A Food Bank in a Large Urban Centre: Coaching and Training for Senior Managers

1. The Situation

This organization was a small non-profit which had recently experienced a change in leadership and was facing a constantly increasing demand for services within a shrinking economy. The senior management team wanted to build a sense of cohesiveness, shared values and language and enhance the basic management skills they needed to move forward and grow the organization. They had a minimal budget, and each person on the team had varying experience with leadership and supervision.

2. The Approach

Working with the executive director (ED), we developed two one-day sessions of custom designed training (held two weeks apart) for the senior management team. The training was targeted at improving skills in specific areas that participants felt were most crucial to address in terms of improving their leadership and overall organizational performance.

This was followed with individual coaching sessions for each senior manager held every six weeks or so, where program participants worked on goals established in the training sessions and explored ways to improve their own management.

The final program element was a ½ day reunion session where participants shared accomplishments and ongoing challenges. The program extended over about nine months, and was followed by an evaluation session with the ED to assess outcomes of the project.

3. Results

Program participants were enthusiastic about both the training program and the coaching sessions, indicating that they felt these provided direct practical help in applying workshop concepts and techniques to improve their own performance and that of their staff.

At a broader level, organizational performance appeared  to have improved as a result of the program. Some serious performance management issues have been addressed and systems are being developed to streamline overall efficiency and productivity as well as improve morale.

Perhaps most significantly, the organization posted its largest surplus ever!