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WORK THAT ROCKS

by | Aug 29, 2023 | Articles, Features

In this series, Jenny Campbell explores resilience and wellbeing, and the ethics of coaching for healthy organisations.
Part 1: Leaders’ disconnect between widespread burnout and their own behaviour, and how resilience coaching and rigorous data can help

 

Imagine you’re coaching a senior leader whose organisation is growing fast. With growth comes a mad frenzy to get everything done by yesterday.
The coaching has centred on devolving leadership more effectively, with the intended outcome of releasing more leadership capacity to meet exciting growth targets. People are committed yet they’re working up to 80 hours a week to deliver. Your client raises the issue but despite significant coaching conversations and many Aha! moments, nothing really changes.

You’re left in a quandary. Coaching requires being aligned with the client’s agenda, but are you now complicitly working on targets that drive long hours, even burnout? Your ethical code is being rattled.
This is an issue not only for the wellbeing realm. It shows up in other domains such as in diversity, equity and inclusion, and the environmental, social and governance agendas.
So how can we coach ethically in this context?

Figure 1: Employees’ resilience levels
Source: Resilience Dynamics, 2022

 

Leaders’ disconnection from workforce burnout

Many leaders don’t grasp how widespread burnout is and/or don’t know what to do about it.

Some 72% of managers and leaders report they feel ‘used up’ by the end of the day, according to one study (DDI, 2023). Another study finds that 27% of the UK workforce self-report as burnt out, 36-48% nearly burnout, while the under-25s are 8% more likely to experience poor mental health than those aged over 55 (McKinsey Health Foundation, 2022). A third study finds that 31% of HR professionals’ time is now spent tackling mental health issues (HR magazine, 10 May 2021)

Worryingly, our data (Resilience Dynamics, 2022) highlights a growing disconnect between leaders and the workforce – leaders are driving hard for productivity, possibly oblivious to the dangers they’re creating.

Our workforce data shows tiredness and stress are affecting the deeper resilience drivers of capacity and balance. Many employees struggle to create extra capacity, don’t often have a good life balance and experience high levels of tiredness and stress (Resilience Dynamics, 2022; Figure 1).

Leaders, on the other hand, are feeling energetic and optimistic, able to be flexible, and accept things being out of their control (Resilience, Dynamics, 2022), as Figure 2 shows.

 

Figure 2: Leaders’ resilience levels
Source: Resilience Dynamics, 2022

 

 

Our data corroborates other sources such as Gallup’s 2022 survey of 15,001 US employees which found a noticeable difference between the percentage of chief human resources officers agreeing/strongly agreeing with the statement: my organisation cares about the overall wellbeing of our employees (65 and 27% respectively), compared to other employees (24 and 28% respectively; see Figure 3).

 

Figure 3: Optimising the client’s story
Source: Resilience Dynamics, 2022

 

 

Improving wellbeing through coaching, using a resilience lens

Pacing
First, challenge must be paced according to the resilience – the capacity for challenge and change – of client and coach. To do this, we believe it’s fundamental to agree with the client how to assess their resilience levels, transparently, so the coaching work can be progressed in a way that the client can genuinely assimilate the learning.

Data
Having specific data is helpful. Resilience Dynamics coaches, for example, use the Resilience Dynamics self-assessment tools, plus our new Resilience Tracker (part of the Resilience Dynamics Dashboard®) to help clients See – Understand – Optimise their resilience and wellbeing (Figure 3). The insights can be transformative. We find clients owning their own start point or ‘data’ provides clarity and drives the conversation. The data does the work.

More profoundly, people don’t change unless they See themselves – their resilience and wellbeing in their personal context. Their story then becomes alive.

This is true also of organisations. Seeing requires realistic, non-tokenistic measurement. It’s not hard but we still find that not many organisations are investing in important evaluation.

 

Case study: Ferocious ambition
‘Carl’ is the managing director of an international engineering firm. He has an excellent reputation as a commercial leader but not as a people leader. He ensured HR support for employees during the pandemic but his ambitions for the business have seen him drive team members hard, ramping up stress levels for others.

Carl has worked with his coach for many sessions, during his candidature and promotion to his current role, and once in role, to build a personal leadership style that’s fresh and impactful. Coaching with a resilience lens, drawing on different sources of data, has helped him become more self-aware, invest in his own wellbeing, and adopt a more strategic way of leading.

 

The coaching
Stage 1: Pre-promotion
Focus: Readiness for senior leadership
Data: Gathered from initial conversations and observation

The coach, aware of HR’s remit for coaching to address Carl’s people skills and that the promotional process was clearly complex, contracted for a full day’s observational session. Below are extracts from feedback on Carl:

  • Busy busy busy –little time to stop, reflect and learn.
  • Bored easily.
  • Could potentially switch between wanting to be ‘one of the team’ and therefore acting as a kind of buddy, versus being annoyed/frustrated and being forceful in feedback/remarks. It is related to your impatience.
  • The other driver may be because you feel the need to control. This is something to discuss. Control is not needed in everything; instead you need to have confidence that your team can deliver, and let them have the control over all the detail. The key is to consider what are the conditions for your confidence in a particular task/project?
  • I wrote down whilst in team meeting, the ‘rules around here’ for being part of your team. They might prompt some thoughts!
    – Know your numbers, know your people
    – Show up (in body)
    – Don’t ask questions
    – Have some friends in the room
    – Be ready for when Carl might grill you
    – Don’t add in anything that will extend the meeting

 

Carl and the coach agreed that his resilience was in ‘Bounceback’ – from The Resilience Dynamics® model – which explains the range of resilience levels, implications for health and capacity for change. While a feature of the domain of high performance, the continuous ups and downs of Bounceback cause fatigue, which in turn can lead to frustration. These resilience discussions, together with the feedback, set Carl’s coaching agenda, helping him build awareness of self and how he wanted to lead, which he’d previously not had the opportunity to consider.

Carl was promoted to MD around six or so months after the coaching had started.

 

Stage 2: Re-inventing the ship
Focus: Issue resolution as a leader
Data: Qualitative data on Carl’s resilience and wellbeing picked up during coaching conversations

The focus shifted to running the business and Carl’s investment in personal adaptability and wellbeing. Changes he initiated included embracing a more strategic way of operating.

However, the frenzy continued.

Now it was about deliver, deliver, deliver AND change, change, change. Carl exhibited an immense capacity for tackling issues across long periods of time, and with his more stable way of operating, started to gain traction in distributing leadership and building more effective teams.

However, the coach continued to sense that Carl’s Bounceback behaviour continued to dominate, and as the issues continued to mount, others in the leadership team started to voice their concerns about ‘Burnout’, which is expressed within ‘Fragmentation’ in the Resilience Dynamic®.

Conflicts in client behaviour often occur because clients are so used to acting in Bounceback that they know no other way, and their compassion for others suffers. Some people are ‘chronic Bouncebackers’, creating the conditions wherever they go that drive a Bounceback way of living and working.

The drivers that sit underneath this are familiar to coaches – the need to please, to rescue, to prove oneself. The latter, also known as Imposter Syndrome, is rife in high performance organisations. Chronic Bounceback also includes being addicted to the adrenalin drive, habit and not knowing or trusting other ways to perform well. Carl and the coach started to work on Imposter Syndrome. Its hold on Carl was strong but there was change.

 

Stage 3: Letting go and becoming
Focus: Letting go of Imposter Syndrome
Data : The Resilience Dynamic Questionnaire (RDQ)

 

Figure 4: the Resilience Dynamic Questionnaire
Source: Resilience Dynamics, 2022

 

The RDQ demonstrates the range of resilience in which someone operates, showing the highest and lowest scores (see Figure 4).

In this case, the RDQ experience was very revealing, with Carl’s results showing an extreme range for many areas of resilience and wellbeing. Context mattered enormously to him in terms of whether he could be flexible and adaptable, or whether he became really forceful.

The RDQ helped Carl see not only his own extremes but how others might perceive them. It was in some ways a relief. He could see his own story in that data.

A deep double ‘breakthrough’ session was scheduled to help Carl uncover and shift unhelpful beliefs and values. Both coach and client were exhausted at the end, but both had a sense of having completed significant work that would alter Carl’s life and work permanently.

The build-up of trust required to get to this point was significant for Carl to be ‘ready’ to face his deeper fears head on. The coach’s understanding of Chronic Bounceback and how long it takes to shift gave them a framework to work in. The data, too, was pivotal in helping Carl take responsibility for his way of operating.

 

Conclusion
Our ongoing research suggests that resilience is about the capacity for change and that nurturing this is a positive force for good. Resilience has been ill-positioned in a number of organisations, which require staff to ‘toughen up’ in the face of more pressure. We stand against this. Instead we believe coaches should equip organisations to build capability to support healthy high performance.
Coaching is an ethical industry. We can stand up and into difficult subjects like burnout and mental health, offering great coaching and challenge. To do this well, we need to be alongside our clients when they learn how to See – Understand – Optimise within their own context.

It means coaches embracing working with data to best coach for healthy organisations.

It’s work that rocks!

  • Next issue: Coaching teams to be on the front foot and banish burnout

 

About the author

 

References

 

Further information