Basic Management

Welcome to CoachingOurselves! You will be getting together on a
regular basis for 90 minutes to learn about management, while
developing yourselves, each other, and your organization.
This topic explains CoachingOurselves through the lens of five
“mindsets” basic to the practice of management. We call them
Reflection, about managing self; Collaboration, about managing
relationships; Analysis, about managing organizations; Worldliness,
about managing context; and Action, about managing change.

Understanding how your organization functions can seem overwhelming; where to start? In this session, we start with four common forms of organizations and investigate their strengths, weaknesses, and implications. You will come to a better appreciation of your organization and others, seeing them as the interplay of specific forms and forces.

We understand business and government well enough – the private and public sectors. But how much do we really know about the social sector, made up of cooperatives and so-called NGOs and Not-for-Profits, etc.? Do we realize how vast this sector is?

This topic helps inform managers of business and government about this important sector with which they must work. It can also be a good early topic for those organizations from the social sector itself.

The pressures of managing are constant, not temporary: in other words, pressure in this job is business as usual.

This topic looks at the popular myth of the manager as fully in control and replaces it with some of the facts about the characteristics of managing: the hectic pace, the fragmented work, the orientation to action. How is anyone supposed to think, let alone think ahead, amidst all this?

Managers generally spend as much time “managing on the edges” – in other words out of their unit, relating to the rest of the organization and to the outside world – as they do inside their unit. Here we consider various roles related to this important work, with the concentration on “buffering”: how to manage the delicate balance of outside forces coming into the unit.

Leadership is an important aspect of managing. But what does this mean in your day-to-day work? As you will see, leadership is a complex interplay of factors which requires balance.

This session explores the three key factors which contribute to leadership: qualities, behaviors and context.

How often do you wonder not just about what happened, but why it happened and how it differs from other happenings?

Today’s session introduces the importance of reflection in managerial work.

Reflection is about getting the meaning from everyday experiences where managers may too easily allow ‘doing’ to drive out ‘thinking’; and ‘thinking’ might miss out on the clues provided by feelings and intuition. By bringing conscious awareness into the moment, the result will be more informed action.