COACHING FORORGANIZATIONALCHANGE 163
oflocal populations. As the primary coordinator of international development
aid, the UNDP had essentially undergone a change in its client base, with sig-
nificant implications for its own culture and approach. Specifically, NGOs,
run in a very networked and inclusive way, are effective in using decentralized
technology, and are open to strategic ideas from leaders at all levels. The
UNDP had little experience with this decentralized, grassroots style, and
needed to adapt in order to be an effective service provider to this growing
constituency.
I was brought in to meet with the leaders (known as resident representa-
tives) and staff of 10 country offices, which would serve as centers of exper-
imentation for the kind of leadership shift the UNDP needed to make. My
initial job was to lay out the changes in thinking, style, and training that
would help the leadership become more f lexible and networked in their ap-
proach. We did some initial training around those ideas. A year later, I fol-
lowed that up with an in-depth anthropological observation of multiple
centers of exper imentation to determine how effectively the transformation
was taking place.
The offices were in Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Egypt. I lived in each of
those countr ies for several weeks, shadowing the leaders of the country of-
fices and doing diary studies of their ways of working. Following that, I in-
terviewed the people around those key leaders extensively, as one might do
in a traditional 360-degree survey. Then, I went into the field to spend time
with the primary NGOs the country offices were coordinating. Out of that
research came a major report that was highly specific in detail and fairly pro-
found in its evaluation of the traits of leadership that ref lected the culture of
the UNDP country offices. The strengths of these traits measured the prog-
ress that the UNDP had made in transforming to meet its new reality, while
the weaknesses indicated the work that had yet to be done.
Rather than an academic or theoretical model, I think of such reports as
narratives describing the real story of an organization. The value resides in
the articulation of how things work in practice and what that feels like on a
day-to-day basis. Organizations are rarely able to observe and analyze why
they do what they do. Despite whatever strategy, mission, or values may for-
mally be in place, most are operating by the seat of their pants, without the
time and mental space to consciously deliberate on the gaps between per-
ceived direction and reality.
Although bottom-line orientation can make some organizations resistant to
an open, searching analysis ofculture and leadership, I have found that there
are significant and lasting bottom-line results to the approach. In particular,
large organizations are recognizing, in these economically challenging times,