Looking forward to in person development programmes again? With participants hardly ever looking away from their smartphone screen? Maybe not…
18 months working from home gave me the opportunity to experiment with new learning formats. Some of them have a lot to bring to more traditional classroom learning formats. Of course, I was delighted to go back to in-person development programmes and team offsites, which remain more effective than virtual events to offer networking and bonding opportunities. But for the rest, adapting my design and facilitation skills to virtual formats and tools took my practice to another level. I will not go back to the good old 2-3 consecutive day-programme, and here’s why.
Working from home in lockdown accelerated pre-existing trends
3 consecutive days in my calendar for a leadership development programme? Are you joking?
Back in 2019, before the Covid pandemic first broke out, some highly rated leadership development programmes were already struggling to attract participants. It was no longer possible to squeeze 3 consecutive days + up to 2 days travel time into senior leaders’ ever more constrained calendars. Yet, it did them good to cross off those few days in their calendar, to tell their PA “I’m off”, and finally take a step back from their frenetic daily pressure. Those who did all said so. The fact remains that the cohorts were more and more difficult to recruit and last-minute withdrawals more and more frequent.
The need to shorten and / or split development time was already there before the pandemic. Working from home under lockdown only made this new need unavoidable.
90 minutes without looking at my phone? Seriously?
I must confess that until Covid, I used to be one of those facilitators who would complain about those participants who could not spend 90 minutes in a room without compulsively looking at their phone. I even remember asking a dear client, may she forgive me, what she thought about taking her Exec Team to a dream location and seeing them spend their whole time sending text messages.
Scattered attention is a scourge, but very few of my clients expect me to tackle it, as a consultant, a facilitator or as a coach. Even with mindful contracting at the beginning of a session, mobile phones and tablets reappear at the first break… And never disappear again. On the other hand, policing the group after every break ends up hurting the relationship with the participants.
Attention span shortening is a fact. It became much worse with full-time remote working, but again, it was there earlier.
We don’t need to sit together in a room to watch a presentation or a video!
Back in 2019 (when was that again?) meetings in which the participants were asked to sit and listen were known to be improductive. Why not send a video or a written document, that everyone can discover at their convenience and pace. The trend towards scripted lectures is telling: who fills a room by reading their speech from behind a lectern nowadays?
Videoconferencing has made these monologues unbearable for all my clients, without exception. And this is true for keynote speeches, development programmes as well as daily meetings.
Our budgets are shrinking, we need maximum ROI!
The momentary disappearing of travel, room rental and facilitation equipment expenses helped my clients cope with drastic budget cuts at the beginning of the pandemic. And although virtual formats require more design and preparation time, many professionals got used to meeting higher expectations with tighter budgets. In 2022, travel costs are back in the equation, inflation and recession forecast take a heavy toll on budgets, whilst talent retention challenges, leading to increased L&D demand, are on the rise.
ROI expectations have never been higher and this trend is here to stay.
These constraints support the development of efficient learning formats.
Leadership development programmes do not look like instructor-led live group sessions + a few individual follow-up coaching sessions any longer. They are designed to make the most of the participants’ learning processes.
Stretching the learning process over time
Splitting the live group sessions over several weeks gives learners time to think, experiment and practice between two group sessions. Those are focused on debriefing, exchanging feedback and grabbing more learnings to take the leaerners’ practice to the next level. This stretch is necessary to acquire complex behavioural skills.
One doesn’t learn how to listen or manage conflict in 3 days, even with the best role playing activities. It is absolutely necessary to practice, fail, receive feedback, reflect and start again. To plan learning in multiple steps enables this process to unfold.
Stretching the learning process over space
Reducing classroom learning time doens’t mean reducing the overall learning time. It means creating learning moments outside of the classroom, in other contexts, by other means.
At home, reading documents or watching videos on one’s own,
At the office with peers, to experiment new ways of thinking,
On the job, to practice.
Learning has always taken these many paths, more or less formally. Optimising each of them has become indispensable.
What remains to be done in the classroom with a facilitator or a coach is: creating collective psychological safety, share experiences, help each other. This kind of session doesn’t have much in common with traditional didactic presentations!
Stretching the learning process over various tools
Videoconferencing, reading, writing, asynchronous video watching, games, facilitation and revising apps… Using a variety of tools is more than ever necessary, especially to address the shrinking attention span mentioned above. Rather than control the incontrollable and fight endlessly to keep mobile phones out of sight, launching a quizz the participants will take on their phones is a smart way to have them use their phones for the benefit of their learning. A variety of tools also enables the learners to connect when and where they need to access the resources they need.
When used purposefully, tech is a precious ally to channel attention, make resources accessible and plan the learning journey.
Creating opportunities to learn in real-life situations
Since learning time is reduced at the benefit of time on the job, “real life” becomes the place where practical training happens. Designing and planning these experiments to be meaningful without putting the business at risk is a skill L&D professionals need to develop.
For these experiments to be insightful, it is necessary to ignite and guide the reflection the learning will emerge from. Learning comes from reflecting over the experience, not from the experience itself.
Multiplying learning relationships
To learn well, one needs support:
from peers who experience the same challenges
from managers who invest time and energy in their team’s development
from mentors, who are a few learnings ahead,
from L&D professionals, who will create and organise these relationships, instead of playing every role like they used to in the old days.
Moving forward, a facilitator / group coach / instructional designer’s job is to:
create a group dynamic where the learners will find enough psychological safety to take risks
encourage learner-manager conversations where learning follow-up will happen
facilitate an alumni network where people who are making similar learnings can keep learning from each other over time.
Instructors standing in front of a powerpoint presentation should no longer exist.
The most impactful development programmes I’ve witnessed recently have a few features in common:
A brief plenary session to orient the learners,
Sessions in small peer learning groups, focused on their ongoing challenges. The role of the coaches is “only” to create and maintain a group dynamic and suggest a conversation process matching their chosen topics.
Frequent informal moments, to break the ice and start building a network,
Individual and / or collective follow-up sessions several weeks after the face-to-face sessions.
Individual or buddy-pair homework between each session,
A wrapping-up plenary session to share learnings, reflect back on the learning journey and look forward.
Such development programmes can be hosted partly face-to-face partly online, or 100% virtually.
When the Covid pandemic broke out in 2020, I soon realised that shifting from the classroom to the Zoomroom would require revisiting my training design and delivery practices.I chose to train into Accelerated Learning withThe Learning Gym, Ltd. Melanie Martinelli and Shilpa Subramaniam and their team were worldclass adult learning specialists. They also had, 10 years virtual training under their belt, which none of their European competitor had back then.
Accelerated Learning has helped my training and coaching activity thrive throughout the pandemic. Since then, in person as well as virtually, I keep using the AL learner-centered principles to respond to my clients’ development needs.
Increasing development demandand talent retention challenges,
Shrinking learner availability,
Increasingly volatile attention and engagement,
Unprecedented budget cuts.
In this article, I’m sharing how AL still helps me address these conflicting challenges.
Whatever the topic or the audience, AL follows a 4-step process : Preparation, Presentation, Practice and Performance
Source : The Learning Gym Ltd
Less than half of the learning process happens in the session, with the trainer. For learning to stick, content discovery needs to be done prior to the session, asynchronously. Application of the learnings happens on the job, after the session. The training session focuses on integrating the learnings through group interactions.
Shilpa Subramaniam, co-founder of The Learning Gym Ltd
The Accelerated Learning facilitator plays a completely different role to the traditional trainer
Most traditional training sessions and meetings comprise instructor-led didactic presentations.
On the other hand, AL dramatically reduces the amount of time a facilitator spends ‘teaching’. Instead, the focus is on participants discovering the content through a variety of paced and playful activities before, during, and after each session. Once participants have discovered the content, it’s time to practice by solving practical cases, helping each other on real challenges, and so on.
If you need to prioritise between Presentation and Practice, always choose Practice. And the less slides you make, the better! It’s almost impossible to read and listen at the same time. You don’t want to compete with your slides for your participants’ attention! Even when you write instructions for breakout activities, you need to be as concise and precise as possible. I always advise my participants to take a picture of the instructions with their phone before going into breakout rooms.
Melanie Martinelli, co-founder of The Learning Gym Ltd
What’s the difference between face-to-face and online Accelerated Learning ?
Online training is all about preparation.
It is true for both the facilitator and the participants, but for different reasons.
Design represents 80% of the facilitator’s job. For the participants, the Preparation phase is meant to arouse their interest and address their psychological or technical learning fears. You also need to keep in mind that they have little time to invest in this prep and that not all of them will do their homework.
Accelerated Learning was initially designed for face-to-face training. But in fact, most AL activities work brilliantly online!
There are more than 200 AL activities, with which you can cover the 4 steps of the learning cycle on any topic, with any audience. All of them are transferable online, I tried them all! Most of the time they require little tech. With breakout rooms, a whiteboard and the chat, you can offer your participants amazing experiences.
Melanie Martinelli
The Virtual Accelerated Learning facilitator needs to address the learners’ fears.
At least at the beginning, the learners’ fear are not only psychological but also technical.
Addressing these fears is necessary to enable everyone to be fully present at the session, whether they are familiar with videoconferencing tools or not.
A dedicated tech producer helps the facilitator and the participants feel comfortable. Even with a few years’ experience in virtual training, s*** happens : the network, the bandwidth, the server – anything can go wrong. Besides, you never know if everyone has the latest version of the tools you’re using. My secret is to debunk the learners’ fears throughout the Preparation phase. I send them a connection tutorial, I’m online and available for tech support 20 minutes before the session begins, I have great check-in games to help them become familiar with the platform’s features. All of this softly makes the fears go away.
Honey Raza, tech producer at The Learning Gym Ltd
Facilitators too, can be technically challenged.
There are plenty of online facilitation tools such as Mentimeter for polls, Padlet/Jamboard for collaborative visuals, and Kahoot to create fun quizzes. These tools are awesome, provided you use them with discretion as they can increase the risk of technical mishaps and attention loss.
I focus on the learners’ experience in the design phase. What do they come to learn? I start by designing a low-tech version. I only add a tool if I’m convinced it’s the best way to reach a learning goal. I never forget a tool requires handling, time, and might turn the learner experience into a nightmare. Attention is not tech dependent. It’s a question of learning design. As far as tools are concerned, my motto is “less is more”!
Melanie
How about relationships in the virtual Accelerated Learning world?
Whether face-to-face or virtual, check-ins are essential for a successful learning program. Probably more so online, where sessions are shorter and do not have informal moments or spaces. It’s important to give the learners time to get acquainted with each other via an icebreaker, or to schedule time in breakout rooms for rapport building, and to use breakout activities extensively. It creates relationships that last longer than the sessions.
How about the body in the virtual Accelerated Learning world?
If Shilpa and I named our company « The Learning Gym », it’s because we believe that learning happens through the body. It can happen online, look at all the Yoga or Pilates classes that are offered online since Covid.
There are very simple things a facilitator can do to get the learners to move, such as “Get up, walk around the room and bring back an object that represents what you want to learn this morning”
Melanie
To learn more about AL and other learning journeys with The Learning Gym
The Accelerated Learning cycle is not only relevant for training. It works for strategy meetings, group coaching, action plan building, and many other purposes.
By the way, Melanie and I designed and delivered an AL based group coaching program called “Managez votre énergie, pas votre temps”. (English translation to come soon)
If you enjoyed this learning journey, I also invite you to read a piece I wrote after embarking on a “High Performance Learning Journey” with Shilpa from the Learning Gym : Development programmes: keeping the best from both worlds.
Throughout lockdown, « thinking out of the box » was not just another buzzword. It was a necessity.
Over these 2 years, in my tiny home office in the most remote part of Normandy, I remained connected to the world thanks to the internet and I made amazing encounters and discoveries.
Some of you remember Topia, which I sadly left to go back to face-to-face meetings. To be perfectly honest, I’m delighted to see my dear client in person again.
The B❒x, an amazing thinking companion.
Those 3 discoveries have 2 amazing women and a fantastic man in common : Melanie Martinelli, Shilpa Subramaniam and Jimbo Clark. Today, I’d like to pay a tribute to Jimbo and his world famous B❒x.
Who is Jimbo Clark ?
Jimbo was born and raised in the U.S. and has lived in Taiwan for over 20 years. He is an adult-learning innovation genius. Paradoxically, we met under lockdown, him in Taipei and I in Normandy. Who said you couldn’t travel in Covid times ?
Jimbo founded Innogreat, with this welcoming statement:
No organization begins with the dream of being pretty good. No leader took the promotion hoping that things will turn out just OK. No child imagines a future of just getting by. We all dream of greatness. Our mission is to help you innovate to greatness.
In a nutshell, nothing great gets done without ambition. And Jimbo applies this principle to what he does best: innovation in the field of adult learning. The B❒x is his masterwork. Jimbo’s been working at it for over 15 years: facilitating with it, refining it, sharing it… with creativity and generosity.
Jimbo Clark and Mirjam Leunissen, working hard.
What is The B❒x ?
The B❒x is a physical metaphor of our worldview.
Outside, what people can perceive of it: our behaviors, our opinions.
Inside, what drives you to behave the way we do: our thoughts, beliefs, emotions. Long story short, the filters through which we see and interact with the world around us.
The principes behind The B❒x
Just as everyone has their one and only worldview, everyone has their one and only B❒x.
Our B❒x is made of the learnings we made throughout life. It allows us to form our opinion, to solve problems, to make decisions. It is “perfectly designed to take us where we are now”. Therefore, thinking out of the B❒x doesn’t mean getting rid of it. We all need a B❒x to live in society.
But when we need to answer a challenging question, our B❒x can become too tight. Flexing our worldview then becomes an interesting way to answer our challenging question. It is this flexing process that Jimbo’s B❒x embodies brilliantly.
How does the B❒x experience work ?
A skillfully designed introspective process
The first thing I did when I received my B❒x was to make it “obviously mine”. It doesn’t need to be artistic, beautiful, or to make it look exactly like me. Anyway, I so suck at drawing that it would be impossible. Luckily, it just needed to be “obviously mine”. That I could do.
At the start of the session, I chose a challenging question I wanted to reflect on. Actually, I’ve done it a few times now, every time on a different topic. Every time, the process worked beautifully. I’ll come back to this versatility, as I believe it is one of the B❒x’s major strengths.
Then I filled the outside of my B❒x: what do other see, hear, feel from me on the topic my challenging question.
Then comes the inside of the B❒x: what experiences, learnings have I made so far on my challenging questions? What are my opinions, my beliefs on that topic?
Now is the time to ask: “where do I want to go from here”. What is my desired outcome? What do I need to change in my behaviours and my thoughts to get there? What will it change for me?
To answer those increasingly challenging coaching questions, The B❒x offers a line of questioning around filters.
What would happen if I were more curious? more vulnerable? My systemic lens tells me that curiosity is a good cure for fear and vulnerability a powerful antidote to excessive control. But maybe I’m wrong…
Eventually, a few questions about commitments wrap up the process.
A constructivist, non-normative coaching approach.
Everybody has a unique worldview. No one is asking me to change mine, but if my worldview is not helpful to solve a challenge, flexing it is an option worth exploring. I get to choose what I want to change and how.
How does the B❒x help thinking out of the box ?
It’s robust
The physical B❒x takes us through a proven line of questioning that help me explore my worldview and ends with commitments, after helping me express my needs. Because it’s simple and classical, it works on an infinite variety of topics.
It’s versatile
The B❒x can be used individually as well as with a group.
It lends itself to topics as différent as:
Diversity & inclusion
Collective intelligence
Teamlife
Self confidence
Marketing target identification
Reflecting on the finishing year and planning the year ahead
Planning the next temps of my personal development
Committing to fight climate change
…
It lends itself to any facilitation or coaching style: the B❒x facilitator has endless space to adapt their delivery to meet their audience’s needs.
It’s powerful
The first thing I did with my B❒xwas to make it mine. A straightforward way to realise my worldview is unique.
When I first I put my B❒x on my head, it felt stiff and narrow. But gradually, as I worked on the various sides of my B❒x, openings and foldings made it more comfortable to wear. As my thinking was slowly becoming more flexible, the B❒x on my head was becoming more cosy. Looking out, listening was becoming easier as well. My physical sensations perfectly matched my cognitive thinking.
In or out of the Box ?
It’s fun
Going through the process makes introspection fun. Going out on the street with our B❒x on our heads, taking crazy selfies in a crowded area is also part of the fun. Possibilities are endless.
It’s subtle
The B❒xis full of discreet nudges to note, remember, anchor learnings, ask for feedback… Leaving the session, I have put a lot of myself into this cardboard companion, but if I’m serious about answering my challenging question, there is a lot more I can do with it to make my answers come true.
My next steps in thinking out of the B❒x
Freshly certified to use the B❒x in my coaching programmes, I am currently designing a group coaching programme about self-confidence for a client. She immediately felt the potential of this wonderful thinking companion.
To be followed!
Her name is Françoise, 30 years a manager. That’s all I shall say about her to protect her anonymity. In 2003, coaching her was my first coaching experience.
Nous nous sommes revues récemment après une longue pause. She remembered our relationship as if it were last year. She agreed to let me transcript and publish our conversation as a coaching client testimonial.
I have few opportunities to meet clients so long after coaching them, I’m curious to know what you kept from working together, Françoise…
I’m still keeping the postcard you had sent me at the end of my first individual coaching programme, remember? A pretty house with blue shutters, some open, some closed. In a nutshell, the message was that I had opened some windows working with you, and I had some more to open. I’m retiring next month and this card is in my boxes. I’ll always keep it!
I’m deeply touched, Françoise… What else do you want to add to your coaching client testimonial?
Ah! Your questionning! Those endless silences, that would make me feel so uneasy! After a while, I would end up saying something, waiting for an answer… And you would reply “so what?”. It was hard… but educational! Over the following years, I met many of your professional coach colleagues. All of them had answers, models, advice requiring immediate application. I messed up big time following them. To be honest, they lacked listening. You Cécile, made me think and step back. From all these coaches, consultants or trainers I’ve met, you are the one who worked the longest with my company. All the others disappeared within 6 months. That’s because you spent so much time listening and observing how the system operated.
In hindsight, you were my first coachee! I literally learnt how to coach with you.
I’d never have guessed if you hadn’t told me. In hindsight, I remember that you didn’t have a coaching programme. Your competitor did. But when I saw him wave cheerfully at a senior leader passing by in the corridor, I thought ‘this one is gonna gossip around‘. That’s how I chose you. I had no visibility on your coaching model or the coaching goals, but I felt I could trust you to tackle difficult relational issues.
Yet… I coached many other managers and leaders in your company, individually and collectively. I trained some, too!
Oh yes, I remember you facilitated a management training with my team. But I didn’t know about the others.
You’re not going to resent me for respecting my duty of confidentiality, are you?
Confidentiality, ethics ! No offense, but I never believed in those words. In a company like mine, many training and coaching firms would spy on behalf of HR. And you know, it took me quite a while before trusting you for good. I couldn’t say how long, but several coaching sessions for sure.
What made you trust me to carry on working with me?
Difficult to say. When I think about it, I’d say that first and foremost, you never tried to impose anything on me. Among which seeking reconciliation with my boss with whom I had a terrible relationship. The other thing is that you had my back. I don’t know how to say that precisely, but your colleagues were… polite, nice, but wouldn’t sweat for me. You would. I’m not saying you cuddled me, though. I still remember you challenging me to my limits, which I would carefully avoid!
As in ?
One day, I had been harshly told of by my boss’ boss. When I told you he had frightened me, you asked ‘what if you had frightened him?‘
Another time, as I was telling you I had a good star responsible for all the good that happened in my life, you replied ‘what if you were responsible for it?‘
And ?
You and your monosyllabic questions !!! Well… To this day, I don’t have the answers to these particular questions. On many other topics, though, your questions made me see the world differently, without providing me with a ready-made answer. You listened to me, you let the answers emerge and I could make my own choices. I don’t regret any of them, even those I paid a high price for. On the verge of retiring, I consider my professional life a good one.
This is music to my ears, Françoise. I couldn’t dream of a more gratifying coaching client testimonial. Listening to you, I realise how my coaching practice was inaccurate back then. I lacked coaching tools, supervision (don’t tell anyone, I didn’t even know it existed). Anyway… I’m so happy this coaching had such an impact on you! Such a coaching client testimonial happens once in a lifetime!
As I said earlier, Cécile. It’s neither your programme, nor your coaching techniques I remember. It’s the relationship we built. I never met anyone in whom I could confide to such an extent ever after. A coaching relationship like ours happens once in a lifetime.
Executive coaching is about asking questions and helping the client find their own resources. That said, there are as many coaching models as there are coaches and I owe my clients full transparency on my approach.
Understanding behaviors systemically helps my coachees build a bridge between their behaviours and the organisational context, and see behavioural issues as relations that need to be fixed, rather than individuals alone.
The symptom is not the problem!
If my worldview were to be summarised into a single belief, I would say that all behaviours, even the most abnormal ones, are a way to adapt to an ongoing context.
Having spent my early consulting years working with the organisational sociologist François Dupuy’s team, who had taught me to look for the rationale to unexplained behaviours in the wider organisational context, I was on familiar ground when I discovered the Systemic and Strategic Approach, which, at the psychological level, sees any given symptom as a cog in a system. Reciprocally, other members in the group maintain the symptom by their own interventions, thus maintaining the system’s stability.
Stable doesn’t mean healthy.
The solution provided by the symptomatic behaviour might be painful, costly or inadequate to at least one member in the group, creating a dysfunctional balance. Nevertheless, all systems strive for stability: every time a member of the group steps away from routine behaviour, the whole group is disturbed and follows regulation processes to regain its initial stability. This phenomenon of homeostasis explains why change is so difficult and places resistance to change in a wider perspective than on the sole individual.
Although people are driven to solve their problems, sometimes, especially when homeostasis gets in the way of an advantageous or accelerated change, well established regulation processes prove inadequate.
The human brain struggles to find new ways to solve the situation and tends to do more of the same, even when told or taught to do differently. Repeatedly attempting to solve a problem with the same inadequate solution, however logical and helpful it might be in other contexts, compounds the situation and “the solution becomes the problem.”. This is where my coaching takes place.
My ambition is to help my clients realise that they are not “pawns in a game, but players who know that therules are “real” only to the extent that we have created or accepted them, and that we can change them..”
Who is the client for executive coaching?
From a cybernetic perspective, any change introduced anywhere in a system changes the functioning of the whole system.
Therefore, it is not compulsory to work with all members of the group, nor with the person whose behaviour is considered most problematic according the group’s norm.
My first goal as a coach is to find who is (are) the client(s) for help, i.e. who most wants the situation to change.
In corporate environments, most of the requests come through intermediaries and the coachee is not always asking for anything. This is one of the reasons for which systems thinking is as powerful in corporate environments as in family issues.
Working with all those who are ready to invest time and effort into change places the responsibility for change on more than one pair of shoulders.
Unravelling who is asking for what :
gives me insight on who plays what role in the current situation and who is ready to participate in trying alternative solutions;
enables me to create awareness that behaviours can be seen as interactional loops and that change most often comes through interactions, rather than from individuals alone;
requires I find out to which extent the identified coachee is ready to make the effort to learn anything and I do my best to turn them into a proper client;
creates opportunities to put some responsibility onto the sponsor’s shoulders, providing them if need be with “guerrilla coaching”, which needs to be framed with skill, for the sponsor doesn’t want to be seen as the coachee.
When the latter is not accessible to coaching, there is always an alternative pathway to change through the former, if (s)he accepts to play a role in creating the solution to a problem (s)he doesn’t feel responsible for. This is, in my view, one of the most remarkable strengths of the Systemic and Strategic Approach.
How my executive coaching model takes my client’s past into account in a coaching that doesn’t search for causes
Insight about why a phenomenon occurs doesn’t suffice to change it.
Unlike the Psychodynamic Conflict Theory, stating that “ the unconscious material consciously available to the person experiencing symptoms likely to produce more complete and lasting changes for the individual than those that do not.” Watzlawick & al. describe their approach as “a search for pattern in the here and now rather than for symbolic meaning, past causes or motivation”. The first observation I share with these authors is that insight aboutwhy a phenomenon occurs doesn’t suffice to change it; the second is that change often happens without insight, through subtle changes in their worldview. It doesn’t mean I completely rule my clients’ past out of the discussion: I take it into account insofar as it shapes their present values, beliefs and behaviours.
This “here and now” focus has encouraged me to look for connections between the Systemic and Strategic Approach and Gestalt’s present-centered change.
Whereas the former designs specific change goals and strives to remove obstacles, the latter explores what happens for the coachee in the time and space of the session, that will help an unknown future to emerge. I have soon found it helpful to be able to choose between these two approaches according to my clients’ level of clarity and satisfaction with their goals.
How my executive coaching model helps my clients to visualise their interactional patterns.
I firmly believe that helping a client see the interactional patterns they are immersed in makes coaching a valuable investment.
The whole purpose of the first sessions of my coaching is to frame the problem or desired change in an interactional way. It helps listing attempted solutions, finding their underpinning pattern and starting to instill doubt into the clients’ mind about the validity of their regulation processes to reach their goals. Of course, instilling doubt about regulation processes implies that some unsuccessful attempts have been made, or that some action that should have been taken hasn’t been taken).
Recent developments have brought a major improvement to the initial model with a visual tool: the interactional mapping.
My visual interpretation of a case study presented in Boutan & Aubry’s “Essaye encore!“
Dion, S. (1993) ‘Erhard Friedberg et l’analyse stratégique’ Revue française de science politique, Année 43, No. 6,
Watzlawick, P. Beavin Bavelas, J. Jackson, D. (1967) Pragmatics of human communication: a study of interactional patterns.
Wittezaele, J.J. Nardone, G. (2016) Une logique des troubles mentaux: le DOSS, Paris: Seuil. p.95.
Peltier, B. (2010) The psychology of executive coaching, 2nd edn.
Leary-Joyce, J. (2014) The fertile void: Gestalt coaching at work, St Albans: AoEC Press. p. 6.
Houdé, O. (2019) L’intelligence humaine n’est pas un algorithme
Watzlawick, P. Weakland, J. H. Fisch, R. (1974) Change: principles of problem formation and problem resolution
O’Neill, M.B. (2007) Executive coaching with backbone and heart: a systems approach to engaging leaders with their challenges, 2nd edn.
Kilburg, R. (2004) ‘When shadows fall: using psychodynamic approaches in executive coaching’ Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, Vol. 56, No. 4.
Boutan, E. Aubry, K. (2017) Essaye encore! Déjouer les pièges relationnels au travail.
Executive coaching is about asking questions and helping the client find their own resources. That said, there are as many coaching models as there are coaches and I owe my clients full transparency on my approach.
Coaching with strategic empathy helps me build a bridge between the support my coachees need to feel safe, considered and understood, and the challenge they are ready to take to change.
I can never spend too much time and care building rapport.
Research in the field of psychotherapy links success to the quality of the relationship, much more than on the therapeutic model.
Accordingly, recent publications by systemic coaches claim that “relationship prevails over strategy”. Even Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which has long considered the therapeutic relationship as a neutral stimulus in a technical treatment, now integrates attachment theory to leverage the therapeutic potential of the relationship.
Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment has provided me with the most valuable practical guide to creating an environment where the coachee feels considered, listened to and supported.
I have reviewed and improved my practice of each of the ten components, making a habit of turning off all sources of distraction and asking my coachee to do the same as a favour to our working relationship, shortening and opening my questions, giving my coachee time and space to find their own pace to think without being interrupted, doing whatever is in my power to make the meeting space welcoming and enhancing for my client, and so forth. Asking a personal assistant to book a particular room is no longer trivial: it has become a backstage part of my signature presence.
As I mostly work for global organisations, I pay special attention to intercultural gaps to convey my relational intentions according to the business and regional culture of my clients.
How much time to spend checking-in differs significantly whether my client is American or Lebanese; I don’t make contact with a Japanese as I do with a French person. Understanding better how foreign executives experience the French corporate culture whether they come from a high or low context culture, use an implicit or explicit communication style, has greatly helped me improve my awareness to create a personalised thinking environment for each coachee. Reciprocally, I put special effort in grasping the cultural gaps when working in non-French environments: if these cannot be abolished, I often find it better to make them explicit.
Last but not least, Rogers has helped me take my presence to another level.
Having been trained to focus on my client, I had never thought that bringing my own emotions into the relationship was an option. Reading that being “genuine, words matching own internal feeling” was an indispensable characteristic of a helping relationship has liberated my natural sensitivity, enhancing the quality of my relationships and opening a whole new field of coaching possibilities.
Strategic empathy is a powerful way to create a containing environment.
In some cases, my experience has shown me that empathy alone helps clients become more acceptant of themselves, which allows change to happen.
Supporting insecure overachieving leaders to ‘be themselves more, with skill’ is indeed an enjoyable and rewarding experience, both for the coach and coachee. But I define this developmental type of coaching as reinforcement or fine tuning rather than change. In my view, change is a more confronting experience, and I see my role as a coach to support my clients through this challenge toward a desired or unknown future.
I don’t feel comfortable opposing support and confrontation.
Guiding a coachee through a chair work experiment requires supporting the effort on the one hand and confronting the client with a situation they most often dread on the other; sharing my clients’ frustration while listing all their failed attempts to reach a goal also requires a robust blend of support and challenge. Drawing from Rogers’ description of the helping relationship, Wittezaele & Nardone, two masters of the Palo Alto school in Europe, have created the concept of strategic empathy, to describe this double movement, meeting the patients where they are, stuck or in pain, resonating with the nature and intensity of their feelings, yet challenging their course of action to help them find a more ecological one.
Strategic empathy helps asking helpful incisive questions, that enable my coachees to envisage alternative solutions to their issues.
It is never comfortable for anyone to be asked questions as provocative as: “If you were absolutely sure that your assumption is not true, what would you do or say or think differently?”, or “no matter how much care one takes in phrasing it more gently. Even Nancy Kline’s soft voice calls this question “incisive”, cutting. I have many other provocative questions in store to instill doubt into my coachee’s mind, and I have learnt to make them feel deeply and sincerely understood before I ask any of these sharp questions. Even then, many clients keep telling me they remember them long after the coaching has ended. I cannot anticipate when is the right moment to ask a provocative question in the course of a coaching. The only thing I know is that my coachee must be absolutely confident in my understanding and positive intent before I ask them.
The double movement implied by strategic empathy can seem contradictory, but it is a powerful way to coach with “backbone and heart”.
de Haan, E. (2008) Relational coaching: journeys towards mastering one–to–one learning.
Kline, N. (2017) More time to think: the power of independent thinking.
Suleiman, E. Bournois, F. Jaïdi, Y. (2017) La prouesse française: le management du CAC 40 vu d’ailleurs.
Rogers C. R. (1961)On becoming a person: a therapist’s view of psychotherapy.
Goffee, R. Jones, G. (2006) Why should anyone be led by you?What it takes to be an authentic leader.
Wittezaele, J.J. Nardone, G. (2016) Une logique des troubles mentaux: le DOSS.
O’Neill, M.B. (2007) Executive coaching with backbone and heart: a systems approach to engaging leaders with their challenges.
Executive coaching is about asking questions and helping the client find their own resources. That said, there are as many coaching models as there are coaches and I owe my clients full transparency on my approach.
Communicating with the whole self helps my coachees build a bridge between what they know and what they feel. A powerful way to gain alignement and confidence.
We cannot not behave, nor can we not communicate.
“All behavior, not only speech, is communication, and all communication – even the communicational clues in an impersonal context – affects behavior.”
Consequently, relationships can be accurately described as communicational feedback loops. It is interesting to see that this representation of communicational patterns is circular, i.e. it has no beginning and no end, whereas, in the coachees’ minds, their behaviour is always triggered by an external cause and follows linear causality. This circular representation frames relational problems in a non-pathological and empowering way: nobody’s a culprit, and everybody can take part in making change happen. I find this framing much more constructive than “nobody’s innocent”.
The Systemic and Strategic Approach, Transactional Analysis and Gestalt share a common interest for the incongruences between content and intent, digital and analogical communication, information and relation, using different images to help make meaning of what is being communicated and how.
I use all three to raise my clients’ awareness about communication axioms such as: the receiver, not the sender, chooses what meaning to make of a message; how things are said matters often more than what is being said; actions speak louder than words. I particularly appreciate using Transactional Analysis to help decipher conflictual games, symmetrical escalations, crossed transactions. In the later stage of emotional experiment-creation I take my coachees through, Transactional Analysis combined with Gestalt provides an amazing range of experiments I’m only starting to discover, to help them trade a critical parent or a submissive child communication style for an adult one or to review one’s stamp collection.
How Gestalt is helping me to widen my use of non-verbal communication.
Discovering the scope and the power of non-verbal language.
In 2013, I was asked to give a lecture to help seventy nurses from around the world improve their relationships with patients through non-verbal communication. I remember delving with delight into research about facial expressions, body postures, involuntary gestures, eye contact, proxemics, dress and make-up codes to build an interactive learning experience. I still use many of these learnings in my coaching, especially Amy Cuddy’s experiments according to which taking a power posture for a couple of minutes helps raise one’s level of testosterone, hence authority; or taking a relaxed posture for the same amount of time reduces the level of cortisol, i.e. stress. I practice physical exercises to help myself and my coachees build confidence, credibility and presence before high-stake events. Having tried ideas and experiments for myself increases the level of authenticity of my coaching discussions.
Discovering Gestalt has taken my coaching skills to an entirely new level, “using the body as a vehicle for addressing and extending awareness and emotional intelligence”.
Throughout the my Advanced Coaching studies, I have started reflecting body language and asking questions about incongruent communication. It proved immediately more powerful than noticing them silently. I then discovered in-session embodied experiments such as chair work, walking along my coachee on a continuum, changing places or perspective to see things from a different angle or distance, inviting my client to stay with a sensation, a movement, an emotion. I have experienced the power of these techniques with my peers and some of my coachees with success and I relish having this vast field of new coaching skills ahead of me.
How good old verbal skills still help me build my signature presence.
The very first active listening skill I learnt almost thirty years ago still plays a major role in my signature presence.
Paraphrasing, using the client’s words as much as possible; covering all the ideas, not just those I select; not adding any comment or rhetorical ornament of my own; and adopting a neutral tone, to avoid any underlying judgements, is an art. In my early working years, I would use this technique as a trainer to show the participants I was listening without judging and to encourage them to say more. As I took on coaching, I kept practicing paraphrasing to demonstrate empathetic understanding.
I also pay great attention in mirroring the level of language used by my coachee to match my client’s affective expression with the same intensity.
When a client tells me (s)he is furious, I paraphrase with the same level of speech to show my level of understanding and acceptance of their emotion. If I paraphrase it with un understatement like “I notice you’re cross”, I stand a good chance of receiving a metaphoric boomerang in the face sooner or later. Therefore, unless I make a deliberate choice of making my coachee stay with their furor and push it to its extreme, paraphrasing their affective expression with the same intensity helps building the relationship.
How I add a personal touch to my signature presence
Another Gestalt treasure is self-disclosure, which I found to my utmost surprise an enjoyable way of putting my excessive sensitivity to work.
At first, I felt daunted to bring my internal world into the relationship for I was afraid it would sound narcissistic and draw the focus onto me rather than the coachee. But I reckon that with process instructions, precautions for use and supportive supervision made my apprehension melt like snow in the sun. Now, I truly enjoy asking candidly: “I feel lost here: how about you?” instead of enduring endless technocratic talk I am incapable of making meaning of. The beauty of it is that so far, my coachees have answered things like: “My team give me that feedback too. Maybe I should work on concision, can you help me with that?”
To wrap up this section on self-disclosure, I’d like to mention a personal characteristic I am proud to have made an asset of my frenchness.
Being a non-native English speaker has long felt like a liability and I have worked hard to improve my English skills until several of my fellow learners gave me enthusiastic feedback after I’d said “We’ve got ten big minutes left” instead of the much more British “We’ve got just over ten minutes left for this session”. On reflection, I realised that using the language slightly inappropriately – yet understandably – creates impactful communication through candid clarification questions and exotically phrased expressions I use like metaphors. It reminds me of one of my favourite teenage readings based on the hilarious principle of translating idiomatic expressions word for word from French to English and vice versa. I hold this French touch as a precious resource to bring some eccentricity and humour into my signature presence when coaching in English.
Watzlawick, P. Beavin Bavelas, J. Jackson, D. (1967) Pragmatics of human communication: a study of interactional patterns.
Peltier, B. (2010) The psychology of executive coaching, 2nd edn. ; Boutan, E. Aubry, K. (2017) Essaye encore! Déjouer les pièges relationnels au travail.
O’Neill, M.B. (2007) Executive coaching with backbone and heart: a systems approach to engaging leaders with their challenges, 2nd edn.
James, M., Jongeward, D. (1978) Born to Win: Transactional Analysis with Gestalt Experiments, New York, NY: Signet.
Gevrey-Guinnebault, C. (2014) Et si je faisais bonne impression ! – communication non-verbale mode d’emploi, Paris: Eyrolles.
Coppock, D. Gillie, M. (2012) ‘Getting personal’, Coaching today, (January 2012).
Leary-Joyce, J. (2014) The fertile void: Gestalt coaching at work, St Albans: AoEC Press.
Shackleton, M. Gillie, M. (2010) ‘Use of self and self-disclosure in coaching’, AoEC conference 2010.
Rogers C. R. (1961) On becoming a person: a therapist’s view of psychotherapy
Chiflet, J. L. (1985), Sky, my husband! The dictionary of the running English, Paris: Seuil.
Executive coaching is about asking questions and helping the client find their own resources. That said, there are as many coaching models as there are coaches and I owe my clients full transparency on my approach.
Seeing the world through a different frame helps my coachees overcome the paradoxes that make change so challenging.
Paradox, you said?
At first sight, Gestalt and Strategic Therapy don’t have anything in common
Except that both models were initially developed in the aftermath of World War II, in the United States, by first- generation European immigrants. Gestalt is a humanistic, non-directive, intuitive approach aimed at “allowing the world to emerge rather than supporting action plans and task routines”. The Systemic and Strategic Model belongs to the behavioural approaches and follows structured protocols to solve complex relational problems, including heavy psychopathologies.
Through learning and practicing though, I have found fascinating epistemological connections between both models.
Both see meaning in relationships rather than in isolated elements; both focus on the here and now rather than on the past or the future; both are concerned with the way one experiences reality and how it impacts our interpretations, feelings and behaviours; both focus on the process rather than on the content. Not to mention the way both envisage the paradox of change: “Change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.” claims Perls; “To reach one’s purpose, one must give it up”, replies Bateson !
There are other paradoxes the Systemic and Strategic Approach leverages powerfully.
Most problems can be described as logical paradoxes
The attempted solutions fail to solve the problem because they don’t address the same logical level, thus creating unwanted systemic feedback. E.g. “I am a developmental and peaceful boss; therefore, I never have tough conversations with my employees”. When this leader shows up for coaching, his team and business partners, who are fed up with the tolerance the low performers benefit from, are on the verge of rebellion. A paradoxical reframing can be summarised as: “Peace-keeping and employee development is indeed my role as a leader. But the way I am trying to maintain peace is preparing a much bigger war. Therefore, to maintain peace at collective level, I must accept to fight a battle at individual level.” Opposing fear to a greater fear in a way that matches his understanding of his role is a paradoxical way to give this leader the courage to do what he dreads most.
Another powerful paradox is to prescribe the symptom.
When a coachee is stuck in a situation or an emotion, asking them to relinquish all attempts to get out of the rut, and instead make a list of all the inconveniences they would experience by stepping out of it is, in fact, very close to staying with an unpleasant emotion in a Gestalt experiment
Bridging in progress
At the end of the day, everything comes down to practice. At that level, I can but acknowledge that both models differ significantly. For two main reasons in my experience:
The Systemic and Strategic Approach is much more leading than Gestalt.
The reframing paraphrasing not only encompasses the clients’ account of the situation, but also the impasse of the attempted solutions and concrete, more advantageous alternatives. Pushed to its extreme, the strategic dialog is a line of alternative questions to which the client can only answer A or B. I’ve never bought into this technique, however efficient and effective I’ve observed it to be. I need to give my clients space to think for themselves, rather in a Nancy Kline style.
Systemic and Strategic Approach experiments happen between sessions whereas Gestalt offers experiments within the session.
For instance, in a Systemic and Strategic Approach, I will ask a client who’s been grieving a dead husband for twenty-seven years to write what her bereavement tells her for thirty minutes every day between two sessions; in a Gestalt approach, I will ask her to stay with her grieving feeling and see what comes up in the moment.
These differences might be irreconcilable, but I believe they offer a stretching space to improve my coaching, with questions I’m still dwelling on, such as: how can I word my questions so the coachees do their reframing themselves? To which extent is it possible to combine in-session and between-session experiments? If I have to choose between two lines of experimentation, what are my guiding criteria other than my gutfeel?
Exploring new opportunities to build change-channeling emotional experiments
My reframing techniques borrow a lot to Nancy Kline’s.
First of all, I find inspiration in creating a nuance between assumptions and beliefs, in that the former is more questionable, therefore more accessible to reframing than the latter. I also find incisive questions incredibly effective. My practice steps away from Kline’s in that I believe that challenging an assumption by asking “Do you think it is true?” is rarely powerful enough to dismantle denial. It is too cognitive to begin with, and I find it prone to putting my client on the defensive. I much prefer to suggest an anthropologist experiment, asking my coachee to observe and make notes of all evidence they can gather in their everyday life that gives consistency to their assumption.
Recent neuroscience research led by the development psychologist Olivier Houdé confirms that cognitive change is best channeled through emotions.
The human brain builds heuristics through redundancies that help us choose our reactions based on experience. For instance, a child learns that touching a hot surface burns and (s)he grows to avoid it or to approach it with caution. Heuristics are handy shortcuts and most of them make our daily decisions easier. But sometimes, they can be limiting and lead us to erroneous conclusions or actions. Emotions associated with past learning impact the way we react to a given stimulus and can lead to inappropriate behaviours. Emotions can even block change from happening at the behavioural level. Houdé and his team have found that doubt, anticipation of regret and curiosity are prone to questioning limiting assumptions.
This research opens new coaching opportunities insofar as doubt, regret and curiosity frequently occur in coaching conversations.
Traditional systemic and strategic reframings and emotional experiments are effective to instill doubt, channel anger, confront fear or process grief, to name but a few. Houdé’s findings encourage me to create learning experiences that trigger anticipated regret and curiosity, or just to leverage these emotions when they appear spontaneously in the conversation. On a more tactical level, this neuroscientific validation of the link between cognitive development and emotions might be helpful to convince some coachees to explore their emotional blocks. A trusting relationship also needs rationale.
Conclusion
Most people have an ambivalent attitude towards change: they want reality, not themselves, to change, and for cause. Finding a pathway to change despite systemic homeostasis, emotional blocks and hard-wired heuristics is incredibly hard. Being helped makes it at best more accessible, not easier. To that effect, my coaching is systemic, strategically empathetic, emotional as well as cognitive, and plays with paradoxes. I believe these four characteristics allow me to create the best possible conditions to help change happen, against all odds.
Leary-Joyce, J. (2014) The fertile void: Gestalt coaching at work, St Albans: AoEC Press.
Wittezaele, J.J. Nardone, G. (2016) Une logique des troubles mentaux: le DOSS, Paris: Seuil.
Beisser, A. (1970) ‘The paradoxical theory of change’, in Fagan, J., Shepherd I. L. (ed.) Gestalt Therapy Now, New York: Harper & Row.
Gerbinet, D. (2017) Le thérapeute et le philosophe – Atteindre un but par le non-agir, Paris: Enrick B. Éditions.
Boutan, E. Aubry, K. (2017) Essaye encore! Déjouer les pièges relationnels au travail, Paris: Enrick B. Éditions.
Nardone, G. Salvini, A. (2004) Il dialogo strategico. Comunicare persuadendo: techniche evolute per il cambiamento, Milano: Ponte alle Grazie.
Kline, N. (2017) More time to think: the power of independent thinking.
Houdé, O. (2019) L’intelligence humaine n’est pas un algorithme, Paris : Odile Jacob.
Knowing how to say no is the solution to many problems. Saying no helps managing time, stress, boundaries, and other’s respect. But then, why are so many people so afraid to say no? Ultimately, how to help them effectively before they all burn out?
As usual, this topic is mostly seen through an individual lens. In turn, fear of displeasing, lack of self-esteem, inability to assert oneself are pointed out. Are so many of us cowards or doormats?
In my opinion, it is an illusion to think that learning to say no is a purely individual responsibility. Worse, it’s manipulative. It creates culprits who, out of guilt, will buy into the principles of assertiveness, Transactional Analysis and Non-Violent Communication without understanding what blocks them. At the end of the day, how many will have learned how to say no and will still be unable to do so?
Daring to say no and setting clear limits is a relational exercise. It requires empathy for worldview of the person who feels the need to assert themselves, but also their professional relationships. Illustration with a few examples from my coaching practice.
Three similar but different inabilities to say no.
“I don’t say ‘no’ because I want to be a good person in my own eyes”
Florence is kind. So kind, that she lets herself be overwhelmed by her internal stakehoders’ requests. When she complains about it, her colleague Diana tells her off ” You’re too kind! You need to be a little selfish in this organisation. Otherwise, you get eaten out.”
This is not the advice Florence needs. Not only is kindness part of his core values, but selfishness is out of the question. If Diana can be assertive without feeling guilty, Florence is incapable of it. The very fact of associating “saying no” with “selfishness” is enough to block his desire for assertiveness.
“Learning how to say no? I will never take the risk of disappointing others”
Franz has built his whole career and his leadership style on empathy and respect for others. “Being there for you” is his way of leading and he is a much-loved leader for that matter. His HR department mention him as a role model across the company. As for his boss, he always asks for more. And the more Franz does, the more his boss asks of him. To such an extent that Franz has no free time or weekends left to rest. But how else can he manage, when he spends 8 to 12 hours a day on Zoom? His team’s and other stakeholders’ requests can only be processed outside working hours.
“How to say no when everyone complies? »
A former free-lance trainer, Faouzia is happy to have found a Human Resources Development position in a large group. For a while, she found real fulfillment and economic security there that she did not have as a freelancer. But since COVID, she notices that the pace of work and the general level of fatigue has increased steeply. Lately, she has noticed that her behaviours oscillate between passivity and aggressiveness. She can’t find find the emotional space to calmly express that her workload has exceeded the limits of her abilities. “They got into the habit of emailing us on weekends. And I got into the habit of answering them.”
Talking oneself into to assertiveness is ineffective when the risks of change are overlooked
Self-respect is non-negotiable
Florence will never do or say anything that could undermine her values of kindness and selflessness. When asked if she is putting herself in danger, or if she is afraid of hurting others by learning to be assertive, she politely answers no. For her, being kind is a question of identity and self-image. It’s non-negotiable. By the way, when it comes to defending her values, Florence perfectly knows how to set boundaries.
It is not easy to give up the benefits of one’s behaviors
Franz, on the other hand, has built his entire professional life on his ability to please and his power to say yes. He has no trouble identifying the obstacles that prevent him from asserting his difference or his personal needs. He is afraid of disappointing. It is as simple as that. And to no longer receive compliments from his HRD, his boss, his teams… which are his main source of pleasure at work.
Not all environments are open to asserting a divergent position
Faouzia does not experience the same fears as Florence or Franz. Although she has enough self-confidence to say things firmly in individual situations, the situation she is in now is different. She feels the 24/7 connection has become a new norm in the business. Therefore, she fears that if she opposes this new normal, she will come across as a rebel, and that she might lose her job.
Three different boundary-setting strategies
A ‘no’ might be kinder than a ‘yes’
First and foremost, Florence needs to be reassured that no one is asking her to give up her kindness and her values. A quick inquiry with her stakeholders shows that by accepting everything, Florence has created a bottleneck. Stakeholders who take her ‘yes’ at face value sometimes wait for days before getting what they need.
A major reframing came from one of Florence’s stakehoders. “If you really want to be kind and helpful to my team, and I know that’s your intention, you need to tell us ‘yes’ or ‘no’ clearly! Otherwise, we can’t manage! That was all Florence needed to hear to adjust her behaviour.
Sort expectations before letting everybody down for good
The first step in coaching Franz was to ask him what would happen if he didn’t change anything. The answer was quick: burnout. And Franz knows his company well enough to know that once on sick leave, no one will count on him any longer.
By exploring his stakeholders’ expectations in more detail, Franz then realised that:
His boss did not expect him to stay in meetings except when he had to speak or actively participate.
Two of his teammates were asking for more autonomy.
These two discoveries allowed Franz to lighten his workload while better meeting their expectations.
Word has it that Franz has started to schedule slots of unavailability in his electronic diary. This way, he can respond to his team’s requests whilst escaping the “back-to-back meeting curse”.
Identify allies to strategise and give each other courage
Faouzia, was quick to discover that many of her colleagues were suffering as much as her. Questioned discreetly, union representatives affirm that disconnection is a right guaranteed by law. It is down to everyone to set their boundaries and assert their rights.
Not convinced, Faouzia and her colleagues try an experiment: they disconnect in the evening at 6 p.m. until 9 a.m. in the morning. Unsurprisingly the next morning, their emailboxes are overflowing but no one protests openly. They start again the week after, and again the week after. The morning pressure is strong. A few blackmail attempts have even been made, but the small group sticks to a reply that cuts short any debate: “I saw your email on arrival this morning, leave it with me”.
After a few weeks, they observe that the quantity of queries received outside working hours is starting to drop and that the “pressure surges” are altogether exceptional.
In conclusion
A few learnings from my coaching practice, to help individuals and groups set boundaries
Saying yes to something always means saying no to something else. People who find it difficult to say no always have good reason to hesitate. Taking these reasons into account and integrating them into the problem-solving strategy is essential.
Depending on the environment and the balance of power, taking an assertive position is not always the best option for gaining respect. The urge to assert oneself politely but firmly is not relevant to all professional or cultural contexts.
One can perfectly assert one’s position, needs or rights without ever saying the word “no”. It is not just a verbal skill. It is also a relational and strategic skill.
It is sometimes better not to find yourself in the situation where you will have to say yes or no.This comes down to protecting yourself from solicitations before they are dumped onto your desk.
“All behavior, not only speech, is communication, and all communication – even the communicational clues in an impersonal context – affects behavior.
A courageous woman who appreciates being psychological safe at work
Kate is a senior marketing director and a great leader. She is recognised both for the quality of her marketing expertise and for her team management.
When the company opened new markets, the company’s leadership team naturally entrusted them to Kate. In addition to her previous workload, that is. “I was told to do it, not asked,” she says. Certainly, it was told nicely, with many compliments about her abilities. But Kate had no say in this extension of her scope, nor about the ways of working or the productivity gains to be made.
But OK. Leading the professional life she loves, in a healthy working environment, with bosses whom she respects and vice versa… All of this is well worth a few compromises.
Three common incidents
Psychological safety does not mean absence of psychological risks
A proven case of moral harassment
Stepping into the new market is no easy endeavour. The local sales director quickly turns out to be a bully, who scares off the employees. Kate promptly steps in, as the business needs marketing and sales to collaborate smoothly.
No reaction from HR or her bosses. Kate eventually realises that on a new market, sales prevail over marketing. Therefore, the company feels obliged to put up with the sales director’s toxic behaviour… At the cost of psychosocial risks and turnover in the marketing teams.
A flawed solution to ensure the team’s well-being
The only solution Kate has found to protect her team without lowering their performance is to deal directly with Mr. Bully. Indeed, since she is more senior than him, he keeps his head down with her. However effective, this “solution” comes on top of Kate’s workload… And somewhat undermines the feeling of psychological safety in which she has lived until now.
Speaking up against sexist behavior in complete psychological safety: squaring the circle
Inappropriate behaviors
Kate’s company is taking part in an international conference, to support their ambitions on the new market. All the company’s senior leaders are showing up. One of them publicly pays her a “compliment” everyone considers inappropriate. Kate has heard worse and chooses to ignore. The next day, as Kate proudly announces she’s made an appointment with an important stakeholder over dinner, the same senior leader makes a horny comment on her working methods. At the airport at the end of the conference, Kate takes him aside and tells him, politely but firmly, how she and the teams feel about his behaviour.
An insufficient level of psychological safety to file a sexual harassment complaint
Kate discusses this incident again with her direct boss, who witnessed both scenes. Outraged, he encourages her to file a sexual harassment complaint with the HRD. Filing an official complaint means immediate dismissal for the leader. But, as Kate knows from a precedent in the company, it’s likely to have consequences for her, too. She remembers that in a previous similar case, the stalker was fired, but the victim also had to leave the company a few weeks later.
With that in mind, complaining officially feels too risky. Kate doesn’t see herself as a victim anyway, and she is aware of the generational gap. This older leader looked sincerely sorry when she snubbed him. Kate therefore decides not to file a complaint, but she asks the CHRO to call him to order.
A poison for psychological safety
Then, well, nothing. No follow-up or feedback either from HR or her line of management. Contacts between Kate’s teams and those of the leader, which should have developed following the conference, are at a standstill. She learns off the record that her CEO and the leader are best friends… Which means that the latter doesn’t have anything to worry about. Kate is both disappointed with the cowardice of her leaders and relieved that she did not file a complaint.
A good manager should be able to fight for their teams, shouldn’t they?
An injustice to be repaired
To cope with the expansion of her scope, Kate has ramped up one of her team members, a great achiever who deserves both promotion and reward. What’s more, this associate is, for historical reasons, largely underpaid. Kate makes a strong case to get what she thinks is right for him.
Psychological safety, really?
Kate fights for weeks, until winning this case. She then receives a cryptic email from HQ in which she understands that she must choose between promoting her team member or being loyal to the company. Kate stands firm but goes on annual leave in a state of exhaustion and psychological distress.
Reframing psychological safety in an actionable way
Step 1: acknowledging the seriousness of the situation
In Kate’s worldview, leadership is about taking personal risks, being a role model and never compromising with integrity. These values show in her professional as well as her personal choices. Her voice quivers with indignation as she tells these stories. Her emotional distress, due to the repeated disrespect for her values, is palpable. Kate can’t stay where she is. Where should she go and how remains to be decided.
Step 2: decipher the implicit feedback provided by the organisation
Telling those incidents all in one shot makes Kate realise that they all boil down to an endless loop:
“Ultimately, my bosses aren’t brave and don’t want me to be! They only provide psychological safety to those who don’t challenge the status quo! ». What can I do to live up to my values, then? Leave? Lower my standards?
Step 3: formulate another, more strategic, definition of courage.
At this point in the conversation, I recall an old read: “While facing death threats from Iran, Salman Rushdie had the opportunity to meet President Clinton. His press secretary had arranged a 5-minute interview at the White House. In his autobiography, Rushdie tells how he prepared for this meeting.
“First, he says, the President knows that if I want to meet him, I will ask him something. Second, I must ask him for something he can give me. Otherwise, I will embarrass him and lose his support.”
That day, Rushdie urged Bill Clinton to take a public stand against intolerance. It seemed very little for the most powerful man in the world but given the international situation between the US and Iran, Rushdie assessed it was the most he could ask for. To his point, the very fact that he had been seen at the White House had already created some mediatic unrest. Clinton agreed and gave this speech to the United Nations. Subsequently, other public personalities lent their support to Rushdie, which they would never have done before. »
Step 4: recreate psychological safety at her own level to recover his quality of life at work.
For Kate, things are becoming clearer. No matter how strongly individual leaders support her views, there is only so much official support they can give her in challenging the status quo. And it will be no different in another organisation.
Now, that’s where Amy Edmonson’s advice resonates most: what can Kate do at her level to give psychological safety to herself and her team?
Fortunately, Kate has some leverage. She has plenty of allies in the organisation, who appreciate her integrity and listen to her views. She can prioritise what she enjoys doing and who she enjoys working with. She can let those who give her trouble manage on their own and, if they fall short, come for help. From this standpoint, she is in a better place to negotiate her terms than she was when she thought that being brave was to save them from themselves.
Kate has stepped out of a losing game: worldview v/s worldview. It’s a crucial first step to a better quality of life at work. She has space to foster her values without arm-wrestling against her organisation, and she knows the value of that space.
