Challenge: Need for a concrete way to measure organizational and team culture, as well as the cultural impacts of performance coaching.
Solution: Find a concrete and comprehensive culture measurement tool that could support the performance coaching already being done with the organization.
What They Do: Research That Matters
The Reach Alliance, founded at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy in partnership with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, is a student-led, faculty-mentored research and leadership initiative. Reach is a network of eight leading global universities focused on understanding how to reach those that are hardest to reach: those living in extreme poverty, the geographically remote, administratively invisible, and marginalized.
To do this, the Reach Alliance recruits top students – equipping the next generation of leaders to produce actionable insights – and catalyzes impact through our institutional partners. Reach has over 200 students and 30 of the world’s top faculty members conducting interdisciplinary research in over 30 countries. Reach aims to affect global change by shifting from conventional procedures to more collaborative and interdisciplinary practices.
Reach’s mission is to pursue the full achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals by equipping and empowering the next generation of global leaders to create knowledge and inspire action on reaching the hardest to reach. All Reach case study reports can be found here.
Innerlogic and Reach: Supporting Professional Development
The Reach Alliance realizes that it isn’t enough to only bring together a group of experts in their respective fields. They want to build highly effective teams, and teamwork is its own skill that can be taught, learned, and improved.
To get teams working effectively together, Reach engages professional performance coaches along with innerlogic to deliver data-driven interventions.
The Reach Alliance describes innerlogic as a “digital culture auditing platform.” that they use to optimize the performance of the students and researchers in the roles of collaborators and mentors. The organization tracks and analyzes team parameters using real-time data to anchor the performance coaching interventions. The coaches more quickly and confidently log, monitor, and resolve team metrics that could have otherwise led to dissatisfaction, team challenges, burnout, etc.
Coaching Effectively: Tracking Culture in a Meaningful Way
Jason Sealy is the head performance coach for the Reach Alliance. His role is to support the teams to create an environment that fosters high performance.
“Once I learned of this product, I was really excited about how it could support high performance with the Reach Alliance teams.”
Before innerlogic, the coaching staff would use subjective “back-of-the-hand” tests to test the team’s health. But with innerlogic, they can learn from real-time team data to help them ask the right questions and structure the best interventions. The coaches can almost “surgically” address an issue that’s going on with the teams. The culture system shines a light specifically on critical areas. For example: how the team works together or what drives effectiveness within the team.
“Communications from the researchers to the coaches are so much deeper now at this point in the game now.”
What’s Next?
The Reach Alliance and the SCP Team of performance coaches continue to use innerlogic to assess their interventions and measure their cultural evolution over time. Reach continues to be a leader in investigating the impact of social programs and initiatives that are reaching the hardest to reach while simultaneously leading in developing their talented interdisciplinary researchers.
For more information on how they use coaching and innerlogic, visit their articles on Coaching High-performance Teams and Performance Coaching Enhances Teamwork For Better Research.
