Copyright KOAP Ltd all rights reserved 2013 administrator@koap.co.uk
“To KOAP “…… Achieving organisational goals of high performance and competitive advantage amidst significant change”
KOAP was founded some five years ago by Steve Gore to build on his many years’ experience training, coaching and mentoring senior executives through times of change. Fascinated by the dynamics of human interaction under pressure Steve has successfully designed and delivered training interventions that have supported some of the world’s largest organisations through challenging and demanding times, and now he has brought together some of the industries brightest and most dynamic trainers, facilitators and coaches to create a team to help organisations take on the economic climate of today.
In our experience often inspirational vision for an organisation is created by a few and then thrust upon the many. Too often, this results in these change initiatives ending in a successful change of procedures and structures, but less sustainable change in ways of working, culture and effectiveness.
One way of defining what we do is as a systematic approach to improving organisational effectiveness – one that aligns strategy, people and processes. We enable an organisation to be ready for the future by taking steps which create an environment that allows employees to understand, embody and deliver the organisation’s objectives. This involves both “hard” issues – strategy, policies, structures and systems – and “soft” issues, ones that develop appropriate skills, behaviours, attitudes, culture and a style of leadership that will enable organisations to deliver optimum performance.
The key distinctive feature of our perspective is we take a holistic approach; paying attention to how what is done in one part of the organisation impacts on another.
Our vision is of a future where Leaders are “mindful” of just what is going on around them. If whole organizations were mindful, and we refer to the simple act of noticing new things, leadership would be quite different. Leaders would not only be mindful themselves but they would enable their followers to be mindful as well. In an increasingly complex world where work cuts across all types of institutional boundaries a leader's only task is to promote and harness "distributed" mindfulness.
Being mindful and noticing puts us in the present, makes us sensitive to context,
and aware of change and uncertainty. When we are mindless we hold our perspective
still, allowing us to confuse the stability of our mind-
Mindlessness can also lead you to assumptions about staff behaviour. As leaders once you understand the member of staff’s perspective, you can be less judgmental. If I see you as rigid, I want to ignore you. If I see you from your perspective, as someone I can count on, I'll value you. We can turn around every judgment in this way, and when we do we'll find we have a less rigid view of people. Once we free ourselves from our misplaced superiority, we may find talent and ability to provide solutions
In more than 30 years of research it has been found that increasing mindfulness increases productivity, decreases burnout and accidents, and increases creativity, memory, and attention and creates more of a positive impact on leaders and staff. When mindful we can take advantage of opportunities and avert the dangers that don't yet exist.
This is true for the leader and the led.
