Rita Symons has a natural ability to coach. It stems from her intense curiosity, being well-networked and her very rich career in the NHS. The former president of the EMCC UK launched EMCC Global’s climate coaching initiative in 2019 and continues to raise awareness in her work. Liz Hall reports
When it comes to the climate crisis, “I care because I can’t not care,” says Rita Symons, executive coach, coach supervisor and former president of the EMCC UK.
“I find it incomprehensible that people can’t care, that people can be so stuck in this denial of what’s going on. I think it’s the duty of all of us, particularly those of us in any sort of leadership role, to raise awareness,” says Symons, who spent 22 years working in the National Health Service, ten years of which were at board level, including as a CEO.
“As the human race, we’ve created a reality that’s so egocentric, built around us using the planet as a resource rather than us seeing ourselves as part of this living ecosystem.”
Symons has for two years headed the EMCC Global Climate Action and Sustainability Centre for Excellence, which publishes its report (news), Exploring the role and boundaries of coaching for climate action, on 6 March to coincide with Climate Coaching Action Day. The report summarises research among around 100 coaches, mentors and supervisors. About half believe that the climate crisis should be on the coaching agenda, and half don’t, of whom 17% are vehemently opposed.
Unsurprisingly, given that another of Symons’ passions is inclusion (her book, Stepping out of Otherness, is due to be published by Routledge later this year), Symons says, “I guess we’ve got to hold a space of curiosity. I’ve had conversations with some [opposed respondents]. Some come from a place around the origins of coaching being very business-focused.
“Although I find it quite difficult to put myself in the shoes of the 17%, I respect their views. In the inclusion space, I think the important thing is that we have the conversations. Those people may have been coaching for a very long time and may have an ingrained mindset of this is the only way.
“Maybe that’s understandable. I think the idea of things like degrowth economics is still relatively new, relatively challenging. We have politicians who have denounced it as a risk to our way of being and living. So it’s not surprising in a way that we’ve got this small percentage of people. We are very polarised in life, generally, and this is just a microcosm of that.”
When it comes to changing hearts and minds, Symons, who as well as a first degree in psychology, has an MSc in Public Health Management, learnt from her early days in public health “that fear doesn’t work as a motivator for change”.
“So while I’m really committed to acting in [the climate] space, for me, there’s something about creating a narrative about ‘the third way’ of ‘a better way of living’.
“I don’t think [we need] denial of all the things we’ve built, to go back to living in caves. I’ve been reading about degrowth economics. And I strongly believe there’s a way we can live sustainably and actually be happier. And why wouldn’t you do the work you can do to get us there?
“I’ve made my own choices about how I want to live. We’ve moved from South Walsall to rural Shropshire and we’re trying to grow much more and trying to consume less. One of our goals this year is to plant 50 trees. I recognise how privileged I am to be overlooking a pond and a paddock! But I think, particularly when you talk about climate, we can just find it so overwhelming but actually, if we all make little steps, it all makes a difference, doesn’t it?”
Although Symons had a personal interest in the environment, she wasn’t very active until around 2019.
“To a large extent, Coaching at Work was pivotal in this [shift], [showcasing] the call to action from Alison Whybrow, Linda Aspey and Zoe Cohen. That was a really important provocation for me so as EMCC UK president I had some exploratory conversations with people like Magda Mook (ICF), Hetty Einzig and Eve Turner, who co-founded the Climate Coaching Alliance (CCA) with Whybrow and Josie McLean.
“That brought about the professional bodies’ Joint Statement on Climate Change (https://www.coaching-at-work.com/2020/10/23/joint-global-statement-on-climate-change) which I drafted on behalf of what became nine professional bodies.
She decided to “put more of my energy into that space, reading more and joining the CCA”. And in late 2021, she set up the EMCC Global Climate Action and Sustainability Centre for Excellence, with some volunteers from across the globe.
“I was really clear that the Statement was a lovely beautifully crafted set of words, but if we didn’t do anything, then it was utterly pointless. Setting up this group was around how to turn those words into action.
“We’re here to raise awareness, to create safe space, to give people tools, not to preach and tell people there’s a single right answer.”
In addition to its report, the Centre has published a reflective guide for members, which was discussed at an EMCC Global ‘Tough Talks’ session on Climate Action and Sustainability: What is our role in encouraging a future focus?
In her own coaching, Symons very rarely talks explicitly about climate action. “For me it’s about that systemic awareness. The sorts of questions I’d use to bring this in are, ‘Who are the stakeholders who aren’t in the room?’, ‘What might the consequences of this decision be in a decade’s time?’ ”
Symons makes an effort too to “bring nature into the work…When I’m working online, such as in group supervision, I’ll use imagery of trees, creative writing. And I like outdoor coaching. I did [an outdoor session] a couple of weeks ago and we were walking past a very old oak tree and we just stopped and paused and I said, you know, that oak tree’s obviously been there for about 400 years, what have they seen? What would they suggest to you? I think there’s something very natural about the way we can bring nature into our coaching.”
Getting into coaching
“Of all the development things I did, [coaching] was the thing that changed me most as a person”, says Symons.
She delivered sessions through the NHS internal coaching register. Then a set of challenges in one particular senior leadership role, which “tested my resilience” and in which she became rather “miserable”, saw her decide to take agency and walk away, dedicating herself more fully to coaching.
She undertook further coaching qualifications, in addition to working part-time at a hospice, and built up her business: Enhance Coaching and Consultancy.
“Coaching is something that I’ve come to relatively late but I feel very privileged to call myself a professional coach now.
“And now, I can honestly say there isn’t a day I’ve regretted [the transition].”
She has since qualified, too, to be a supervisor, and particularly loves group supervision, and she offers leadership development, and facilitates Action Learning sets.
EMCC UK
“I joined the board of EMCC because I missed the dynamic of being part of a board team. So, rather naively – bear in mind, I was a very inexperienced coach – when the director of business development role came up, I ended up having a conversation and getting that role. If I’m being honest, particularly as a volunteer, I wasn’t really sure what I was taking on. But I knew that I wanted to belong to something. And when I looked at the professional bodies, EMCC was the one that aligned for me.”
After being on the board for a couple of years, fulfilling different roles, she became “an accidental president. The previous president left after a short time and there was a sense that we needed some stability, for one of the experienced directors to step up. There were only a couple of us who could have done that, and the other individual didn’t want to. So I sort of ended up president by default.
“Since then Rachael Hanley-Browne (who has just stepped down, with Ivan Beaumont taking over) developed it much further but from where I took over, I think I left it in a really good place. We increased the membership and we moved to having a paid operations manager and team which created a step change in the quality of the member experience. And I recruited some excellent directors. I built the team back up again. It was real privilege, and hopefully I left it in a better place and built some of the foundations, I think, for Rachael take forward and build on.”
Now, she doesn’t “miss the governance and the being on a board. That’s not somewhere where I’d put my energy now.”
Publications
Part of where she has been putting her energy has been into her book, Stepping out of Otherness (Routledge, in press).
It sets out the social psychology theory of why humans other. It also draws on her research among eight women of colour who’ve achieved some success, interwoven with her own experiences. In addition, taking a holistic view, drawing on the work of people like Nancy Kline and
Joanna Macy, it points to what she sees as necessary actions for greater inclusion. She includes contributions from others sharing their take on othering, and what they think some of the solutions might be.
“I find that so many books around inclusion describe the negative impact of systemic inequality, but then they stop there, almost leaving you stuck in the trauma. I’ve really tried to think about, what are the systemic interventions that are really going to make a difference?”
Personal experiences around race
When Symons was younger, “I always knew I was different and so I think there’s probably something for me, reflecting back, around a desperate need to fit in. I made myself very small because I didn’t want to stand out.
“Rita isn’t even my name. The name I was given at birth was Priti. At the age of three, I went to nursery school and my teacher asked my mum if she could call me Rita. It causes problems to this day, like I can’t renew my driving license online so on one level it’s an inconvenience. But, when I was writing about it in my book, I really reflected on it. And I thought, what motivated that teacher? How did my parents feel? You know, they’d carefully chosen a name for me, and that was taken away.”
In her career, “I didn’t necessarily often feel that race was an issue. But in my early days in public health, I was always the person asked to work with the Muslim community [Symons isn’t Muslim]. I was always chosen to be the token person [of colour] sent to the mosque to do dental hygiene. In some respects, that was okay, but [in others] it felt like an additional burden at the beginning of my career, when I was trying to learn and do my job really well, I felt that there was always this additional weight that was on my shoulders.
“Then when I was in my 30s, a friend who worked for the Probation Service said, ‘We want some posters, and we want some people who are different. And I then got a message back, saying that her line manager said I didn’t look ethnic enough, and they didn’t use my photos. Here was this white middle-class woman saying I didn’t look brown enough!”
Later, as a senior leader, she was involved in a regional mentoring scheme and was sitting on a platform on a stage, when someone asked her, ‘do you think you’re a role model?’
“My answer was that ‘I don’t get to choose – the very fact I’m here as one of the few directors of colour means I’m a role model.’ And again, I think there’s something of that feeling like both a privilege and a burden.
“I think so much of the work around inclusion ends up very divisive. I’ve increasingly come to the view that positive action programmes don’t always work, because you take people from marginalised groups away, and you work with them, but then you’re sending them back into the same system. I’ve seen people really harmed by that.
“Increasingly, I believe the solution is to bring people together, to facilitate and create a safe space for conversations across difference.
“I think one of the reasons Wondrous People’s [Symons is an associate with the organisation] work really resonates for me, particularly its Race at Work programme, is that it’s really explicit about bringing white groups and people of colour together to have the conversations that need to be had to raise awareness and to really get people to understand and get power groups to understand the impacts of micro-aggressions of systemic inequality in a very sort of visceral way. And I think [white] people need to go through that, that acceptance and shame before they can then get into being really good allies.”
How does she draw on her work in the othering space to feed into coaching with the climate in mind? “I think the key things are curiosity and non-judgement, which is really hard, isn’t it? But I find it’s much easier to get in people’s shoes if you get to know them as human beings.
“It sounds really simple but I think that generative conversation which creates new knowledge is the space we’ve got to get into [to counteract the fact that] our brains are designed to encourage othering, we boost our self-esteem by associating with groups and associating positive characteristics to our group and negative characteristics to other groups.
“I guess the really powerful thing that coaches can bring to this, as well as supporting clients, is doing our self-work and raising our self-awareness about this.”
Clients
In addition to the inclusion work she is doing with Wondrous, Symons’ clients include a large charity for which she coaches vulnerable women, the NHS – she’s a member of the NHS Leadership Academy Faculty delivering on five leadership programmes – the Ministry of Defence (MoD), for which she is delivering a women’s development programme, and the HMRC, where she is offering action learning and facilitation. She also has clients in the private sector, including global companies.
“It’s been interesting to contrast the culture in the public and private sectors. There’s a particular challenge, I think, working with leaders in the public sector where you’ve got the interface with politics. When I first started in the NHS around 1990, the link between politics and the actual day-to-day running of the NHS wasn’t as direct as it is now.
“In the private sector, there’s more freedom to act quickly. [Another] obvious difference is that in the private sector, it’s about profit and shareholders, versus the public sector is about social value.
“I’m very picky about which bits of the private sector I work with. But I’ve found that good leaders are good leaders anywhere, and there are lots of people in the private sector who are really committed to developing social capital and social value as well as profit. There is really good and really poor practice in both.”
Approach
Symons doesn’t identify strongly with a particular coaching approach.
“I’m fairly flexible and adaptable. But I do work holistically and systemically. Maybe it’s because I started off my career in public health. And I’ve studied system theory and complex adaptive theory.
“It’s about really understanding self and the system [the clients] operate in, and developing strategies and tools that allow people to achieve what they want to achieve, whilst maintaining a moral compass that feels comfortable for them. [It’s about] politics with integrity, helping people actually understand the system, but act in a very positive way.”
She’s interested in working with “people who want to work on the big things, who want to work on purpose and legacy. I have no interest in coaching somebody in professional services who wants to make partner. That’s just not the work that I want to be doing. I appreciate people who do that work, but it’s not for me.”
Achievements
What is she proud of?
“I find it really hard to talk about this. I tend to be quite self- critical; it’s something that I’ve always struggled with. And as I’ve done more work on this, I thought, well, maybe that does come down to things like race and gender.
“I am proud of some of the work I did in the NHS although I still feel a sadness about the way I left. But I think what I’m probably most proud of is making a successful transition [out of the NHS]. I remember colleagues saying, lots of people go from being a chief exec to being a coach but not many people do it really successfully, which I suppose I have, going from being a novice coach in 2016 to where I am, becoming the EMCC UK president, some of the work I’ve done such reciprocal mentoring for inclusion in the NHS, being the
lead faculty.”
What made her transition successful?
“I think I did have some skills to build on. I had a very rich career in the NHS, some wonderful experiences, and wonderful people who I’ve worked for or with. And I brought all that resource with me when I first started my business.
“I think part of the reason I’m a good coach is I’m naturally very, very curious and very well-networked. And so I had lots of exploratory conversations and opened lots of doors, 80% of which went nowhere, but actually that was okay because the 20% did lead to work and it was enough. It led to some really exciting opportunities. I called on the relationships that I already had.
“I’m not a religious person but I would describe myself as a spiritual person; I do believe in karma. And I am naturally a people pleaser, a helper, a rescuer. One of my friends described it beautifully. She said that at the point of leaving the NHS, ‘you had a lot of credit in the bank.’ There were a lot of people who were very happy to help me because I’d helped them out in the past. And I do believe that if you’re really positive with other people then when you need something back, that is forthcoming.”
On further reflection on her pre-independent work, she says, “I am proud of the fact that in a challenged health and social care economy, in setting up a transformation programme across nine organisations [seven health, two local authorities], I was the only local leader seen as able to step up and have the confidence of everyone. I think this was in many ways ahead of its time as it was in 2015, pioneering much of the integrated system working we see now. I’m proud that despite the risks, I stepped up and had a go.
“Also, at that time I wrote a mental health strategy which moved to recovery-based, holistic models. There was a shift of investment to recovery and recognising Experts by Experience [people who have recent personal experience of mental health].
“More recently, I was a participant on the Windsor Leadership programme for senior leaders – 12 years ago. And this year I have been asked to go back as a facilitator.
“I’m proud, too, of some of the programmes I’ve developed with the MoD’s senior leaders’ programme, working with women in a very male environment, and creating more of a sense of agency and ability to act and, and confidence.
“Outside of work, I’m proud of the fact I’ve got two wonderful young women as daughters, and that somehow between me and my husband, we managed to bring them up to be so wonderful!
“And on a very personal level, which feels quite difficult, really but I lost my dad in the first wave of Covid and then my mum had cancer, and I’m proud of the way that I took time out and cared for her for a couple of years and I was there at the very end. Proud is probably not the word but I look back and I feel I did the job well.
“So when I stop and think about it, it doesn’t come naturally, but there’s a lot to be proud of.”