Why are we so reluctant to face uncomfortable facts? Maybe we should look past conformity and constructively challenge the norm in ourselves and others
Lindsay Wittenberg
When you get to know an organisation because you’ve had a few coaching assignments with them, you begin to notice themes and patterns in behaviours and attitudes.
My attention has been drawn lately by patterns in organisational behaviour that appear to me to be counterproductive, or to ignore obvious truths.
There’s the company that fails to hold a leader accountable for inappropriate demands on one after another of the people who report to her. Those demands result in one individual being signed off with stress for three months, and retention rates falling in the team, while the leader appears to change nothing about her behaviour, and doesn’t appear to be held to account, although she’s moved to another role.
There’s the organisation that fails to see the signs of distress in a team, focusing on the urgent completion of a project, regardless of the implications for those responsible for planning, resourcing and implementing it under pressure. The contrast between the lived experience and the organisation’s claimed values is striking.
In such situations I find myself thinking about humans’ reluctance to confront uncomfortable facts, which Margaret Heffernan treats so powerfully in her book Wilful Blindness1. In a talk she gave recently she suggested we all have freedom that we don’t use enough – the capacity to act more freely and see better: in other words, to see beyond the norms that surround us. We overestimate the benefit of conformity, we don’t notice what’s around us, and we fail to constructively challenge ourselves and others.
I believe my role as external coach carries responsibility to surface and illuminate what may be hidden or opaque, bringing compassion, balance and safety. I see my role as also to peel away layers of wilful blindness and enable sight of reality, which can be uncomfortable, confronting and liberating for my clients. I need also to facilitate the client to build the courage they require if they are to encounter difficult realities.
Equally, I need to remember that my role is to equip my clients to flourish rather than to promote my own values (even though those values implicitly and explicitly underpin my coaching) and to accompany the client as they explore the implications of clear sightedness and the process of making decisions about how to handle inconvenient truths (as US politician and environmentalist Al Gore might put it).
Coaching can offer some of its greatest value, I believe, by creating a space of such safety that the client feels able to face – and wrestle with – new, confronting, difficult and even existential questions which they have previously been able to avoid by getting lost in their own and in their organisation’s wilful blindness.
It’s one thing to engage with your own wilful blindness, but it’s quite another to take on the wilful blindness of the organisation that employs you. Those that do may find it hugely difficult (witness the experience of whistleblowers, who may risk the survival of their jobs and their careers) – and also the fullest expression of their authenticity.
One recent client of mine, who had been on that journey, remarked at the end of his coaching: “The coaching programme made me realise I am actually a human being”… so the hidden had, for him, become visible.
- Lindsay Wittenberg is director of Lindsay Wittenberg Ltd. She is an executive coach who specialises in authentic leadership, career development and cross-cultural coaching
1 M Heffernan, Wilful Blindness:Why We Ignore the Obvious, London: Simon & Schuster, 2012