OPINION
By Lindsay Wittenberg
Aggressive leaders and insensitive feedback fail to get the best from staff, yet coaches must not judge the culture – or their client’s view of leadership
I’m intrigued by the different perspectives that clients offer me on leadership as it is lived.
There was the senior executive with responsibility for a significant initiative that was intended to transform the business – a role she loved. However, a new boss, the CEO, was making a big impression – and it wasn’t a positive one.
It seemed to my client that the boss thought it was motivating to shout and gesture aggressively at people round the executive committee table, whereas she experienced his style of leadership as punitive and disabling, inspiring anxiety rather than engagement.
Her health and well-being were suffering, and as she tried to manage her work and her emotional responses, she had less and less energy, time or headspace for the family that she loved. She felt she had turned into someone just managing to survive rather than the successful, thriving leader she had been, and she put this down to the climate and culture engendered by her new boss’s behaviour and attitudes, which others were also beginning to adopt. She was wondering how much longer she could tolerate the situation.
Or take the director who had achieved two outstanding business successes in the short time he’d been with his company and who had nevertheless been given negative feedback by his boss that he experienced as striking at the very core of his identity.
He had worked hard to implement his learning from his coaching, and the feedback came as a betrayal of both his efforts and his achievements. He decided to leave the organisation.
These and others have struggled with the leadership culture of their organisations. In coaching them I’ve also had to work hard at times to set aside my own values and judgements, and to keep front of mind my contract with both the individual and their employer.
I believe my role is to be of use to the coaching client by opening up perspectives from which they can resource themselves, make well-founded judgements about their responses to the cultures they find themselves in, be creative about options for the way through, evaluate those options and be able to manage the barriers that may stand in their way.
My role is not to judge the culture of their organisations.
Such situations are less about leadership itself and more about coaching to survive poor leadership. They remind me that I’m coaching not only the individual, but also the system they’re in, and I call frequently on a constellations approach to enable the client (and me) to get a sense of, and perspective on, the various influences and relationships at play (more of that in a future column) and the options for change.
I’ve also had the opportunity to coach a client who defined leadership as delegation, and a coaching approach to leadership as training.
Her gift to me was to remind me to take nothing at all for granted about leaders’ views of leadership – people whose views of leadership and of appropriate leadership behaviours may be diametrically opposed to my own.
In bringing me up short, this leader underlined how far some organisations have yet to travel in achieving a more informed view of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of effective leadership, and how I need to be in those contexts.
Lindsay Wittenberg is director of Lindsay Wittenberg Ltd. She is an executive coach who specialises in authentic leadership, career development and cross-cultural coaching