A previously model leader has begun shouting at junior team members, causing much distress.
How can we address his emotional outbursts through coaching?
THE ISSUE
A senior leader has been reported for his emotional outbursts recently during meetings with junior members of his team.
He has been with the organisation for several years and until recently has been a model leader, demonstrating best practice in terms of managing and leading others. However, circumstances may have changed for him. He has been working longer hours, including some weekends, and is also experiencing additional pressure at work due to a key team member being away on long-term sick leave.
During a meeting last week, he became very agitated and anxious and shouted at a team member for not producing a particular report on time. The previous week he was heard shouting at another member of his team who then left the meeting in tears. These are seemingly unusual behaviours for the leader. However, they are having an impact on others, and they have been noticed and reported recently to the HR department by a member of the leader’s team.
The HR department has spoken to the leader and discussed these incidents, and he has agreed with HR’s recommendations and requested some coaching to help him to manage his emotions at this time. Given this backdrop, how would you approach coaching this leader?
Veronica Munro, international C-suite coach
THE INTERVENTIONS
Dan Newby, Founder, School of Emotions, and executive coach/author
Exhaustion tends to either heighten or dull our emotions. The leader’s emotions are spilling out because they are bigger than his capacity to contain them.
I would investigate which emotions are challenging him and provoking his agitation and shouting. Agitation often points to irritation, frustration, annoyance or anger. Shouting can be provoked by emotions as different as fear, anger, excitement, fury or loyalty.
The emotion he identifies will be the ‘you are here’ dot on his emotional map. Let’s imagine he selects frustration.
My approach is to ask the following:
- What does frustration mean to him?
- How is it serving him in this situation?
- How is it acting as a barrier?
- Does he want to shift to behaviour based on a different emotion?
- What emotion would he choose out of the 200 or more that we each experience?
- What does he imagine is the benefit?
Frustration is co-creative with the belief that something is too slow or difficult. Emotions that might be more productive could include: curiosity (why do things feel so difficult?), self-compassion, tolerance (choosing to endure the situation), or irreverence (looking for irony or humour to relieve tension).
Next, look together for ways he can practise shifting between emotions. This will include a new inner narrative (frustration = ‘this is too slow’ > curiosity = ‘I wonder why’) as well as attention on shifting somatically. Have him facially mimic frustration, then curiosity, and exaggerate these to feel the difference, and get a commitment to practise what, how, when, how often, with whose help.
Richard Haggerty, Transformational coach and author
A leader may be expecting an awkward conversation which draws attention to something they feel embarrassed about. They desire to save face and may feel under duress to be here.
Any emotion can usefully be leveraged and channelled into a better outcome. One strategy is to address this indirectly. Rather than taking the approach of a scolded child, eg: ‘Do you see how this is negatively affecting the office?’ it is implied they have agency to choose better.
- Set a clear frame: Keep focus on the process of coaching, which creates distance from any potential embarrassment: ‘Thank you for being here. I’ve been asked to offer coaching. Coaching is about looking at any gap between where you are and where you want to be. It’s an efficient way is to build on strengths and what’s working.’
- Get agreement and buy in: ‘Sound good?’
- Elicit strengths: ‘What’s going well?’
- Set an outcome: Support leader to create a desired future. ‘What could be even better?’; ‘What do you need to make that to happen?’; ‘What will that do for you?’
- Elicit a metaphor for ‘what could be even better’: Metaphor is a well-researched modality to create an anchor for future resources. It also allows a person to discuss anything that needs restructuring indirectly, yet still get the emotional impact of the transformation. Sometimes it’s easier to represent outcomes as a metaphor: ‘If someone drew a book cover that represented “what could be even better”, what could that look like?’
- Evolve a metaphor: Ask leader to evolve metaphor: ‘What could a [metaphor] like this want to happen?’; ‘When that happens, then what happens?’
- Integrate a new metaphor: ‘What do you know now that you didn’t know before?’
- Future pace: ‘What difference will/could this make?’ Ask this question multiple times
- Responses curated by Veronica Munro