Leadership training according to the coach philosophy

The better people work together in a company, the better results can be achieved. There are various ways of organizing collaboration. It can be organized strictly hierarchically – when knowledge and skills are “bundled” at the top. In this “classic master principle”, management takes place through clear guidelines and monitoring of correct implementation. This is efficient if there are few surprises, the leader is the most competent person and people “only” have to carry out processes and instructions that are as simple and predetermined as possible. The industrial revolution was based on these principles.

However, knowledge in many companies is becoming more and more specialized and distributed among many employees. Managers are no longer the best experts, but have to rely on the specialist knowledge of their employees. Added to this are rapidly changing markets and framework conditions. Employees are better educated and rightly have higher expectations when it comes to developing and implementing their own ideas and solutions. Freely based on Maslow, more and more people in industrialized countries are looking for opportunities to at least partially self-realize at work. This requires a further development of cooperation and the understanding of “leadership”.

The change in the understanding of leadership is not only beneficial for companies, but is also urgently needed in modern industrialized countries in order to be efficient and attractive for highly qualified employees. Organizations position themselves as faster, better and more flexible when they promote independence, support decentralized decision-making and delegate in a competence-oriented manner.

How can these principles and ideas be communicated effectively and sustainably within a company? How can the understanding of leadership be permanently changed and established?

Today, many such ideas are being developed and taken further in the New Work scene and in modern work concepts. We are following these ideas closely and implementing them, partly with external support.

“I consider management to be the task of transforming skills and resources into performance and results. What counts in the end is the result.” This is how Fredmund Malik put it. Very good results can only be achieved sustainably on the basis of very good cooperation – that is one of our fundamental principles.

This is why we have been working for over 25 years on the topic of “leadership according to the coach philosophy”, the principles of which have many thought leaders in management (e.g. Reinhard K. Sprenger) and sociology (e.g. Niklas Luhmann). Dieter Heitsch developed very practice-oriented training courses for implementation in day-to-day business, and our internal management training is still based on these principles today.

The real trick of these training courses is not only to impart the knowledge, but also to experience it in so-called analogy exercises. An emotional experience during training significantly improves retention and makes it easier to transfer to everyday working life. As in sport, the aim is to be able to “practice”, to learn through experience and to improve through joint reflection during training. The aim is to develop managers into coaches for their employees. Coaches who lead a team in which the skills of the individual are optimally utilized, where feedback, mutual appreciation and cooperative cooperation lead to the best results.

In our group, leadership training is offered to all managers by an internal trainer trained in the Heitsch methodology and is continuously developed on the basis of feedback from participants and new insights.

We are grateful to Dieter Heitsch (who sadly passed away far too early in 2019) for the foundations he laid. The consistently positive feedback from participants reinforces this philosophy. In addition, the shared understanding of the basic principles of a participative management style is growing in our group of companies and makes an important contribution to our corporate culture and to the possibility of achieving better performance and better results than the competition on the basis of good cooperation.