087: Phillip Cave: Coaching Organizational Systems for Agility and Humanness

How do we coach across individuals, teams and systems to drive organizational change? Is it possible to be both an internal leader and an organizational coach at the same time? Do team coaches need to be subject matter experts in the content of what the teams are working on?

Join show host Dr. Krister Lowe and today’s featured guest Phillip Cave to explore these and other compelling topics on this week’s episode of the Team Coaching Zone Podcast. Phillip Cave is a Life and Organizational Fulfillment Coach and a Senior Manager at Accenture. He is a people and organizational transformation leader with more than 27 years of experience creating himself, technology startups and coaching organizations. His experience in software engineering, leadership and product management shifted to professional life coaching which results in cultural shifts in Fortune 50 companies.

Some themes explored in this episode include:

• Phillip’s journey from photographer to software developer, to becoming a leader and manager of teams and people, to becoming an organizational coach.
• Metaphor of a chiropractor: creating alignment across teams, leaders and organizations
• Forces driving the shift to new forms of organizational design and effectiveness: 1) agile movement and 2) humanness
• Coaching as a vehicle to help individuals and systems emerge
• Engaging leaders around their willingness to lead transformation: both the “being” as well as the “doing” aspects
• Coaching leaders to see themselves as part of the system and not apart from it
• The Lean Change Canvas
• Role of the coach to act as a mirror to help the organization “see itself”
• Case example: building a new commerce platform over the course of 1 year with a team of 70 at Starbucks
• Coaching the “team’s voice”
• Being part of the leadership team as an internal director and organizational coach at the same time
• Challenging teams to embody roles like “scrum master” as a function distributed across the team rather than as a job owned by one person
• Team Performance Model: resource form coaching teams across the lifecycle
• The emergence of the “Management Coach” job in companies
• Learning how to be a catalyst of people
• The merging of worlds: technology + learning and development
• Coaching organizational design and effectiveness
• Reflections on the future of organizational coaching and more

This is a great episode for coaches interested in understanding how organizational coaching is adapting in order to stay relevant in an era of disruptive organizational change. This is an episode you will surely not want to miss!