About Biz School

Biz School is one of three businesses owned by The Winding Staircase Pty Ltd. The other two are:

• Coach School, specialising in delivering professional coach training and mentor-coaching.
• Life School, specialising in personal and life coaching and a range of personal development services.

In brief, what we do...

In Biz School we focus on organisational leadership development and transformation through people. We achieve this through the delivery of executive and management coaching and consulting services for organisations. We have a passion and commitment to the growth of coaching as a way of learning and leading and regard coaching and a coaching approach as core to all of our businesses.

What we notice...

In our experience, much current management thinking and practice continues to be shaped by a rationalistic, mechanistic, dehumanising, problem-solving mindset drawn from a 200-year-old Newtonian scientific worldview that treats organisations and people as ‘machines’ and ‘resources’. While this notion can be dismissed as irrelevant academic theory, unfortunately it continues to permeate the way most leaders work and thus has a profound impact on our lives and the way we treat ourselves and each other everyday in the workplace.

Through our work with leaders in a wide range of organisations, we hear widespread recognition that this way of leading organisations has reached its ‘use by’ date. Leaders want to find new ways to lead but don’t know where to look.

...AND we read lots of great books about ‘cutting edge’ organisations and methodologies for creating more human and productive work places,

 

...BUT we don’t seem to come across many people who seem to actually work in these kinds of organisations and work places!

We believe there is a critical need to reinvent the world of work, organisations and business and that leadership is a key for this. At Biz School, we are committed to creating new work places for ourselves and to help others do the same.

What we believe...

What we do and the way we work come out of some key beliefs and values about human life, organisations and leadership. We believe:

• Life is to be lived authentically, abundantly and sustainably, for everyone and everything on the planet.
• Human beings are social beings. We live in the dance between the individual self and others: the group, team, organisation, neighbourhood, society, and nation. No person is an island.
• As human beings, we engage in collaborative action for a sense of connection AND to get things done: to create and sustain the lives we want together and individually.
• To engage in collaborative action is to get organised — to create organisations. As human beings we create different kinds of organisations so we can create the way of life we want that is not possible to achieve alone. Based on differences of purpose, structure and funding, society currently distinguishes between three kinds of organisations:
  —      government (local, state, national, and international),
  —      business (for profit), and;
  —      not-for-profit civil society and community organisations (ranging from informal local
           neighbourhood groups to large, professionally run agencies).
• Each kind of organisation and each unique organisation is created to contribute something valuable and important to society. And like each human being, each organisation has a unique positive ‘vocation’ or contribution to make AND they also have a ‘shadow’ side that often detracts from this contribution and causes harm.
• Leadership is a key! The role of authentic, wise and courageous leaders is to create and maintain organisations that fulfil their true human purpose and to create work places that enable everyone in them to express their core purpose and passions — to make a real difference.
• Organisations are first and foremost networks of conversations & relationships and the primary competence of leaders is conversational competence. For us, this means, leaders need to know how to have the right conversations at the right time, conversations that create clarity of purpose and understanding, connection and relationships, and that generate effective action for results.

Biz School is about supporting leaders in government, business and not-for-profit organisations to lead with character, integrity and wisdom to create organisations that unlock the human spirit and therefore achieve the results and make the true, positive contributions these organisations were created to make.

What we value...

• Organisations are People. We believe that if our work is to be successful, it will be because we have made a difference to individuals and their capacity to see the world differently. Therefore, we approach our clients with loyalty and professionalism and want to work with people in a mutually authentic and enriching long term partnership. Our approach is personal and as consultants we will ‘walk our talk’ and support you to be effective change agents in achieving your desired outcomes.
• Leadership Matters. We believe leadership is vital in helping organisations achieve their potential and that leadership is not solely the province of management and that there is more than one right way to lead. We will work with you to develop a holistic and eclectic approach suitable for you and your organisation.
• People are Learners. We regard ourselves and our clients as life-long adult learners and we seek to encourage and facilitate opportunities for you to learn and achieve through experience, action and reflection. We seek to support you to find and fulfill life-calling vocation.
• Our Approach. We seek to facilitate learning that is recognised as intellectually and professionally credible by participants and the broader corporate and educational world. Our approach incorporates values of spirituality, playfulness, art and wisdom. We adopt an Appreciative Inquiry approach, working collaboratively to affirm and enhance the best and most positive qualities of the systems, people and situations that already exist.
• People and Relationships. We seek to partner with associates who are authentic as people and credible as coaches, consultants and adult learning facilitators and with whom we feel a mutually enriching connection.