How can coaching and mentoring models improve employee resilience in a VUCA world?

This is where you need to develop your coaches and mentors to be good in these roles. If you’re setting up a formal program create a Community of Practice for them to learn from a curriculum and each other as well as provide a support network. Secondly, develop menteeship skills. It’s not easy being a mentee ir the one being coached.

Coaching can help you manage the contradictions of our VUCA world. On one hand, we're experiencing extreme changes so quickly, which means we've got to unlearn and stop doing what no longer works and figure out new ways to respond. Also, the speed of these changes makes us anxious and doubtful of our capabilities, especially when we're facing so much uncertainty. Good coaching can help you deal with these contradictions by helping you rewire your mindset to address the future as well as ground yourself to remember how you've managed tough times before. An effective coach will work with you to lean into your curiosity, your values, your emotional intelligence, etc. so you can think differently while being true to yourself.

Leaders who want to increase their resilience and thrive in a VUCA world develop vertically. That is, rather than just add more skills/a la apps to their brain/smartphone, they need to upgrade their brain/operating system and build more capacity, clarity, and courage. In other words, you as a leader need to develop more complexity in yourself to manage the increased complexity of the times. Vertical stage development is the best model for this type of growth.

The mentioned models are good for incremental improvement in a role; however, they lack the visibility into the changes the coachee experiences that come with transformative development. So there is also the 4S model -Self: What feelings, strengths and weaknesses, do I bring with me. Who do I want to be when I make this change? -Situation: What are the factors involved in the change? What is creating the need, what is the urgency? -Support: What agencies, programs, people, or technologies will help me? - Strategies: What strategies will I use to make these changes? As your coachee moves along their path you will need to adapt to their changing identity, skills, capabilities. And acknowledge that your own identity will change.

With leaders who know they need to up their game to play in a VUCA world, I'll often help them identify some of their biggest challenges and then figure out the best way for them to tackle the issues head on. Many leaders I work with struggle with the following: How do I stop falling back on black & white (binary) thinking and open myself up to consider more options? How do I take others' perspectives? How do I lengthen my time horizon, rather than just thinking about the next quarter? How do I stop feeling so anxious about all the uncertainty? How can I learn to say "I don't know?" How do I stop my team and me from spending all our time planning and start experimenting?

I mentioned in an earlier comment to create a development program and a CoP for coaches and mentors. They need support as they guide their people through the process. Process is important, provide the tools they will need to develop their own skills. Also menteeship has a skill set, and we should develop those skills as well through classes on how to build relationships with coaches, building efficacy in their ability to be coached, and having agency within this type of relationship.

Leaders, not just their employees, need to feel psychologically safe before they can talk about their challenges and how to deal with them. As a coach, I provide that psychological safety by making sure the individuals I'm working with know they can talk to me in confidence, that I'll listen deeply without judgment, that I have their best interests at heart, and that I'll work with them on options that they can start to try out to see what works best for them.

It's not just a VUCA world we live and work in; it's also a BANI world. Especially since the pandemic, we're dealing with things that are more Brittle, Anxiety producing, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible. Leaders and the rest of us need to look for good options, not the one best option, and stop being obsessed with efficiency. We often need slack in the system now to get things done.

I coach leaders to minimize VUCA by creating stability within the team, developing strengths of the team members, creating processes that will allow the team to pick up each others slack when everything goes sideways. Build an internal environment to give people trust, stability, hope, compassion and a sense of belonging. Then you can add mentoring and coaching as a way to strengthen the individuals within the system leading to stability of things they CAN control.