COACHING FOR CREATING FLOW By Maqbool A. Babri
Flow, in my opinion, is when a system, e"ortlessly, becomes the best conductor of the energy, wisdom, creativity, positivity, and joy, whether it’s a human being or an organizational structure. With flow, all components are in harmony and work in sync and with eciency to enhance the capacity of the organization. The client systems don’t just go with the flow they continuously modulate the flow to adjust and influence the flow so that the organization remains relevant in achieving a leadership role in serving the customers, employees and shareholders.
To arrive at personal flow, the various elements in our body must be able to communicate freely, openly and provide accurate feedback, as well as provide whatever support systems need to function at its optimum. For us, it’s our organic system and all the vital organs, such as lungs, heart, liver, kidneys etc all working in harmony to assure we have the ideal heart rate and temperature. All this is governed by our autonomic system which regulates the communication amongst all the components. It’s the turbulence in our thought process or ingestion of toxic materials that disrupt this communication amongst the components, creating a lack of natural flow. This disruption of flow confuses the components and they are unable to deliver the needs of the body causing the system to malfunction and pushing it into a self-destructive mode.
For us, it’s our organic system and all the vital organs, such as lungs, heart, liver, kidneys etc all working in harmony to assure we have the ideal heart rate and temperature.
Organizations are also like organisms with lots of components. These components are us employees, and it’s the responsibility of the management to ensure that we, the employees remain in flow. Certainly, we the management must be in flow to be able to facilitate that everyone remains inflow, and the system gets into the flow to deliver excellence in terms of products and services as well as profitability.
To enable people to be a conduit of wisdom, knowledge, energy, and enthusiasm while protecting them from toxic thought and behaviors, most organizations management coaching to help people embrace flow.
The word coaching has been borrowed from sports; coaching has made deep inroads into management. During earlier flirtations by management with coaching, the objectives have been to help management get more out of its people.
This was based on a misplaced assumption that employees and management were opposing teams. Management was being taught techniques on how to maximize output through sophisticated manipulations and use of exploitative techniques where management by objectives and annual confidential reports were used to manage people through fear and punishment.
More and more modern and forward-looking organizations are learning that management and employees are not two opposing teams trying to beat each other but are one single
team, and hence must win together. This new perspective has changed the concept of coaching.
Certainly, skills’ coaching is still very important and is mostly managed under the “new” sta" orientation and job management introduction/induction modules.
The Management coaching is more about changing attitudes of the management and sta" through strengthening their leadership capacities and engaging their teams in, both, designing work as well as implementing it, hence creating flow.
Coaching now focuses more on driving out fears and facilitating the management to involve its human resources in decision making and hence make decisions that are broadly understood with much wider buy-in and ownership, transforming fear driven systems into respect-driven relationships.
Modern and progressive organizations make conscious e"orts to become more open and transparent in all areas of business and its dealings, hence communication, at all levels, is enhanced and every member of the team can see that whatever is being done by the management is to serve the collective interest of the organization which are also in harmony with their professional goals.
Coaching is further used to help the management to walk the talk by understanding, living and promoting the values jointly agreed and established by the organization. It is further aimed at recognizing the value of diversity and disagreements that contribute to an even higher creativity, and innovative problem-solving.
The essence of attitude coaching is to help the coachee recognize that, essentially, we are driven by desire to do well and remain productive. We all want to earn respect and be respected. We are driven by the desire to improve the quality of the lives of our family and the communities we live in.
The coached is facilitated to understand and recognize the role of humility in becoming more e"ective as a leader, to become a better listener, to learn to appreciate, to learn to accommodate and to become a cheerleader for her/his team.
The attitude is the most important attribute that will determine whether we will spend a happy positive life or will become grumpy and complain about everyone and everything.
Certainly, our positive attitude towards others around us will make us and others even more happy and positive
Posted on 08/05/2018
