COACHING FORORGANIZATIONALCHANGE 171
role as coaches. We have to help sponsors learn to be good coaches without
taking over the team’s ability to make its own decisions. An individual with
high status can ask an innocent question and be interpreted as having issued
an order. We also help sponsors to recognize and foster the intrapreneurial
spirit. This helps them to make better decisions about what to fund and to be
more effective in coaching the teams they are sponsoring.
Climate Makers
A number of our clients are working to create a general environment that
brings out cost-effective innovation. Their most innovative people are also
troublesome and challenging to manage. Some of their people are routinely
blocking innovation. Some aspects of the culture make the innovator ’s job too
hard. Even some of their own actions and ways of thinking are inhibiting oth-
ers’ ability to innovate. We help them find and build on the positives that exist
and to work on a few high-leverage changes that will create space for innova-
tion to f lourish.
We often find that our climate maker clients face significant challenges.
Repeatedly, money has been spent, staff assigned, and yet the innovation proj-
ects keep falling way behind schedule. How do we make innovation pay off?
What is holding things up?
Per haps, the client has already put in place a formal system and
processes to drive innovation. These systems are often counterproductive
to cost-effective innovation. Innovation in particular is almost always
driven by the informal rather than the formal organization. Unless it al-
ready has the support of the informal organization, an innovative idea that
arises at the bottom of the organization has little chance of getting up
through the formal decision system. We coach climate makers on how to fix
the formal systems so that profitable innovations are more likely to get
through in a timely manner.
In these cases, we are working with senior leaders above the level of in-
trapreneurs and even many sponsors. We begin with their mental model of an
innovative organization. Does it fit the somewhat chaotic way in which innova-
tion actually happens? As we are invited to do so, we also coach them on their
behavior and the behavior of their direct reports. How are they affecting the
organization? We talk about the ways in which the organization supports the
five roles of innovation, including inventors, intrapreneurs, innovation team-
mates, sponsors, and climate matters. Senior leaders want to understand how
the strategies, policies, actions, and management styles can support the orga-
nization’s ability to innovate.