opinion

Working life is complex

Little about working life, leadership or achieving organisational effectiveness is simple. Often it’s complicated, usually it’s complex, and sometimes it’s chaotic. It can also be disorderly.

Leading in complex times

In this context, I was privileged to attend ‘Leading in Complex Times’ this month, the result of a joint initiative between three organisations (Cultivating Leadership, Harthill Consulting and MDV Consulting) to help enable leaders and those working with leaders to sharpen their skills in the complex world of work. Experimentation and the chance to tussle with thorny issues was the promise – and the organisers delivered on it skilfully and in thought-provoking ways.

Three forms of mind

The themes of the day centred around three forms of mind:

Seeing Systems
Taking Multiple Perspectives
Promoting Enquiry

The lessons of these themes, as Jennifer Garvey Berger explained, can equip leaders to ask new questions – and thus create journeys towards new answers. All of them resonated strongly for me as a systemic practitioner and executive coach: they reflect significant threads in my own approach to the challenges that my clients bring to coaching, and in the ways in which I facilitate clients to go beyond what shows on the surface – whether through behaviour or thinking – in order to create a sustained capacity for a realistic and creative encounter with their environments and for development and change.

‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making’: Cynefin

In 2007 David Snowden and Mary Boone published their seminal article ‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making’ in Harvard Business Review, as a contribution to ‘to broaden[ing] the traditional approach to leadership and decision making and form[ing] a new perspective based on complexity science.’ With colleagues, they developed the Cynefin framework as a lens through which leaders could perceive their worlds with greater insight.

They describe their model in these terms: ‘The framework sorts the issues facing leaders into five contexts defined by the nature of the relationship between cause and effect. Four of these – simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic – require leaders to diagnose situations and to act in contextually appropriate ways. The fifth – disorder – applies when it is unclear which of the other four contexts is predominant.’

Of these five contexts, the task of leadership in our time is increasingly often described as complex – and leaders are often challenged as to how to deal with it.

Leaders’ complex challenges

Leaders whom I work with arrive sooner or later at the realisation that question(s) they bring to coaching are either obviously or surprisingly complex, requiring a holistic approach to address them. Those whose behavioural pattern is to rush towards quick answers can find the exploration of what’s actually happening to be confronting, frustrating, uncomfortable – and rich in learning. This applies whether their challenge relates to wanting more fulfilment in their careers, a sense of lack of focus or stuckness, an aspiration to release more of the potential of their teams, a feeling that there’s more in them than they’re currently delivering, managing difficult people, dealing with the buffeting between agendas that characterises their working lives, discomfort in their emotional relationship to their difficulty – or a multitude of other questions.

In complexity what matters is relationships

Jennifer Garvey Berger reflected that in complexity what matters is strengthening relationships between people, recognising and understanding influences and forces rather than exerting control, accepting emergence rather than being focused on planning for outcomes, and a readiness to work with boundaries and perspectives rather than a sense of objective truth. All these reflections underscored for me why and how my coaching clients achieve what they do (often to their surprise). Systemic connections, the courage and clarity to see things as they really are, and the space and freedom to create new solutions relate strongly for me both to how I work with clients and to the playground that provides our context.

A systemic constellations approach

In my experience, a systemic constellations approach can richly illuminate what the complexity is about (including the place of the client’s emotional and behavioural response to the complexity), and can clarify the relationships between the elements that form the complex picture. It can enable new perspectives through which the client can gain a sense of agency when they feel uncertain, stressed or confused, and can create new and resourcing ways to manage the complex, and constantly changing and unpredictable, circumstances in which they find themselves every day of their lives.

Photo by Michael Heiss via Compfight

Leading through systemic complexity

The task of leadership in our time is increasingly often described as complex – and leaders are often challenged as to how to deal with it. Leaders whom I work with arrive sooner or later at the realisation that question(s) they bring to coaching are either obviously or surprisingly complex, requiring a holistic approach to address them. Those whose behavioural pattern is to rush towards quick answers can find the exploration of what’s actually happening to be confronting, frustrating, uncomfortable – and rich in learning. In complexity what matters is strengthening relationships between people, recognising and understanding influences and forces rather than exerting control, accepting emergence rather than being focused on planning for outcomes, and a readiness to work with boundaries and perspectives rather than a sense of objective truth.

Resilience in a changing world

Leaders are constantly required to deliver more with less. But their resilience can’t be taken for granted. Resources that are particularly valuable for building resilience include: Self-compassion and self-care; mindfulness and acceptance; awareness of habitual thinking patterns such as confusing assumptions with reality; clarification and articulation of purpose; building adaptability and the ability to flex; physical resourcing through sleep, diet and exercise.

Leadership, culture and successful selling

Leaders often start their careers by excelling technically. However, as their careers progress, they require an increasingly nuanced approach – particularly in relation to communication. Leadership means getting things done through people, not in spite of them, and leaders need to tap in to their self-awareness and to convert that into self-managed communication. In the high-stakes climate of the oil and gas industry, from Texas to Saudi, the leader has a consistent need for humility, integrity, curiosity, a willingness to think beyond the usual boundaries, trust, an awareness of one’s impact, and a finely-honed capacity to listen and to respect each individual.

Stretching to breaking point

Some senior people I coach are being stretched to a point where their wellbeing has reached dangerously low levels. At the heart of their recovering their health and balance is the realisation that, whereas they’d previously regarded self-care as selfish, self-indulgent or disposable, not only is it ‘OK’, legitimate and necessary, but also it enables them to make a better job of their jobs and their relationships in and out of work, enhancing their efficiency, their insight, the ability to take a broader perspective, their emotional intelligence, and the quality of their judgments and decisions.

Whose life is it anyway? Loyalties and agendas

Leaders may give away their authority by prioritising other people’s agendas and interests over their own – often indiscriminately and usually unconsciously. This blind loyalty to an assumption that questioning or challenging someone’s else’s agenda isn’t possible can, in turn, be down to another loyalty. This underlying loyalty can be to the leader’s outdated or misplaced belief that they have to do everything themselves if things are to get done to the necessary standard. This thinking habit or indeed a lack of thought - and the consequences - can be damaging to their leadership, career prospects, reputation, effectiveness, relationships, judgements and decisions. Leaders need to remember to be aware of the moment when a situation is drawing them in, and to give themselves space to think and options for alternative action.

Compassion: a business issue

Paul Gilbert, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Derby, defines compassion as "a sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it" – and he notes that the core of compassion is courage. Far from being a soft issue, his scientific perspective is directly relevant to how organisations can boost their effectiveness. Compassion can do much to restore trust, confidence and a sense of safety in the individual and in the system – and it’s partly about both presence and acceptance, with a close link to mindfulness. Leaders and their reports can take practical steps to boosting both their self-compassion and their compassion towards others.

Building resilience in a tougher world

We all - and particularly leaders - seem to be experiencing more and more pressure in our modern world. The need to build and maintain resilience seems more pressing than ever. By ‘resilience’ I mean not so much the ability to simply cope, but more the capacity to consistently adapt to changing circumstances, to learn from adversity, and to manage intense emotions and uncomfortable thinking in oneself and others. We need to learn to flex in our responses to adversity.

'Just being': my article in Coaching at Work

Transactional coaching objectives are irrelevant to some of my clients. 'Doing’ keeps them out of trouble but offers no fulfilment or satisfaction, whereas - ironically - 'being' and objective-free coaching offers them the time and space that are essential for them to profoundly engage with their coaching objectives

Honesty, wellbeing and mental health

Mental ill-health in organisations may be a taboo subject and may carry a stigma. Sufferers may suffer in silence until their condition worsens to the point of crisis. When crisis does strike, in addition to individuals’ difficulties, the organisational upheaval and cost can be significant, as can the damage to working relationships. However, in an open culture people are more likely to feel engaged and to give of their best, and evidence shows that business results are much better than in cultures where the issue is not faced. It is the coach's responsibility to work with whatever shows up - but not to aim to heal or cure.

A sense of belonging

The deepest human need is to belong. A strong sense of belonging and connectedness is positively associated with wellbeing, happiness and mental health. Feelings of belonging are understood to influence an individual’s identity and the extent to which they feel accepted, respected, valued for who they are - and these feelings in turn, by strengthening relationships, impact on engagement, effectiveness and productivity

opinion

Recent Posts