opinion

Torn between family and the office

He was a C-suite leader in a multinational company, fulfilling a demanding, multi-faceted role that also involved international travel, in a job and a company he loved. His home was a flight away from the company’s headquarters, and the company was adjusting to life after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. His CEO wanted staff in the office four days a week, which meant that this leader wasn’t seeing his young children for most of the week. He was beginning to feel peripheral to his family – and he was troubled by this. He knew that for his own and his family’s wellbeing he wanted to be in the office only two days a week.

Not safe to raise his dilemma

He was, however, very hesitant to raise his dilemma with his CEO. Some of his peers were in similar positions, but it didn’t seem to bother them in the same way it bothered him, which left him feeling uncomfortably different. The prospect of suggesting to his boss (who had arrived relatively recently in the organisation) that he work from home two days a week threatened his sense of safety – he felt out on a limb, risking his sense of belonging (arguably the deepest human need), and he was nervous about the impact on others’ perceptions – primarily his boss’s, but also his colleagues’. The way he talked about it was almost with a sense of shame, of inadequacy. Equally, he felt strongly that he was missing out on his children’s lives and development (and they were missing out on him) and putting an undue burden on his wife.

The distribution of power

His story has made me think not only about work-life balance, but also about the distribution, perception and use of power, and what it takes for a leader to experience the ease and the sense of wellbeing that can help release more of what he or she is capable of.

He wasn’t regarding the encounter with his boss as a conversation between equals, trying to work out the best all-round solution, but rather as a request for permission. It struck me that the predominant dynamic was an imbalance of power, in contrast to the possibility of creative collaboration.

When your voice isn’t heard

I’ve wondered too about the extent to which this leader anticipated his voice being heard: he didn’t seem to be hopeful that he would indeed be heard. When your voice isn’t heard, and the balance (or indeed price) of your contribution isn’t acknowledged, but there’s no space for a conversation between equals, something in you and about you is suppressed – and it doesn’t just disappear. It might develop into a sense of frustration, or even further into an inability to tolerate the conditions. It might manifest in physical symptoms (I’ve coached people whose eczema or poor sleep or back-ache were related to voicelessness), or in anxiety.

Working lives and the requirements of the business

It’s not the presence or the structure of the (necessary) hierarchy that intrigues me, but rather how that hierarchy is lived. What’s the price it exacts from its people, or rather is it prioritising the conditions that will create the happiest and healthiest working lives for those people – at the same time (and this is the challenge for leaders) as fulfilling the requirements of the business? How might leaders surrender some of the order and uniformity that seems to ease the path towards fulfilling their agendas? How might they live with more of the trust and versatility that might incidentally result in more unpredictability and uncertainty? How might they learn to encounter that uncertainty and manage themselves through it? How might their people feel seen and heard in a way which makes it easier for them to deliver – which, in turn, makes their delivery more sustainable? How might leaders enable their people to step into, and leverage, more of their own power?

Less individualised and more relational

In short, how might both leader and led transform their perceptions of their roles and their places into something less atomised and individualised and something more relational? While an individualised perception focuses on the individual’s power and responsibility to accomplish and achieve, a more relational perception sees capacity as enabled by relationship, by the willingness and ability to truly relate to, listen to – and be consistently curious about – others’ agendas, motivations, contexts, influences and interdependencies.

Step back and detach from a serial view

This is a challenge when tasks need fulfilling, stakeholders’ interests need to be served, and urgent issues demand attention and strategy. But leaders who take the vision and time to step back, detach from their own, serial view of how things happen, and pay more attention to others’ experiences of what underlies, surrounds, connects to and accounts for how things happen may find that the results they were driving for actually get produced in different, more streamlined, ways.

Psychological safety can produce richer results

Leaders I’ve worked with have discovered that starting with what enables psychological safety – honest conversations, safety to experiment and make mistakes, asking for and offering help, and embracing difference – has produced results of greater richness and longevity than they ever anticipated (see more on psychological safety here).

^{Photo by: Hunters Race}

Power, voice and the relational nature of work

He was a C-suite leader in a multinational company, fulfilling a demanding, multi-faceted role. His CEO wanted staff in the office four days a week, and he was beginning to feel peripheral to his family. He knew that for his own and his family’s wellbeing he wanted to be in the office only three days a week. He was, however, very hesitant to raise his dilemma with his CEO: he felt out on a limb, risking his sense of belonging. It struck me that the predominant dynamic was an imbalance of power, in contrast to the possibility of creative collaboration, and he didn’t seem to be hopeful that he would be heard. How might leaders enable their people to step into, and leverage, more of their own power? How might both leader and led transform their perceptions of their roles and their places into something less atomised and individualised and something more relational?

A journey through risk

An emergency admission to hospital..... Until the surgery had been completed and pronounced successful, and the biopsy showed there was no ongoing problem, the nature of what my life was to be was at the extreme end of uncertainty, with a possible threat to it. Being present to my own experience without resisting it, and accepting both the experience and the situation on a moment-by-moment basis, have, I realise, been central. I feel sure that my years of mindfulness practice accounted for my capacity to accept, and to face in to all the available facts and the possible outcomes. During my hospital stay and afterwards I’ve been struck by how many people remarked on my effect on them. For leaders every action, every tone of voice, every conversation has an impact. The leader who accepts mindfully that things are as they are will be realistic and very likely have more insight than the leader who resists a situation they wish was otherwise. They’ll feel calmer too, and that will be viral. The leader who’s appreciative, supportive and caring (and who encourages that sort of culture) will have a workforce with high levels of engagement, discretionary effort, effectivenes and customer satisfaction.

Slowing down to speed up

A potential client, ‘a man in a hurry’, was looking for answers. Now. Another prospective client slowed down long enough to engage with the notion of the challenge – and the benefits – to him of that very slowing down, because he was interested in ‘exploring the hidden in order to grow’. The nature of organisational life frequently means that leaders are pressured to achieve clear, ‘correct’ outcomes – fast and with urgency. While this is standard, it militates against the possibility of achieving richer, wider, more sustainable outcomes because space hasn’t been made for reflection and for experimenting. A leader might consider becoming aware of when speed is the lived priority, and reflecting on the impact and outcomes of that priority. They might also consider putting in place processes, approaches and forums in which people can honestly express what’s going on for them, be truly heard without being offered opinions or judgments, and be acknowledged for who they are rather than what they do.

The horse, leadership and me

I’m with a group of colleagues, learning about experiential leadership with executive coach and developer of leaders and teams, Jude Jennison, and her herd of horses. With a horse it’s critical to be in relationship (and useful to be able to identify how that manifests in your body), to be curious, to be present, to respect the horse’s freedom to choose and to offer clear direction. What won’t work is to be concerned about your competence or performance, because the horse will instantly pick up on your insecurity and will feel unsafe. And it’s hard to be in relationship when lack of safety is there. Jude’s insight about the importance of allowing the horse space and freedom so that together we can fulfil the task feels like an important illumination. We learn that the whole team needs to be in sync. Communication up and down the line is essential if the team is to stay cohesive. And the horse needs confidence in the clarity, intention, direction, energy and trust of both the leader and the whole team.

What’s love got to do with it?

Client A is close to burnout. He constantly over-stretches himself to meet other people’s requests for help and for task fulfilment. As a child, he felt neither loved nor lovable: the only way he ever felt approved of or accepted was through his intellectual ability and achievements. Client B alienates others with her ‘honest’ but brutal and judgmental behaviour, has very high and unforgiving expectations of herself and of others, and is never satisfied with her own performance. These behaviours are getting seriously in the way of their leadership, and they both want to understand how to manage themselves differently. Besides the negative impact on their wellbeing, each is also damaging their career prospects. The coaching enquiry means they each experience a freedom in an awareness that gives them choices that they hadn’t offered themselves before. They learn, each in their own way, that there is strength and safety and a new-found sense of wellbeing in learning self-love, learning how to listen to their own needs, and self-acceptance. Love has everything to do with it.

Endings and leavings

The primary emotions that arise from losing a sense of belonging need to be attended to, just as much as organisations need to acknowledge the contributions made by those who have left. Endings (and the associated feelings) that aren’t resolved or aren’t fully integrated into a system somehow ‘hang about’ and leave their impact to be felt, sometimes for decades, in the form of burdened roles. A particularly impactful ending is represented by death. There’s value in accepting ‘what is’, and being alert to what may be emerging: experiencing it as a state of being rather than thinking or doing. Loss or ending might actually be, above all, a fertile space – the Gestalt notion of the Fertile Void. Good endings allow for good beginnings.

Are you being heard?

Voice matters because it is a channel for the self-expression that people need in order to feel acknowledged and seen, and – more broadly – because it can have a significant impact for a team or organisation when judgment, uncertainty, ideas and innovation, collaboration, communication and coordination are in the mix. An absence of voice may mean compliance or obedience, but it isn’t territory for sustainable engagement - and sustainable engagement is essential for the flexibility and adaptability that characterises resilient, robust, flourishing teams and organisations. What enables voice is psychological safety: believing that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. That belief means the leader, in the first instance, consistently modelling behaviours that authentically welcome inclusiveness and diversity (including diversity of thought), that mean that help is offered and requested freely, that engage without judgment in taking risks and failing, and that make open conversations the norm – all this without fear of judgment, penalty or exclusion.

The illusion of solutions

Family therapist Barry Mason characterises solutions as ‘only dilemmas that are less of a dilemma than the dilemma one had’. There’s no such thing as right or wrong in the coaching encounter: no predetermined answers, no pre-set course, but rather flow and emergence, and the noticing of these. And here’s where certainty and uncertainty arise, mirroring the working environment - and particularly the leader’s environment. Thinking in terms of certainty may mean that the leader doesn’t see all the tripwires, since not everything is either certain or predictable. In my experience of coaching leaders, the capacity to allow, and allow for, uncertainty – frustrating as that may be – also allows for versatility, responsiveness to the situation as it is, rather than as one wants it or assumes it to be, and creativity. Which in turn allows for a more agile response.

Award for Coaching through COVID and Beyond

Pro bono coaching programme Coaching through COVID and Beyond (of which I'm a co-founder and a member of the core team) has won the Coaching at Work magazine award of External Coaching Champion (Organisation). The depth of our psychological safety in the core team has meant that we’ve been able to have difficult conversations in a spirit of openness and honesty, we’ve been ready to take risks in a context of uncertainty, we’ve been agile and responsive and happy to experiment in a spirit of ‘test and learn’, and we’ve welcomed diversity of all kinds. Living diversity means that we’ve constantly called on our collective intelligence - and so we've been able to achieve innovative success in several important ways.

Trauma

Trauma is a living expression of a life-changing experience that often can’t be expressed in words but is a fundamental – and literally visceral – part of an individual’s identity. The range of manifestations is endless, including addictions, anxieties, physical pain, illness, problems with sleep, problems with relationships, and repeating patterns of behaviour which are counter-productive but which the individual doesn’t seem able to change. Despite appearances, the most apparently well-balanced, cheerful and obliging colleague may be hiding pain and distress which can get triggered and thus result in unexpectedly negative behaviour. The need for compassion and self-compassion, patience and acceptance, curiosity and tolerance is significant. What do you notice at work – about yourself and others?

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