but its behavior due to lack of control is unpredictable. By contrast, behavior an “old” organization is controllable, but it is not anymore so flexible and able to change and adapt. At that point, the organization is able to be both flexible and controllable; it no longer fits in any of these groups. In other words, the organization is in the superior or the highest stage of its development.

Unlike living organisms, which development cycle (born, grow, age and die) is inevitable, companies are able to achieve this ultimate or the highest degree and stay in it by using different methods and taking various decisions and actions.

Ichack Adizes argues that the greatest challenges for organizations are raised particularly by direct transition from one development stage to the next; the companies either learn to overcome problems and move forward, or get “infected” with an unusual illness that prevents the further development and which cannot be resolved without outside professional intervention.

According to our experience, many entrepreneurs confirm that, in a context of the Z-model, the second and third quadrants have the most importance in their business. However, many businessmen manage to succeed, but only part of them manages to keep success for a long time.
 
Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.
/ Tom Peters /
 
That’s why many entrepreneurs believe that now is the time to create and build business processes and systems that could provide an environment for innovation and long-term success.

Good luck!
 

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