Hetty Einzig wants to reinstate feminine values at work, but it’s far from a step backwards. She talks to Liz Hall about her ideas for the future of coaching, her Jewish cultural heritage and how the #MeToo campaign is changing the workplace
Leadership coach, activist and author Hetty Einzig has become one of the go-to coaches and trainers when it comes to developing women, and with her systemic perspective, a highly valued contributor to the debate around which game rules need to shift at work – and beyond.
Einzig reports a marked increase in clients asking her to help them grow their female talent, and she’s involved in numerous initiatives with the development of women at their core.
A faculty member of the Executive Coaching Diploma at the Irish Management Institute in Dublin, she’s currently co-designing an extensive women’s leadership programme for the organisation and she runs a popular two-day programme with fellow coach, Liz Rivers, for women leaders.
She’s increasingly being sought after to speak on women at work too. This month (8-9 March), for example, she was due to speak at the FemmeQ London Summit on the topic: Women Mean Business (http://bit.ly/2ElO45t)
“Calling it FemmeQ is a way of highlighting that both men and women have these capacities – and they’re badly needed in our workplaces [from where they are traditionally sidelined] and in our politics and fractured world.
“It’s about reinstating the importance of key feminine values and ways of thinking and being: inclusivity, intuition, listening deeply, the instinct to care and nurture, compassion and healing and so on,” she says.
The increased interest in the development of women is a sign of the times – and about time. “There are a lot of things coming together. The MeToo campaign, for example, although it was kicked off by sexual harassment, is morphing into something different that’s really important, with people saying ‘enough’, with women saying, ‘actually we can do this much better than men, we can lead’, and ‘give us a chance, we’d like to do it differently’.”
Although protests began with Hollywood, they’re “pertinent to all workplaces, which have been designed, developed and maintained to suit men in power. I find that very exciting and I think there’s an opportunity, almost a responsibility, for coaches to step forward and support women leaders.”
As coaches, “We’ve got to stop thinking of women as lacking self-confidence, and as coaches our job is not to help them fit into a system that’s actually dysfunctional, and that women should really recognise, refine and highlight their strengths, which have been sidelined in the workplace for so long and are much needed.”
Einzig’s ambitious book The Future of Coaching (2017) explores the implications of the rise in women leaders for coaching and beyond, and the synergies between three demographics she sees as key to shaping the workplace: women, millennials and ‘Third Acters’ (those aged 60 and above).
Mixed messages
Like most, Einzig received mixed messages from her mother, which have likely “influenced my current work with women – and my strong belief that women should not be adapting to fit into man-made business and social structures – but need to change the rules of the game. We need to co-create workplaces for the benefit of both women and men.”
Her mother, Susan Einzig, was a Holocaust survivor and a well-known teacher and artist in the post-war Bohemian art scene.
“I both admired her and didn’t want to be like her – like most daughters! Her three messages were: ‘You can do anything you want to in life and I will back you’; ‘men are more vulnerable than women; we as women have to take care of men and cut them some slack’, and ‘the world doesn’t like smart women – you can’t be both beautiful and clever’.
“It wasn’t that she thought [the latter] but that that was the world. And we’re still seeing that today. It was a message that was both useful and difficult to deal with.” How?
“For example, when I was at Cambridge [university], like many 20-year-olds, I thought I knew everything and that if you shout louder, you’ll get heard. I ended up having supervision on my own, because I thought the young lads from these privileged public schools knew nothing about life. I was a bit tough on them“I was told often that people were afraid of me. I was very outspoken and had strong views, and believe it or not, I was quite attractive then,” she chuckles.
She’d been encouraged to be a critical thinker both at home and at the ‘rough and tough’ comprehensive school she’d attended, Holland Park.
“It attracted great teachers. The author Jane Miller was my English teacher and was very influential. She’d come to school in dungarees, smoking cheroots, crossing all the boundaries. She was the first person to challenge me with: ‘Do you really think that? Let’s sharpen up your thinking.’ You were never allowed to use the word ‘nice’.”
At home, she was brought up surrounded by philosophy and spirituality. “We used to go and listen to Krishnamurti every year and Bertrand Russell. I was brought up in a climate which said, ‘the thinking life is the good life’. You have to reflect on who you are, where you are and what you’re going to do. I think it’s impossible to be a daughter or son [of a Holocaust survivor] without at some level trying to work out what it all means.”
On the message she received about men being vulnerable, she says, “Part of my journey in life has been about coming to terms with that. [I have] compassion for what it means to be a man in a world that has narrowed the ‘keyboard’ [of emotions].
“We’re seeing the rather spectacular death throes of the ‘strong man’. The world is much too complex; more scrutiny is needed. [Such men] are too blunt an instrument, thinking that they can do it through might. And I know plenty of men who don’t associate with that approach.”
She cites two young “brilliant” male clients who left their jobs because they wanted to be involved fathers. “I think we’re going to see more millennial men who want a different world.”
Other leadership work includes her involvement with Leaders’ Quest, a social enterprise that works with leaders to create a more equitable and sustainable world. She’s a founder director of Transition Expertise – trained psychologists offering coaching, talent management, leadership and team development to enhance performance.
Coaching
In her book, she explores how coaches and the profession need to grow up and embrace shifts at work and beyond.
“Coaches need to start taking themselves seriously. Coaching emerged either from the athletics model in which case it was all focused on reaching a precise measure of high performance or out of mentoring, of people who thought it would be an easy thing to do, a nice way to retire elegantly But it’s not, it’s a serious and indeed a noble profession.”
Coach trainers need to grasp this and play their part: “Coach training schools are beginning to ramp up and think, are we fulfilling our responsibilities in training coaches for a world that’s changed from when coaching began? They’re recognising they need to equip coaches to work more deeply.
“Traditionally coaches have said, ‘no, we don’t do depression and anxiety’. But I think this is a false barrier and potentially quite dangerous and damaging. When I go into the workplace, the levels of anxiety are massive. If coaches aren’t dealing with that, what are they dealing with?”
She sees the workplace as becoming more open and that “people are seeing their work in a more holistic way and looking at their legacy to the workplace, but also to society and the world beyond.”
With a colleague, she’s just started a big transformation programme for a major airline, which includes coaching and that takes a holistic approach, including spirituality. And the organisation talks “very openly about the work they do in the community and the contribution they’re making to the ‘big ticket’ issues – it’s just part of the work. So I think coaches don’t just need to do deeper, they need to go wider too. We need a good humanist education and to keep abreast of what’s going on in the world.”
We’re moving away from a narrow focus on fitness, and to a more sophisticated view of the body, she says: “Coaches need to become aware that they’re not just receivers, they’re radiators. Just by being in the room, they’re going to influence their client. So the health, the flourishing of their bodies and what they emit is critical.
I think this will be included more in coach training.
“As you and I know, working with the body in a mindful way is the quickest way to change, and since coaches are so pragmatic, they’re going to look for what works.”
Making sense
As well as executive coaching, Einzig’s career has spanned the arts, media, psychology, health, NGO sector and OD. She co-established a successful contemporary art gallery and worked as a journalist for eight years, writing about the arts, health and women in business. She’s held editorial positions at the Sunday Times Magazine and Time Out, while books include the bestseller, Dieting Makes you Fat, and she’s editor of Global Coaching Perspectives, Association for Coaching’s online magazine.
For Einzig, journalism/writing and psychology are “intimately connected as they’re about what makes people tick, which I am endlessly fascinated by”.
“We may have explored every corner of the Earth, but not all corners of the mind. People are paradoxical – they’ll say one thing, then do another. And the contradictions are just fascinating. People don’t work in their best interests.
“[Working with people] is exciting, and humbling – the courage that I have seen over and over again, the kindness if you create a space for people to be kind, to be compassionate, to contribute…the moment you create the environment, they’ll come forward. And the workplace is a missed trick – they haven’t created the right environment.”
She trained and then worked for a number of years as a psychotherapist within the transpersonal approach. Psychosynthesis has been hugely influential. “This was my Road to Damascus moment, discovering how to bring psychology, sport and literature together. I came home at that moment.
“Psychosynthesis is highly spiritual, and the GROW model [popularised by Whitmore] is spiritual too. It’s about which direction you are headed.”
After working as founding director of the Parenting Education & Support Forum (now Parenting UK), which prompted her to further explore the world of work, she moved into coaching. She wanted to resume being more closely involved with people without working as a therapist, and was inspired by friends with similar backgrounds moving into coaching. These included the late Sir John Whitmore and psychologist Christopher Connolly, who’d both also trained in psychosynthesis.
Activism
Einzig’s mother was very political, and it’s rubbed off onto her daughter. “This was the legacy for her, from having come through the Holocaust. She was on the last Kindertransport train leaving Berlin, Germany. Only her mother and older brother escaped. She shared with other survivors a love of life. So it was good food, holidays, “enjoy yourself”.
“We didn’t have lots of material things. We had a simple house with no central heating, but we had second-hand pretty things. There was this idea of ‘beauty as normal’; she was an artist, and created beautiful environments.
So we’d have beautiful china; she’d see beauty in a cracked pot and in people. She was much admired and loved.
“We’d sit around the dinner table and have delicious food, nice wine and conversation. That’s quite common with lots of Jewish people. What’s not so common is becoming political and part of the movement of ‘we can create a better life, we must never let this happen again’. It’s that sense that we’re all citizens and all have responsibility to do our bit towards a better life. It’s indelibly part of my DNA; it comes out in my latest book.
“I don’t think coaches are neutral. Coaches want to do good and make a contribution. We should be proud of that, find ways to articulate it and be upfront about our values. Increasingly, clients don’t just want someone to ask clever questions, they want a space in which to have a deep conversation. You can’t meet a leader at the right level unless you’ve worked that out yourself.”
Through Whitmore, she became a founder member of Be the Change (now Be the Change Initiative), which recognises the environment, social justice and the spiritual as interdependent essentials for sustainability. She’s worked with the Pachamama Alliance too, and describes these non-profits as having immersed her in alternative worldviews.
Other influences include Viktor Frankl; Cohen (2001) whose book studied the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded, Heffernan’s book (2011) which builds on Cohen’s work, and US feminist Carol Gilligan and UK feminist Ann Oakley, who’ve “given primacy to the way women think – differently to men – and have been very influential, but not widely recognised”.
Next steps
Einzig is excited about her next book, aimed more widely than just at coaches. The topic is consumption, including how we’re consuming the Earth and our hunger for inspiration and experience.
One thing’s for sure, whatever she does next, she’ll be inspired by one of her favourite (cited in Einzig, 2017) definitions of success attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but actually written by Bessie Stanley in 1905:
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”
References and further information
- S Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001
- M Heffernan, Wilful Blindness: Why we Ignore the Obvious at our Peril, London: Simon & Schuster, 2011
- H Einzig, The Future of Coaching, London: Routledge, 2017
- H Einzig, ‘Don’t play by the rules: how to reignite women’s fire in the workplace’, in The Guardian, 2016 http://bit.ly/2GrN7cs