An Interview with John Lazar: Institutions and Influences

The NeuroLeadership Institute comes to mind as an organization that certainly does an extremely good job around its marketing and sales—and I think it’s also growing in terms of how it’s bringing together research and theory.  It is providing some grounding for the kinds of understanding that can be developed about what we do behaviorally and how that translates into what’s happening neurologically.

WBECS is an organization that in the past several years has played a role in expanding the coaching conversation and extending the availability of those kinds of conversations to people around the world at a reasonable price point.

Marshall Goldsmith, one of the leading executive coaches in the world, is doing what he’s doing through his organization and taking all of his materials and making all available to the public at no charge.  I think Bob Dunham and his Institute for Generative Leadership is doing some really leading edge work around how we understand organizations, what’s constitutive of them, and in what ways we can intervene elegantly, effectively and powerfully to make a difference.

The International Society for Performance Improvement or ISPI has been around for more than 50 years.  They take a data-driven, evidence-based approach to solving human performance problems in organizations. In my experience, their Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) Conference has been a lovely forum for bringing up coaching and coaching related topics to an international group of practitioners and decision makers. I find that my approach to doing coaching work has been heavily and positively influenced by their models.  While I’m passionate about coaching, I consider myself a performance technologist who has coaching as an essential set of tools in my tool kit.

Two other institutions come to mind.  One is the Institute of Coaching in Boston that you know about and their annual conference on leadership and health care, which I think is a really fantastic conference.  Being a member of that organization has a lot of benefits associated with it.  Then, finally, is the International Leadership Association (ILA), which is, I think, housed in Barcelona.  They’re an organization that brings together leaders and decision makers even more than practitioners to talk about leadership-related issues in organizations.

It was only last year that, for the first time, ILA collaborated with the Institute of Coaching to hold an event related to executive coaching that occurred in Barcelona.  I’m anticipating in coming years that ILA is going to have some things to say and that coaching is going to have a broader presence and significance in those conversations and the kinds of work that they do.

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