CoachingOurselves

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, which was 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 all managers. 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 on its way to the learning organization.

The CoachingOurselves founders:

	Phil LeNir developed CoachingOurselves, following the new approach to management education used in the International Masters in Practicing Management. He experimented with delivery formats for the content he used, and began facilitating management learning sessions with his managers and later with peer groups. Phil is Executive Director for CoachingOurselves, working to bring it to organizations worldwide.
	Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Canada, is an internationally renowned speaker and author on organization and management. He has been described by Tom Peters as "perhaps the world's premier management thinker." Henry has published 140 articles and thirteen books, including Managers not MBAs, from which CoachingOurselves has sprung, and Strategy Safari.
	Sasha Sadilova has over 20 years of experience in managing and developing managers in R&D, Marketing, HR, and Services in the telecom industry in Canada and Europe. Following Phil's lead, Sasha established a CoachingOurselves group in HR in a mobile operator in Prague.
	Jonathan Gosling is Director of the Centre for Leadership Studies, and Head of Executive Education in the School of Business and Economics, at the University of Exeter. Jonathan's research focuses on leadership and ethics in current strategic change, and on contemporary innovations in leadership development. A current research program, Virtual Mindsets, investigates how top managers provide leadership in the new economy. His most recent articles are on leadership education.