Leadership is like standing in a fast-flowing stream. Either you’re anchored or you’re buffeted by currents. Coaching enables us to discover our truth
By Lindsay Wittenberg
Leaders I coach are, in a sense, standing in a stream that is the flow of their life at work – the living of their organisational culture.
The water flows around some of them in eddies and currents in which they stand anchored and balanced. However, for many others the currents jostle them this way and that, challenging them to stay stable and upright on what they experience as a slippery and uneven surface underfoot.
Some of these leaders may feel that they’re facing upstream, trying to keep their balance while a torrent of behaviours that they don’t align or identify with rushes endlessly towards them. These leaders are challenged by the most basic task of standing up every day and delivering on their agenda.
Clients I’ve coached in this situation include some who struggle with their CEOs’ refusal to engage with how things really are, some who have been hired externally because they represent fresh thinking (but who experience their environments as unable or unwilling to accommodate their difference), and some whose personal values differ fundamentally from the lived values of their organisations. Others don’t dare mention their almost intolerable stress levels.
Clients in all such situations often find it difficult to speak their truth at work because doing so might be career-threatening, or for fear that they’d be regarded as weak and not up to the job. Simply being different and/or having a sense of lack of integrity, is stressful and exhausting for these leaders, and has a negative effect on their wellbeing, with an inevitable knock-on effect on their performance.
I’ve had to reflect carefully and honestly on what my role is in such situations, given that the client’s wellbeing is always highest on my list of priorities. Overall I see that role as facilitating them to thrive – and sometimes part of the role is to equip them to influence more effectively in a resistant culture. This can involve witnessing them moving towards a point where they’re becoming so stressed that it’s hard for them to function, and when there appears to be no realistic prospect of the environment changing, or their changing it, in any significant sense.
Simply facing, experiencing and accepting what is, in all its difficulty, seems to offer something new and meaningful to clients. Rather than working directly on a solution, I’ve found my coaching is more effective in these difficult environments by enabling an understanding of what’s going on culturally around the individual. Sometimes this can be done through a systemically orientated question on belonging such as, ‘What does it take to belong here?’, or by enabling a stance of greater compassion for self, peers, bosses.
This can arise in a coaching conversation whose value some clients have expressed as: ‘It’s good to be able to speak the truth at last’ about themselves and the message they dare not express elsewhere. And their greater compassion comes partly from realising what they, a boss or a peer, are loyal to in the prevailing (or previous) culture, and how the culture is embedded in the organisation’s history.
And for me, the repeated lesson is to remind myself to stand back and look at it all through a bigger, broader lens of simultaneous clear detachment and profound connection – so that I remain steady and firm on the bed of the stream.
- 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