An international executive repatriated to UK HQ seeks a career change, one with meaning. But why? How can coaching surface and work with a hidden agenda?
The Issue
Barbara is a high achiever, both professionally and personally, in her 40s, working for a global oil business, who is being repatriated to a role in a restructuring division. The atmosphere in her division is challenging – a critical blame culture underlies fears of redundancy.
Her career change goal is to explore other disciplines and industries to find a more meaningful role and realign her CV to suit the external market. What brought this on? Surely the company wants to retain its significant investment? Barbara is not owning up.
She’s a global nomad, highly culturally adaptable, having lived and/or worked in five countries across Europe and Asia. As a graduate linguist she’s enjoyed international fast track commercial management training in a VUCA environment. Recruited in the UK she originates from elsewhere in Europe where her family still reside. During her last posting she separated from her husband and felt the need to repatriate her children to the UK, possibly a conscious search for being grounded.
During the coaching contract Barbara reveals her relationship with her boss is poor and she’s clashing with the traditional status quo – perhaps because of her multiple perspectives.
The boss has given her a bad performance review, limiting her potential for an internal career move. How can coaching help her work out her next steps?
The Interventions
Penelope Parish
Career, leadership and personal development coach
This client appears to be very pragmatic in sticking to her agenda of identifying a new career move, yet her key issue seems to be about finding a meaningful and purposeful role.
The organisation’s brief seems open, yet repatriation appears to have left Barbara ambivalent towards her role, the organisation – and her future. As I specialise in career transitions across cultures, I’d work with her to enable her to make choices on: “Who I am and want to be.”his client appears to be very pragmatic in sticking to her agenda of identifying a new career move, yet her key issue seems to be about finding a meaningful and purposeful role.
I would begin with her work/life story and identify her strengths of skills, experience, projects and roles. We would then review her cultural origins to clarify the context she draws on in normal and unusual situations. This would enable her to appreciate her cultural position, normalise her situation as a global nomad and feel grounded.
Next, I would encourage her to describe her future career aspirations, highlighting her dreams and real desires. We would discuss her VIA character strengths, values and beliefs, in relation to potential roles. We would generate possible options to enable her to be her ‘best self’ and reach beyond what she believes possible. Linking options with her skill and experience strengths would enable her to flourish internationally and have a meaningful impact on others while supporting her family.
We’d review possible role options in her industry, organisation, international business experience, interests and personal cultural makeup. We’d build on past success stories to clarify her network and how she may adapt to develop new relationships. Key would be identifying new activities to enable her to connect globally in the organisation, business community, friends and family and maximise positive relationships.
Barbara could then focus her efforts on securing a meaningful role and connect authentically with her environment.
Ben Renshaw
Leadership coach
The starting point would be to map out Barbara’s current reality to discover the root cause of the plethora of issues. These include: repatriation, being in a blame culture, fear of redundancy, her relationship with her boss, performance review, internal role, having a meaningful future, marriage and children. We would also see if there are any other issues to flesh out. I would then challenge her to paint a picture of what success looks like in a given timeframe…potentially 12 months as we are not looking at a quick win.
Next we would dive into any barriers that could potentially stop her from moving away from her current reality. At this point I would not analyse them in-depth. Instead I would get under the skin of the presenting issues that Barbara had already outlined. It is very hard to predict what would surface, but I sense that Barbara is so driven by the need to achieve (to the possible detriment of her own marriage and family) that this would be key. Often the main driver behind a high achiever is the fear of failure. If this were the case it would be useful to explore examples of when she had failed in the past, and if there are any learnings she could apply now.
Once we had identified the root cause of the issue the next step for Barbara would be to explore her authentic self in more depth. One of the strengths of a high achiever is the ability to adapt to different situations. However, the cost is that you can lose your authentic self. Key elements of authenticity to identify would be Barbara’s personal purpose, values, strengths, vision and goals of how she would want to be in work, life and relationships. This would require deep reflection and real honesty to put a framework together to enable Barbara to make decisions about her future.
Barbara would need to enter into honest conversations with significant relationships, starting with her husband, children and boss. She needs to understand what success looks like for them and if it lines up with her own. Ideally, realignment in her relationships would give her extra clarity alongside her own framework.