Pain @ work is not OK!

As an executive coach, I permanently discuss challenges faced by the leaders I coach. Let me make something clear from the start: 

• Challenge is a good thing: Facing new challenges is a sure sign that your business and/or way of conducting it are changing. Indeed, businesses need to evolve with time alongside the fast-paced changes that affect our environment: New customer expectations, new competition, new regulation… These challenges can come in the shape of situations such as global expansion, launching a new offering, changing your business model, a team re-organise… All good!
• Challenge is beneficial: In a previous blog post, I talked about the best way to retain your top talent: Keep them on their toes, permanently challenged, to encourage their growth. Challenges encourage employees to lean-in, stay engaged, ready to learn something new every day. People who feel they’re learning and growing stay on! Such challenges can be additional responsibilities, a growing team to manage, increased objectives, adopting new tools, programs and processes...

When discussing my coaching practice, I am often advised to find a more niche way of presenting my offering so it resonates with specific segments of leaders. I am told to “focus on pain points” such as : Lack of confidence, burn out, imposter syndrome, life-work balance, bullying, stress, lack of diversity… It is while attempting to make the most of this piece of advise that I discovered the ugly truth: There is a lot of pain at work!

So the next logical question is: Should there be that much pain at work?!

I resisted so far the temptation to build a narrative about my coaching practice based on pain-points, not because they are rare (oh no they’re not!) but because I don’t think they should even exist in such quantity and frequency in the first place! Furthermore, I fear that positioning coaching versus pain points associates coaching with them and builds a practice on top of something negative. It feels a bit like making my fortune in a time of war and suffering!

In the same way that any school football team has a coach, when it’s losing as well as when it’s experiencing a winning streak, employees should benefit from support all along their career, in tough and in good times. Sometimes, a manager is particularly strong at coaching and encouraging his/her team. Sometimes a mentor is at hand to advise and provide food for thought. More often than not, employees who are in pain at work are left to fend for themselves. This pain becomes habitual, acceptable, and in time it is considered to be an inherent part of work. Humans adapt, they come to terms with the worst of situations, consider them to be expected and build their own survival kits. 

I want to help change that because I think pain at work is not OK. 

The fine line between challenge and pain. 

When does challenge stop and pain start? The line between the two is of course blurry because it’s all about personal perception. What’s exciting to some can be fear-inducing to others. Speaking in public for instance: For some it will be a welcome stretch, a new skill to master, for others it’s pure hell, keeping them awake at night and tinting their entire day or week in the sombre shade of fear. 

I want to help people make the difference between the aches experienced while growing (very positive) and pure pain (nothing good there) and to act accordingly. 

While challenges may indeed signal the need for additional support such as coaching, pains simply signal the urgent need to either change something drastically at work (the culture for instance) or to leave because it’s a toxic environment. 

What’s a typical challenge?

• Promotion, added responsibilities, growing team, requiring a re organisation, the introduction of new processes. 
• Adapting to a new deal, a drastic change in your business environment, by changing your offering or positioning or way of doing business such as experiencing a digital transformation. 
• Pure expansion, be it geographically or through widening your offering, or merging with other companies. 
• Focusing on efficiencies and making changes to improve the revenue per head amongst your workforce or the lifetime value of your customers, or lowering your spend without impacting negatively your results. 

What’s unacceptable pain? 

• Lack of psychological safety amongst your team: Having to hide your struggles and to compete internally with each other, while suffering from automatic finger-pointing when things go wrong. Feeling isolated and permanently “at risk of…”.
• Feeling like there’s a glass ceiling above your head, because you do not have an MBA or because you are suspected to go on maternity leave in the next 12 months or because you have children and need to leave at 5pm on the dot every day. 
• Being perceived as “having reached your maximum” and feeling like you are now part of the furniture but not part of the shooting stars. Not being given a fair chance. 
• Being bullied, gaslighted, discriminated against, made to feel very small and as being “very lucky” for what you have and not in a position to ever wish or ask for more. 
• Feeling depressed, de energised, exhausted, spending your entire weekend recovering from a gruelling week. 
• Being so stressed it affects your sleep, your health, your ability to enjoy downtime, your relationships outside of work. 
• Needing to medicate to perform at work. 
• Feeling like you cannot “be yourself” at work. Having built a work armoury, you may not even know when you’re wearing it or how to take it off. You find yourself expecting an agenda when having a discussion with your partner and listing “action items” at the end!

In the 90’s, I was surprised to witness the global excitement that accompanied the launch of Prozac. No matter how many positive reviews I read about this medication, I kept thinking that, surely, it would be better to focus our energy on making the most common sources of depression disappear, rather than on a product that helps deal with them!

Where does coaching stand? 

Coaching is a tried and tested source of support for people who are feeling challenged. Like in sports. It’s a partnership through which you find and tap into the wisdom, intelligence, resilience, strengths and insights within yourself and the resources available to you and try new approaches until you find an updated way of functioning that bring optimal results and a deep sense of satisfaction. 

When the unacceptable is happening at work, coaching can help of course. Working with a coach can help you identify what is really happening (we sometimes don’t want to see the truth in front of us!), declare with certainty that it’s not OK (no, you’re not going mad!), and deal with it efficiently so you create changes in your work environment, or you leave before too much damage has taken place. 

But one truth remains for me: Pain at work is not OK. 

Listening to quotes such as “No pain, no gain”, we’ve made pain desirable in many instances in our lives. Did you know that cough syrup that tastes bad tends to sell better than the ones that taste nice?! Have you noticed how everyone these days is so proud of being “crazy busy”? We’re so used to pain we sometimes seek it! 

• We WANT the paralysing muscles-ache, the day after a session at the gym. 
• We EXPECT that gruelling “list of weaknesses to fix” at a 360 degree feedback conversation with our boss. 
• We TAKE ON BOARD bullying or patronising comments. 
• 70% of us at some point of our career experience Imposter Syndrome, almost welcoming it when it shows up! 

What to do? 

I help leaders I coach reconnect with their physical feelings because they are your own personal warning system. Usually when something “wrong” is going on, your conscious resilience may be ready to put up with it (“Toughen up, Marion!”), but you’ll get a physical sensation that is designed to show you that you’ve just entered a somehow toxic or dangerous situation: Sweating, a ball in your stomach, headache, excessive need for rewards such as sweets or shopping or social media breaks, feeling of disengagement (“I don’t care anymore!”)… 

I then also encourage leaders to gain awareness about how they feel about work when they’re not at work: How do they talk about work with friends? What words do they use? How do they feel when they explain what they do? How do they feel on Sunday night? Do they see holidays as a welcome break or a life-saver?

Putting all these pieces of insights on paper, documenting them over time can help you put the puzzle together and realise that you’re caught in a situation that is mostly detrimental to your growth, possibly dangerous to your health, and to find the courage to do something drastic about it: Change it if you can, or run in the other direction!

I doubt I will position any time soon my coaching practice around unacceptable pains that people experience at work. In the same way that I hoped in the 90’s that people would focus on identifying depression and its causes and on helping themselves and others rather than run to the chemist to get their own shiny box of Prozac, I wish executive coaching was not seen as a desperate measure when the boat is about to sink!