One day, Phil LeNir called Henry Mintzberg, his stepfather. "I have a problem," he said. "My engineers have become managers—we outsourced their work to Eastern Europe-and now they have to manage the programmers from a distance. They are struggling. What should I do? And, by the way, I have no budget!"
Henry had just completed a book called Managers not MBAs, which describes the novel management development programs he had been working on with colleagues for almost ten years. He suggested that Phil get his managers together periodically, in a casual setting, to share their concerns and experiences.
Phil took this up with a vengeance! He organized them to meet at lunch every week for an hour and a quarter. Meanwhile, he scoured all the documents and background materials of the programs Henry had been developing with his colleagues (see www.impm.org, www.alp-impm.com, also www.imhl.ca), to find themes suitable for each session.
The activity spread. Phil created a second group of peer managers at his office site, and a third, virtual group of peer managers at other sites who met by telephone. It proved so natural, that Phil, Henry, and Phil's mother and Henry's wife Sasha, who had created a group of her own at the telecommunications company in Prague where she worked as an HR director, decided to make it available to managers in other companies all over the world. They also invited Jonathan Gosling, who had worked with Henry on these various programs, to join this initiative. CoachingOurselves.com was born in 2006.
CoachingOurselves draws especially on the innovations of the International Masters Program in Practicing Management, and the Managerial Mindsets which were developed by Henry, Jonathan, and their colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, and Japan. In the IMPM, managers learn by sharing their own managerial experiences with like-minded colleagues from around the world.
CoachingOurselves carries these ideas straight into the workplace in a format suitable for developing management skills. It is, in a sense, the natural culmination of the IMPM philosophy, since the managers do this on their own, without need for classrooms or professors. This framework can be woven into the culture of any organization, to become an essential part of its development, helping it achieve management excellence and a learning organization.
