5 top tips to: Coaching in a changing

environment

The speed of ‘change’ is unprecedented and it’s relentless

Clients often arrive into coaching as a result of, and reeling from, change: • Painful: redundancy or restructure

– expectation: behave ‘professionally’

• Positive: new job or promotion – expectation: make a smooth and easy transition

*Ron Heifetz, JF Kennedy School of Government, Harvard

Even exciting change can create loss of the familiar

“We don’t resist change, we resist loss and change always heralds loss.” *

Containment

• Coachees experiencing change need time and space to process the losses involved with it.

• Part of what will enable this processing to happen is if those affected are offered adequate containment.

• Our Advice: A reflective space in which clients can process their feelings and develop their understanding of what has just happened, whilst hard to find in the work place, is something that can be offered in a systems psychodynamically informed coaching relationship. In the following four sections we will explore what aspects are essential in order to offer clients containment.

• Setting boundaries can offer clients a secure base in which to really explore what is going on for them. For example: – a familiar professional working space that is free of interruption, neutral

and private. We do not work out of hotel lobbies or coffee shops where either the coach or coachee is likely to become distracted.

– Time - we always begin and end sessions on time.

• Our Advice: Clients may at first be a little surprised about how carefully we adhere to boundaries. However, in creating these robust boundaries we are creating a secure base where clients are more likely to feel safe to open up and work with their real feelings.

Boundaries

Authority

• Change is often confusing and can disrupt previous relationships and lines of communication.

• A client may struggle to know whether they are fully authorised in their new role - there is both the process of being appointed/ authorised and self-authorisation.

• Such scenarios create competition, rivalry and other complicated feelings.

• Our Advice: Help the client determine their level of authority and support them through a process of self-authorisation. There is a parallel process for the coach, who can’t work effectively if they are full of self-doubt. The coach must feel they are authorised to work, both institutionally and by the client.

Role

• Role clarity is imperative in a changing environment where roles might be blurred. Knowing where a role starts and stops is vital both for the coach and the coachee.

• Often a coachee might invite a coach to provide an opinion or to tell them what to do. This scenario creates something of a dilemma:

– If we don’t proffer our opinion, the coachee might be disappointed and feel that we are withholding. – If we do, we might step into something akin to mentoring where we become a resident expert.

• Our Advice: Each coach will find their own way of navigating the above scenario,

an option is to reiterate how we see our role and relationship to our coachee and to notice the dilemma and perhaps the draw to meet the client’s request. There has to be several degrees of separation between the coach and the coachee. We never coach friends or families because it’s difficult to hold a neutral or objective position. This clear separation also creates the containment and secure base mentioned earlier.

Task and Territory

• Especially in a period of turbulence, various individuals are going to have more or less capacity to manage ambiguity and uncertainty. This can lead to scapegoating and a sense of an A and B team.

• Some individuals are referred for coaching because they are viewed as a problematic member of staff, due to their difficulties in stepping into a new role or working effectively in a new team.

• Our Advice: Rather than perceiving them to be the issue, remaining curious about what the individual is holding and representing for the organisation, is vital. Be open to refining the initial referral in order that both the coach and the coachee are clear about the task and territory of a coaching assignment. A coaching referral is an organisational intervention in it’s own right - think about what the organisational task is and how that links to the role of the individual and how they are traversing the organisational churn.

Executive Coaching programme starts May 2016

• Tavistock Consulting is running a systems psychodynamic Executive Coaching programme that is accredited by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) at senior practitioner level.

• Click here for further details on the programme and course open evenings.

• This programme and qualification can be commissioned as a bespoke course to take place inside a client organisation or HR department.