Sometimes simply giving a person space is all they need to make a change. This article discusses reframing beliefs in a challenging relationship to allow space for growth. Nicole Berg explains
When I was six years old, my mother tells me, I was bullied by a boy, Michael*, in my class.
By the time Valentine’s Day rolled around and I was preparing valentines for my classmates, I was determined to give everyone a valentine except Michael. My mother explained to me, as mothers do, that I couldn’t just leave one person out, and that it was the kind thing to do (aka, the thing I should do) to give everyone a note.
I did so with mild anger and moderate trepidation: perhaps this was more ammunition for Michael to bully me with?
I was cautiously optimistic when Michael didn’t immediately and openly mock my valentine to him. I was absolutely shocked when, after school, he asked if he could walk me home. (Notably, this shock caused me to acquiesce, while my fear and dislike of him remained.)
For the rest of the school year, he walked me home. My ill-feelings towards him faded and our relationship changed – he never bullied me again.
What I learned then has implications now: if a person is going to change, s/he must be given space to do so. What is this ‘space’? Twenty-something years ago it was time (a 15-minute walk), plus a mindset of careful observation rather than assumption. A simple solution is always worth striving for.
Powerful (op)position
Today, we may struggle to find time even for a 15-minute walk, but I’d posit that we struggle even more to approach situations of challenge or conflict with an open, flexible mindset.
My client, Lydia*, was a graduate trainee for a large financial institution, and very much ‘high potential’. She’d entered the graduate scheme with solid work experience and a recently completed MBA, and was rated highly among her colleagues as well as the supervisors of the graduate scheme.
All signs pointed towards her receiving a good job offer. She also could see that, from the company’s perspective, it would be wise to offer her a position in the area where she already had work experience; indeed, a senior manager from this particular department had already reached out to her. However, Lydia had purposefully undertaken her MBA and placement on the scheme to grow her career in another direction.
While Lydia was confident she’d gained the skills to do good work in a new area, her confidence fell away when she spoke about asserting this desire, particularly to a senior HR executive with whom she had a meeting scheduled, and who would decide the offer of a position.
We explored this and discovered that the source of this hesitancy was a feeling of powerlessness: Lydia felt she could stand tall on her own, but next to a senior HR executive, she felt dwarfed by the perceived power that their title carried. This was compounded by Lydia’s upbringing in a culture where the custom is to defer to one’s elders. Deeply uncomfortable with the idea of disagreeing with the HR executive, Lydia felt the only way she could exercise her limited power was to leave the company if the offer was not in line with her, as yet, unspoken desires.
Finding the ‘And’
Through coaching, we uncovered that Lydia’s feeling of powerlessness stemmed from key limiting beliefs:
- A senior executive would not be interested in Lydia’s satisfaction, instead focusing wholly on
direct impacts on the company’s bottom line - A person’s power, in professional relationships, is equated with their role in a hierarchy
- The HR executive would view Lydia as ungrateful and oppositional if she expressed her career goals.
Carol Wilson, founder and CEO at Coaching Culture at Work, fellow of the AC, ILM and PSA, and author of Performance Coaching: A Complete Guide to Best Practice Coaching and Training1 suggests Lydia should start by looking at the ‘OK Corral’, a tool developed by Frank Ernst from Berne’s Transactional Analysis2 (see Figure 1).
In every exchange with another person, we’re acting from one of the four boxes in the tool, often moving around between them:
- Not OK/OK: I am not valuing myself
- OK/Not OK: I am a bully
- Not OK/Not OK: We are helpless
- OK/OK: We are two capable adults who can work together to achieve great things.
- Lydia should identify where she stands in relation to the HR executive, by shading in the boxes (see Figure 1), and then asking questions based on the GROW model (Identify Goal, Reality, Options, Will to act; see Figure 2):
- What is my main goal?
- What do I want for myself, for others, for the relationship?
- What is the current situation?
- What assumptions am I making that take me away from my goal?
- What evidence do I have for those assumptions, or to refute them?
- What is the real situation?
- If I knew I could do this, what would be my first step? And then what?
Carol also advises that Lydia look for an outcome, from her discussion with the HR executive, that is not ‘either/or’, but ‘and’. Is it possible to find a common goal that satisfies them both?
Permission Protocol is a tool Carol has created for use in challenging conversations (http://bit.ly/2KxVgOR). Asking permission makes the space safer. Lydia should strike a healthy balance between this and stating her message without watering it down (“I’m probably wrong, but …” is an example of a watered-down message.)
If the HR executive contradicts her, Carol says, Lydia should listen carefully, repeat back his/her point of view, to show she has understood, and then express her own view again, gently, but firmly, and then try to find a compromise. The book, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High3 contains some excellent advice on how to do this.
Finally, Carol states that Lydia should prepare her case thoroughly, gathering evidence and researching what has happened to past trainee graduates.
Creating a new experience
In Lydia’s case, with her HR executive meeting coming up, she and I co-designed an exercise that matched the company’s values with Lydia’s action item of sharing her career goals. For instance, if a value of the company was ‘openness’, Lydia could explicitly frame this act of sharing as alignment with openness.
This helped Lydia to form and rehearse what she wanted to share; to mitigate her feeling of being perceived as oppositional, and to focus on company values rather than individual goals in case the HR executive was not interested in the latter.
In the subsequent conversation with the HR executive, Lydia discovered this wasn’t the case at all; the executive was highly supportive of her openness and goals.
This resulted in Lydia taking up a position in complete alignment with those goals – no doubt to the benefit of the company as well which, unknowingly, was at risk of losing her.
By taking this action a new experience was created – one in which Lydia successfully asserted her desires to someone in a higher position.
Through this experience, a new belief could be reinforced that would support, instead of limit, in the future. For Lydia, it was as simple as this: executives are people too. Simply does it.
* All names have been changed
- Our themes of Recognise, Release and Reframe will be brought together in a final column on the theme of Respond: how to apply this self-knowledge and inner work to a relationship.
References
- C Wilson, Performance Coaching: A Complete Guide to Best Practice Coaching and Training, London: Kogan Page, 2014
- F H Ernst Jr., MD,Transactional Analysis in the OK Corral: Grid for What’s Happening, F H Ernst III, Addresso’Set Publications, 1971
- K Patterson, J Grenny, R McMillan and A Switzler, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High, London: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2011