Mobilizing managers to achieve collective success

Your question: How can I encourage my managers to exchange best practices?

Context

A management model is the medium for an uncompromising confrontation between the strategy of the organization and the realities of the environment.

Because of this, the competencies displayed by company employees, especially management, must constantly be adapted to the situation, since it is these competencies that enable the organization to stand out from the pack and to generate real added value.

Managing an organization's "competency capital" involves the management of extremely fragile constructions that are built upon a vast range of different resources.

Exchange of practices is an excellent way of meeting these demands, since it provides an opportunity to work on one's own practices and to integrate new competencies, with input and support from a coach and from one's peers.

The key stakes

• Profit from the combined wealth of experience that your people possess
• Create a united, interdependent working community that provides a source of strength for each of its members.
• Put tried & tested "recipes" into practice.
• Pull people out of their comfort zone in order to look for innovative ways of managing.

To take new competencies on board and to change the way that they operate, people must ask themselves questions about their experiences, examine what holds them back in certain situations, take a close look at their level of responsibility in interactions with themselves, their team, their partners & clients and with their environment.

Contribution of practice exchange to this process:

Practice exchange groups bring together people who are faced with difficulties linked to a common theme. Experience has shown us that the creation of a group of this sort, in which the key words governing relationships and exchanges are confidentiality, sincerity and empathy, tends to generate:

• a community of peers bound together and made stronger by the fact of getting together several times a year. They build a network of mutual trust within their organization from which they can draw support whenever needed.

• a learning network; the techniques and practices perfected by the group can be reused time and time again in order to overcome a delicate situation.

It is not unusual for these groups to provide the opportunity to focus on experiences within their entities or in larger teams so as to capitalize on the success of tried, tested and proven solutions.

Participants bring concrete cases to the table and the subsequent exchanges foster experiential and interactive learning.
Participants are made aware of their relational modes of being and the obstacles to the acquisition of innovative behaviours.

Construction of the programme environment:

Once the themes of the session have been defined, by the group members themselves or by their management, participants express their expectations, their learning needs and the didactic models that will support them and make it easier for them to take on board the target competencies.

The subsequent work can take different forms: e.g. individual interviews, thematic working groups, etc. Practice Exchange Groups convene on a regular basis (generally speaking between two and ten times), and each group is composed of 6 to 7 participants and a coach.

The focus is on individual work within a group: based on the experience presented to the group, the coach works with each individual participant and facilitates the group exchanges. The group performs a mirror function since each individual can learn more about him/herself through the experience of others.

The CARRIED® model is a process organized in distinct phases and which provides each person with an opportunity to participate and to form new commitments within a set period of time.