Could coaching help with these organisational challenges?

Like me, everyone will be reflecting on 2020, and the events that, despite warnings, few saw coming. It has been a game changer for many industries, companies and individuals. At the ‘curtain down’ of the past year, our work life has undergone a test that will redefine it for years to come. It is a year that will continue to impact us throughout 2021 and beyond and some of the changes will be irreversible. It is a sobering, perhaps intimidating but also, in some ways, exciting thought. As a coach and part of a coaching organisation, the question is “Where could coaching be of service as we traverse unpredictable times?”

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit us, the American political commentator, Thomas Friedman was telling us that “there is something (about change today) that is going to be qualitatively different from the great changes of previous era; the speed and breadth with which it is taking hold. ………it is happening at warp speed and directly or indirectly touching a lot more people on the planet at once. The faster and broader this transition to a new era, the greater the potential for disruption, as opposed to an orderly transfer of power” (The World is Flat, 2007)

One thing that we can be sure of is that constant, widespread interconnected change is here to stay. It is multi layered and happens all at once. It is truly systemic. In these unpredictable conditions, it is much more difficult, even impossible to conceive and implement well hatched plans.

As organisations stand, perched and poised on the slippery rock in the middle of the metaphorical river of change and assess their options, we can conclude that it is no longer just about performance, about going bigger, higher, stronger, more effective, more efficient or about plotting a straight line from here to there. That is way too simplistic. It is about creating an environment where where people can adapt, learn, grow, flourish and contribute. It is about creating business and work cultures that are conscious of their relationships with their world, the stakeholders present and future, with their communities, societies and, now more than ever, with the non-human world. 

Coaching 'heavyweight, David Clutterbuck, recently wrote that the coaching profession will either “undergo rapid change to align with the fast-evolving world around it; or it will become less and less relevant.” No matter how positive and life affirming coaching is, it is what it addresses and what it delivers that really counts. We believe that coaching is not just a ‘nice to have’ but it is a game changer and inculcates certain beliefs, behaviours and practices that are potentially evolutionary.

Here are seven challenges facing organisations that I believe coaching can directly impact. Coaching is by no means a silver bullet, but the elemental shift in worldview it delivers has potential to influence all of the following:

1. Complexity Paralysis. When we are faced with continuous change, personal resources can become depleted. We can’t see the wood for the trees. This doesn’t always happen but it is a symptom of what can happen when confronted with continuous upheaval. There is unquestionably a need to respond. Coaching delivers because it creates environments of reflection and challenge, it cultivates resourcefulness. It also challenges deeply held and habitual beliefs, and allows the coachee to adapt by forging new neural pathways and connections, encouraging adaptive behaviours, and sharpening self -awareness. If we believe that “our ability to learn faster than our competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage”, then businesses need enable a mindset where learning and experimentation are encouraged and the learnings from failure are celebrated. That new thinking doesn’t happen by chance.

2. Skills Obsolescence. As a global society, we find, sense or know that there is a deficit of skills and/or the intelligence we need to address the unique challenges we are being faced with. To repeat, ‘what has got us here won’t get us there’. Yet the time and investment needed to develop and enhance those skills is at a premium. We are so busy responding to the immediate challenge, we don’t have the time to be ‘on the balcony’ and see what the patterns are. One of the findings from the Moorhouse’ Barometer on Change report (2017) was that only 27% of business leaders feel confident that they will be able to access the new skills they will need to stay ahead. Coaching helps coachees and teams look for what may be outside their habitual parameters and identify new skills that are required, 

3. Resilience Breach. Constant change brings human beings to the edge of their personal limits - they are stressed, strung out, the autonomic nervous system is triggered. When this happens and we are living on a heady cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline, those twin hormones of the anxiety driven life, our capacity to learn and be creative is significantly diminished. Coaching, again by creating time for reflection and an atmosphere of mindfulness, helps people to take responsibility for their own mental fitness. The locus of control moves from external to internal and the coachee/team begin to take responsibility for their/its own health.

4. Structural Obsolescence. Many of our organisational structure and management systems have served us so far but they are creaking. Working from home really shone the spotlight on this. Again, what has got us here won’t get us there. We need systems, structures and connections that are more agile and flexible than ever before. Coaching, and particularly systemic team coaching helps people and teams creates ways of working that have a life of their own, that are the continuous focus of attention and are always under review. Decentralised ownership builds sustainability. 

5. Leadership extinction. Many of our leadership approaches aren’t fit for purpose because they have been honed on a diet of an outdated success criteria. In 2013, Dr Simon Western drew our attention to the distortion of “economic and social conditions towards short-term gain and the direction of profits towards global elite. Political and business leadership (have )ignored the growing pressures on wider society and the environment, turning a blind eye to the mounting problems they faced” This is challenging stuff. He calls for a new form of leadership that cannot be confined to rationalised and individualised leadership typology. There is no grand narrative of leadership. It is not confined to the top but it's everywhere in multiple forms. What we hope coaching does is create an environment where conscious leadership can begin to spawn. 

Laurence Barrett, a fellow coach and LinkedIn contact who’s contributions in the past year I have valued very much, ended the year quoting Warren Buffett in saying that, “when the tide goes out, you learn who has been swimming naked.” He went on to point out that one of the most interesting things about the pandemic has been that “there has been nowhere to hide for the leadership of some organisations. Some have shown themselves to be adaptive, resilient and inspirational....and others are evidently utterly incompetent. When your supply chain fails, your operating model is no longer fit for purpose and your cash flow is strained you will not be saved by a soundbite and a competency model. Leadership is a lived experience that reveals the soul and character of the leader.”

6. System Disconnection. Silo Mentality, as most of us probably know, is a mindset present when certain departments or sectors within the same organisation do not wish to share information with others in the same company. It has usually arisen from a ‘divide and conquer; approach to management and has the effect of creating accountability and clarifying responsibility. It can however, lead to system blindness, a blame culture, the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing and so disconnects the organisation from itself. Coaching has the potential for wider impact, reverberating through out the whole organisation - specifically when we start coaching the connections or inviting teams and coachees to pay attention to their stakeholder system.

7. Gaps of Meaning. Perhaps one noticeable change we have experienced over the past year has been people reconnecting with what is important to them. People are reconnecting with nature, re-familiarising themselves with their locality, embracing long neglected passions and interests. The past year has done something to our collective awareness about what sort of a life and work life we really want, what sort of a society we want to create. This needs to find an echo in our workplaces, where the need to create spaces of meaning, reflection, consideration and thoughtfulness is ever more crucial. When we coach others, and embrace the philosophy of coaching, what we are effectively saying is, ‘you are important, your thinking matters, we need time to allow it to develop”. When this is done organisation wide, we create reservoirs of resource, meaning and creativity that have to date remained untapped and if allowed to flow, will generate beneficial flows throughout our workplaces and beyond.

Nancy Kline, in her wonderful book, “Time to Think”, dreamt of the whole world being what she describes as ‘a Thinking Environment’ where “people wake up each morning known they are going to be able to think for themselves without punishment, that they can be logical, eloquent bold and imaginative, that their ideas count…”

As I wrote this article, at times I had to ‘call b*llsh*t’ on myself and ask myself why I was writing it. Was it just to promote and sell more coaching? The reality is that coaching, on face value, is a simple discipline based around agreeing some outcomes, giving people space to think how to get there, listening, asking questions and clarifying action. If, however, it is a means to just do more of what have have already done as the human race at work, then we will have failed our stakeholders - most of all, the future citizens of this world in which we all live. 

Coaching cannot just be a servant to some spurious commercial agenda. It has to help us answer some more profound questions. When we skilfully create spaces for reflection, thought and reevaluation, my experience attests that answers to those more profound questions do begin to emerge. 

At the beginning of 2021, we stand at a pivotal moment. In some ways, we always stand at a pivotal moment because this moment is all we have - the past is a memory, the future an imagination. What we do with the moment matters.

Please reach out if there are any aspects of this article you would like to discuss or if you think I can be of any help.