the test before the test

the dysfunctional reaction to dysfunction

Yesterday (Friday) was my driving test. My entire week has been thrown out by the emotion induced by the upcoming deadline. I got to a point where I felt a meltdown approaching. So to protect myself, I found a (literal) dark corner to work in away from all people and tried to have as little peopling as possible. But of course, as a coach, peopling is my bread and butter. So it isn’t great when I’m at work and feel that people are just too much to handle today. Coaches are human too though, and sometimes we have needs that conflict with our ability to support the needs of others.

There are other things I do as part of my role that don’t involve human interaction, and when I need to retreat into myself, there is always a long to do list of things that I’ve been putting off that are perfect to do instead. So I set about building PowerPoint presentations, writing documents, and tidying up my digital world. We all know the universe loves to have a good laugh though, and I was needed more this week by the people I support than I’ve been needed for the last month. Despite my declining sanity, I had to push through and give others what little of myself I had left.

By the end of Wednesday, I was so completely overwhelmed by the dysfunctions around me and my perceived lack of ability to do anything about them that I was ready to run a scorched-earth strategy. (The irony of such dysfunction in the face of dysfunction isn’t lost on me…) When I feel this f*** it all energy come over me, I turn to philosophy. Many of my religious friends talk of being able to open their chosen holy text and finding there on that open page precisely what they needed to get them through the moment. I am not religious, and so without divine intervention, I had to hope that opening a random page in a random book would give me what I needed. Well, many hours and many books later, I open up Meditations and read many pages before reading this:

They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil

I have been fortunate enough to work in organisations with beautiful agile implementations, where the teams are allowed to self-organise and self-manage, and as a result, deliver exceptional products. I am a transformation coach though, so I tend to work in ugly organisations where people have never been allowed to do anything they weren’t told to do and are so crippled and constrained by this that they are incapable of doing or thinking anything for themselves.

If one hasn’t had the privilege of seeing the extremes of the beauty of ugliness that can be present in the workplace, then how can one tell the difference between good and poor-quality leadership and management?

The second half of this week, and as we advance, I am to remind myself that everyone is trying their best, and it is not their fault that they do not see the ugliness of the world they are creating. It is my place to guide them to the beauty of the world the collective tells me they want. There is the ability to create great beauty in everyone; uncovering it and providing them with the tools to express the beauty inside them is my job. I am there to show them the path.

Of course, they are the ones who have to walk it…