be humble and compassioante

breathing can also help

After many years of working in agile transformations, certain behaviours are repeatedly exhibited by each new group of people I work with. After seeing these behaviours in new people year after year, it can start to grind. The repetition of being questioned about the same fundamentals of a new paradigm set in an old context can become painful. The initial reaction to being asked naïve questions can be unfairly judgemental and result in a generally unkind opinion. This isn’t great, though, as these people are clients.

The worst crimes coaches see are when our clients are trying to do things in the same old way, but this time using different words in a confusing and often meaningless way to describe what they’re doing and creating new roles that can’t do what they think they should be able to do.

Our job as coaches is to constantly stand in a position of love and compassion while talking to people about that in which we are experts. We have to explain concepts that we have spent years, if not decades, thinking and talking about, mulling over extreme and unlikely scenarios for the sheer intellectual delight of it. We have to explain these concepts on the most superficial of levels so that a novice can understand, remain humble, and not be patronising or condescending.

By trying to remember that it is for us to identify the underlying incorrect assumptions and reflect those assumptions back. Only then are we in a position to explain the differences between how people think it is and what it actually is. Hopefully, your coaching training included a substantial amount of learning how to ask questions.

By asking questions, we can find out the motivations and assumptions that our clients are making. This allows us to address the actual concerns they have and the problems they are trying to solve. By knowing these things, we can be useful and effective, with the added bonus of potentially appearing much more knowledgeable and wiser than we perhaps are.

·       Why do you need to have X?

·       Who benefits from it?

·       What would the impact of not having it be?

Once I’ve supported my clients in understanding something new, I like to try to give them a way to explain it to the next person. If you’ve just taught someone a difference between project and product management, then it’s likely to change how they make a decision in the future. At that point, they may need to explain how they made that decision to their stakeholders. If they can’t give that explanation, then it could be that their stakeholders are going to be reluctant to approve of an unexpectedly different decision.

I try to summarise the lesson in a few sentences so my clients have the opportunity to understand it better. I explicitly and succinctly review the answers they have given me, the conclusions we have come to together, how they relate to each other, and what the benefits of this new paradigm are for the individuals involved and the organisation as a whole.

·       Instead of using X, we’re going to be using Y

·       Previously, X was used qualitatively by a select few, and we’d like to use Y quantitatively for everyone

·       We think these will be the impacts and the subsequent harms and benefits

Everything is new and different for everyone involved in organisational transformation, and that’s scary. Most of the people we work with are adults with successful careers behind them, trying to learn an entirely new and different way of doing things. The emotional toil involved is always higher than the client may even be letting on to themselves. Many organisations have worked this out, which is partly why workplace coaching has gained such popularity. The irony is that most organisations hiring coaches for transformational work don’t realise why they need coaches, and in many cases, are hiring coaches because they’ve seen and heard that that’s the done thing.

If you struggle to keep yourself in a compassionate space for your client, there are two questions you should consider. Firstly, do you need coaching or coaching supervision to help you remain in a compassionate space? Secondly, is it time to move on to a new client with whom you have a less emotional relationship?

Or perhaps you just need to have a nap…