If our clients are to be agents for their own change, they have to believe in it – and not just go through the motions
Lindsay Wittenberg
The annual Agents for Change conference – designed to encourage trainee doctors to improve healthcare – took place recently in London. It embodies the recognition that junior doctors need to be instrumental in the ongoing change in the NHS, medical education and training, and our wider society – and to ensure sustainable change for the better. Some of the doctors at this dynamic event manifested noticeable energy for the personal growth and change that supports them to change the world around them.
The conference featured Dr Kate Granger, a 32-year-old doctor who’s a terminally ill cancer patient. She’s experienced countless doctors, nurses and ancillary staff failing to introduce themselves to her, sometimes when she’s been especially vulnerable, leaving her feeling “like a diseased body in a bed, not a person”. Knowing she’s approaching the end of her life, and grasping the nettle of reflection on her identity and the purpose of her life, she’s launched #hellomynameis, a campaign with thousands of followers that now extends well beyond the NHS.
Change – physical, emotional and psychological – has been forced upon her, and out of that she has created change that has had significant impact on medical staff, patients, managers and leaders.
Coaches are in the business of change.
We facilitate change in clients, who generally recognise that if anything is to change in their environments, systems and workplaces, they need to change something in themselves. Most are interested in creating such sustained internal change – in thinking, behaviour, relationships and effectiveness – so they can achieve a new order of outcomes.
Occasionally, I find myself working with a client who resents changing. Such clients may change their behaviour, but I question how sustainable this change is, if it comes from an external imperative (such as pleasing the boss). What can the impact be of such superficial change – and what value for money is the organisational sponsor getting?
It intrigues me that a senior person may not recognise that career development is about growth, or that they can be complacent about it. I’m curious at their lack of recognition that there’s always room for another step up.
I also find myself checking out my own integrity in coaching a leader who is satisfied to make changes to his or her behaviour in order to put a tick in the box, but who doesn’t really believe in those changes, or who mistakes his or her boss’s acknowledgment of their change for permission to stop developing.
However, reflection and supervision have helped me realise it isn’t as simple as that. My role and responsibility as executive coach are to robustly challenge inauthentic change and to sensitively facilitate deep reflection, both in and between sessions.
I’m inspired by the energy and passion of those junior doctors achieving authentic, meaningful and occasionally far-reaching change in their complex and demanding systems, but I need to accept my client as I find them, and neither interpret nor judge.
Lindsay Wittenberg is director of Lindsay Wittenberg Ltd. She is an executive coach who specialises in authentic leadership, career development and cross-cultural coaching
www.lindsaywittenberg.co.uk
COACHING AT WORK, VOLUME 9, ISSUE 5