SOME QUESTIONS WITH WHICH THE ONTOLOGICAL COACHING CONSULTANT CHALLENGES THE ORGANIZATIONAL PLOT
- Can we lead others without learning to lead ourselves? In your organization, is there leadership or just "good planners"? How to translate personal leadership into team and organizational leadership aimed at a genuine transformation of daily practices? What makes Do people motivate themselves with the policies proposed or suggested by management? Do you consider that leadership can be learned? Do you know how to distinguish the states of mind that prevail in the different areas of an organization? And if you do, do you know an approach to intervene in them? Do the people who work with you have the ability to talk about what matters to them? What conversations do they have? Which do not have? Which ones would you like to have? In the organization where you participate,Do people feel like they are part of a "team" or is it "a group that does things the best they can?" Where do people learn to commit to joint results?
ADDRESSING THESE CHALLENGES BY FOCUSING ON THE COLLECTIVE LEARNER
Consultants in Ontological Coaching stop to observe the particular ways in which people, teams, organizations and communities pose what they do.
We show in the Pre - TELF the importance of taking charge, when speaking, of the concerns of our interlocutors and we believe that the questions presented we observe that point to the world of most common concerns today in people linked to the organizational world.
These questions do not have to do with "fashion themes" or "management tools" only, but are intended to focus on the collective learner that the teams, organizations and / or communities are being.
If we stop to observe the history of the world that they told us, we will find that the great changes were led by people who took charge of the interests of communities even questioning the basic foundations of common sense in force at the time.
As William James pointed out, A new idea is considered ridiculous and is later dismissed as trivial until it finally becomes what everyone knows…
Examples of these people are Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Galileo Galilei, John F. Kennedy, Martin L. King, WEDeming, and others.
Looking at the complexity we are experiencing, we believe that one of the challenges facing those responsible for collective management (organizations and communities) is that they cannot continue to be mere managers…
Today, in our view, most organizations have an excess of management and a lack of leadership.
In this sense, management is concerned with providing order and coherence in essential dimensions such as product quality and profitability, planning and preparing budgets, organizing and staffing, and controlling and solving problems.
Leadership is concerned with change, determining direction through a vision of the future, and aligning, motivating, and inspiring staff in that direction.
In other words: the function of management is to do what is due and do it well. The leadership role is to determine what corresponds.
We believe that leadership is not necessarily better than management, but that they are simply different and complementary systems of action.
The approach that we propose in the Ontological Coaching training programs is intended to enable and encourage the professionals who are being trained, the development of skills to create contexts that make it possible to integrate management and leadership.
It would be naive to think that organizations that have very good leadership without adequate management control will survive, as well as those that have meticulous planning that is efficiently directed towards the precipice…
A REVIEW OF WHAT WE UNDERSTAND BY LEADERSHIP
The concern for leadership is not of today. Since time immemorial, many human beings have asked ourselves how to make others align and take our vision as their own?
However, in this last century and in the context of common sense in force in the business world, this question has been derived into another: how do we get others to do what we want?
This displacement was not and is not innocent. Having placed ourselves as a community in the last way of asking the question and understanding leadership caused us confusion between "Leadership", "Good Planners", "Intuitive for Business", "Opportunity Exploiters", "Ideal for generating money".
Therefore, it is essential to understand the importance of returning to the first question that includes key elements that the second question overlooks:
I. propose a vision to share
II. align interests of people, teams and organizations with that vision so that they make them their own.
Perhaps in a “theoretical” way many people would find it reasonable and even desirable that this should be so. However, the usual report that we receive in our experience conversing with people is that they judge "very difficult to put it into practice." There arises the importance of generating contexts to return to the initial question and move from a culture of imposition and obedience to one of choice.
From the Ontological Coaching Consultancy we postulate that leadership does not arise from pressure but from choice.
We want to focus this reflection on that "Leadership" ceases to be an abstract concept to become a challenge of "THE USUAL WAY OF DOING THINGS IN AN ORGANIZATION".
We call that HABITUAL WAY OF DOING THINGS WITHIN AN ORGANIZATION, ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE, which is frequently invisible to its members. It is like water for fish. They don't see it until someone makes it out of the water. This is one of the key contributions that the Ontological Coaching Consultancy can make to Leadership: proposing changes in context from which to see differently and from where previously unthinkable possibilities arise.
For such a shift to occur ecologically for the company and its members, we need a new interpretation of what “Leadership” means, not only to produce short-term “cosmetic” results, but to intervene in THE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE.
We are not against producing short-term results. In fact they are very important. However, we want to emphasize that sometimes the fastest is not the most appropriate.
Untimely or manipulative decisions throughout generate counterproductive results that are not included in the balance sheets such as apathy, fear, mistrust, resentment, etc. but that everyone recognizes their entity.
Thus, there is an urgent need to create the contexts to return to the original leadership distinction, which is not a matter of taking it for fashion but rather implies an awareness of the priorities, values and motivations of the people, teams and organizations to in order to contribute in guiding them around powerful visions of the future individually and collectively.
History provides a good example of the power of visioning: a study was done
Regarding what was it that characterized the people who survived the Nazi concentration camps? The response was categorical: "They had something important to do in the future when they came out."
Ontological Coaching Consultants provide contexts and competencies to facilitate people, teams, organizations and communities to build the future.
An expression of this challenge was made by Nelson Mandela when in his Assumption speech as President of South Africa after having spent 27 (twenty-seven) years imprisoned with the vision of abolishing Apartheid he said the following:
“Our deepest fear is not that of being inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that of being powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that scares us the most. We ask ourselves:
Who am I to be brilliant, extraordinarily talented, magnificent?
Actually, who are you not to be?
We observe a close relationship between Leadership and Ontological Coaching Consulting and between Leader of his own life and Ontological Coaching Consultant.
In our proposal, a deep reflection has been and continues to be a north in terms of the coherence of the professional who raises these issues with what that same person does outside the professional field.
If we do not support our MAKING ONTOLOGICAL COACHING CONSULTING with our BEING IN EVERYDAY LIFE we will not be able to sustain our H ACER ONTOLOGICAL COACHING CONSULTING for long.
If we do not support our BEING CONSULTANTS IN ONTOLOGICAL COACHING with our DOING IN EVERYDAY LIFE, we cannot sustain our BEING CONSULTANTS IN ONTOLOGICAL COACHING for long…
Therefore the challenge of COHERENCE between BEING AND DOING in our personal and professional life is a leadership move in itself.
SOME “SACRED COWS” THAT WE REVIEW FROM THE ONTOLOGICAL COACHING CONSULTANCY
The emerging Consultancy that we are showing and developing focuses on reviewing issues that have been and continue to be considered as "sacred cows" or "untouchable" from which the current common sense within organizations is being built (along with other criteria).
Some of these are:
- The central authority figure The predominant emotionality The way in which human beings coordinate actions and communicate to achieve results.
We agree with Echeverría that most organizations in Latin America continue to maintain the traditional management pattern based on the authority figure of the "foreman" who is someone who basically orders, controls, reviews and punishes for a series of tasks within the company.
This way of making others align and organize around achieving a goal, it made sense when the work was only manual and therefore there was a person (the foreman) who always knew more than his employees (as at the time of the artisans).
Today this approach, focused on command and unilateral control, is generating "ceilings" in the productivity of organizations and in the well-being of the people who compose them, which challenges us to observe with courage and self-criticism the way of working through which we are generating said "roofs".
This implies changing the habitual focus of our gaze focused on "looking outside" and "blaming" to review our ways of perceiving ourselves and coordinating actions between people, which implies, in the first place, making ourselves responsible for what happens avoiding the game of " pass the burden on to others ”as Peter Senge would say.
Let us note that these behaviors are not of any particular person, but rather that they are inserted in the culture or in the habitual way of doing in most of the organizations that we observe daily where counterproductive emotionalities predominate for the achievement of collective results such as fear, mistrust, pride, vanity, apathy, resignation, resentment, contempt and others.
From this perspective, we judge that managers will need to progressively become Internal Ontological Coaching Consultants in order to become skilled creators of contexts that enable them to detect the habits that make it impossible for people, teams and organizations to achieve the results they aspire to and operate as managers / leaders.
We say that at some point people in particular and organizations in general will need to start taking charge of addressing issues "that everyone knows is happening but is not being talked about."
This that we point out may sound or be seen as "counter-cultural" at a time when most gurus say that "you have to adapt…"
Adapt to what?
Adapt to whom?
It is easier for people to adapt when they understand the meaning of doing it and the possibility that this is in their lives and not when "it is necessary to adapt by decree…"
People who "are adapted" to the current culture of today's organizations often think that "giving opinions is risky" and / or "to keep the job, you have to abide by what the boss asks for, even if you don't understand what he asks for", etc…
Our way of seeing it is that, paradoxically, the latter will be the ones that will have the greatest difficulties moving in emerging companies where people will need to be self-confident to innovate, to unlearn, to commit, to disagree, to change their minds, etc.
In other areas we also find the opposite of adapting: students in schools learn to give exams rather than learn… They adapted and understood the logic of the system very well and what are the results that are valued… It is more valued to pass exams than to learn…
The corollary of all this is the lack of responsibility, involvement, resignation, boredom and resentment that we find in most organizations that, progressively and invisibly for themselves, are losing their greatest capital: creativity, commitment and the love of its staff with their daily activities and where mistrust is one of the many hidden costs that are not included in the balance…
Given that today's work is basically non-manual, we need to provide training “people-centered who operate with tools and models” and not just deliver tools and models….
We postulate from Create Contexts Consultant that the emerging training has to do with providing communication skills that transform our current modes of coexistence facilitating learning and conversations.
This is what an Ontological Coaching Consultant does when intervening in an organization: generate conversations that reveal the mental and emotional models that limit the performance of people and teams to unlearn behaviors that no longer serve them and relearn other more effective ones for them and the entire organization.
The facilitation of learning carried out by an Ontological Coaching Consultant makes full sense in a world in constant change like the one we have to live in where the only thing that will not be obsolete is the development of the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn.
Our challenge as Ontological Coaching Consultants in a culture where knowing and not learning is rewarded more than once is to create the conditions to unlearn without losing self-esteem and relearn recovering enthusiasm through a methodology very focused on the daily interactions of The Apprentices.
The Ontological Facilitation, understood as an approach that makes the conversations between peers flow, acquires extreme relevance at a time when the brilliant individuals are not coping with the complexity that the world presents to us (and therefore they are paying the consequences from the physical and / or the psychic in addition to the progressive ineffectiveness in its management). In this way, we need to develop effectiveness in relationships and this is a strictly conversational activity: to coordinate with others, what we do is basically talk and listen.
Integrated these learning facilitation and conversation skills in Ontological Coaching Consulting skills, managers no longer have the mission of controlling and punishing workers but of identifying and dissolving the obstacles that limit the performance of their people.
Therefore, these people need to know not only to do well what they have to do, but also to have the skills to show a course, align, motivate and inspire their people, generate trust, a sense of responsibility, commitment and the capacity for learning and innovation.
The indicated displacement implies putting the focus on people when the predominant tendency of the time is to take the human being as a disposable resource.
This way of working is not only generating discomfort, stress and suffering, but also endangers the survival of organizations today.
EXPERT OR TRADITIONAL CONSULTING AND ONTOLOGICAL COACHING CONSULTING
Although we have referred in different ways to the Ontological Coaching Consultancy, we leave for this last section the distinction between this approach and the Expert Consultancy that emphasizes the following:
- He considers that his diagnoses “define what REALLY happens”.
- It has a fragmentary background that includes the following:
- Approach of "his part" without considering the impact of his doing on the rest. Dissociation many times between the professional approach and coherence with moving in his own life.
The Expert Consultancy, (a person or a company specialized in «what the managers of a company defined as that / those who will be able to cover" the problem we define having »), is in charge of confirming and deepening the diagnosis made by the managers (They also consider that their diagnosis is what REALLY happens) and then advise or propose the necessary actions to change the situation (market research, select personnel, etc.).
The Ontological Coaching Consultancy presupposes something apparently obvious: that people make decisions WITH CERTAIN PERCEPTION CRITERIA AND NOT OTHERS AND THEREFORE WITH CERTAIN MOTIVATIONS AND NOT WITH OTHERS to whom we are often blind not because we are “stupid” but because we come from a tradition of twenty-five centuries in which we learned that our opinions describe "reality".
Today, thanks to the contribution of the biology of knowledge, quantum physics and other approaches to human cognition, we can see that human beings cannot access what we call "reality" because we do not have the biological mechanisms of perception to do what.
What we do have access to is our interpretations of the results or facts that we perceive. That is why the interpretations we give and / or give ourselves are decisive for what we can do and so is learning to listen to the interpretations that others give about the same facts that often differ much more than ours. what we would have supposed.
In this context, we distinguish Ontological Coaching Consulting as the approach that allows organizations in general and individuals in particular, to observe the ways of articulating the interpretations of their problems with a view to maintaining them, partially modifying them and / or releasing them definitively to give rise to to others that make it possible to achieve the desired results.
From the Ontological Coaching Consultancy, we interpret the organization's diagnoses as an expression of its own way of observing and not as a description of "what actually happens".
It is important to clarify that we are not saying that the Ontological Coaching Consulting is better than the Expert Consulting. They are different and complementary approaches.
In order to quickly distinguish these different and complementary consultancy approaches we offer the following table:
| Expert Consulting | Ontological Coaching Consulting |
| Deliver knowledge | It generates learning |
| Give solutions | It enables interpretations of greater capacity for action. |
| Analyze the parts | Observe relationships |
| Act on existing problems | Question the nature of the problem |
| Focuses on specific domains | Systemic and Holistic Vision. |
| Advise | Shows |
| Emphasis on techniques | Emphasis on the interrelation of people |
Therefore the displacement that we propose based on the contribution of Rafael Echeverría in his recent work THE EMERGING COMPANY, in terms of training and consulting is as follows:
| Traditional Consulting | Emerging Consulting |
| From: Authority Based on Foreman Model | A: Authority based on the facilitator of learning and conversations (CO consultant) |
| From: Deliver information and techniques | A Provide reflection on the current “ways of solution”. |
| From: Emotionality of demand and fear | A: Emotionality of autonomous responsibility and trust. |
| From: Learning focused on repeating the action | A: Learning focused on reflection on what has been done. |
| From: Professional who “operates his part” disassociated from the “other parts” and not responsible for the whole | A: Professional who operates holographically in an integrated and responsible way for the group of which he feels a part. |
Considering the different consultancy approaches as well as the proposed displacement, it arises to reflect on the importance of what WE Deming pointed out, regarding that “Nothing happens without personal transformation” and at the same time on the need to intervene at the level of the bond BETWEEN people.
Personal transformation is as important as the interpersonal transformation on which the Ontological Coaching Consultancy intervenes decisively and powerfully, as it deals with relationships and not the parts separately.
We believe that the Ontological Coaching Consultancy will make it possible to provide this fundamental new look to go through these times in order to facilitate the transit through the gap of considering the importance of people in the emerging focus and the “disposable” that are being considered today.
Hopefully this work will be inspiring to continue building this ambitious model of collective transformation.
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