|
This was an HR team. A group of experienced professionals working hard but struggling, somehow. They felt together but separate. They invited me to meet with them, to help them create and sustain a greater sense of teamwork. We rented a room off-site and I marked a large outline of a person on the ground using white tape. It looked like one of those outlines police use to mark the position of a body(!).
The team arrived and, being from a Christian organisation, I opened by referring to the image of a body in the Bible, a metaphor that aims to convey the importance of diversity, contribution, care and interdependence. I then invited the team to stand on the ‘body’ on the ground in a place that best represented for them how they saw themselves and how they felt within the team and in the wider organisation. One person stood on the head. Others stood on the arms, hands, legs and feet. After a moment, I asked them to look around and to say what they noticed, how it felt to stand where they were standing, what they noticed about others and what they noticed about the team as a whole. Everyone commented on how they found themselves standing instinctively on ‘doing’ parts of the body - hands, feet etc. After a few minutes, the team leader, a deeply intuitive woman, looked up and spoke: ‘We’re all looking outwards. There’s no-one at the heart.’ It was as if something of profound significance had emerged in the room, in that physical space. ‘We are so busy supporting others outside of the team that we haven’t paid attention to what we need.’ ‘Let’s explore what a team with a heart would look and feel like - then let’s be and do it.’ I could feel a real shift in energy and insight. It was as if something had been released and a heavy burden had been lifted. Fresh awareness, hope and ideas poured into the room. Physical experimentation and movement had enabled something to take place that may not have happened, or at least with the same degree of experiential impact, through group conversation alone. Note to self: if in doubt, just do it.
26 Comments
Gone are the days when we could think of ourselves, our teams and our organisations in splendid isolation. We now discover, abruptly at times, that everything is interconnected, everything is interdependent. We see impacts of global markets on domestic markets and vice versa. We see impacts of national and international policy on local people. We see sudden, unexpected changes that come out of nowhere, traceable only in retrospect, that dramatically shape our lives and work.
In the third sector where I’ve spent most of my professional life, we used to think of, say, human rights, international development and environmental issues as completely separate. We now see them as integrally related. Make a change in one area and it impacts on people and communities in another area - or in another part of the world. We can’t always see the connections but we can certainly feel them. This makes the world more complex, less predictable, less certain. A pervasive atmosphere of complexity and uncertainty can evoke personal, social, economic and political anxiety. Leaders and ideologies are emerging across the globe that offer simplistic solutions, often at the extremes, that create a comforting illusion. They may help us sleep more peacefully, live more purposefully. Yet they ignore, dismiss or suppress aspects of reality that don’t fit their simple narrative. To break free from this, we must learn to surface and live with uncomfortable truths. A stark example: witness the rhetoric in the UK and other Western nations this year in the face of unplanned, large-scale migration into Europe. Social media is filled with heated debate. ‘They’re all helpless refugees – rescue them!’ vs ‘They’re all terrorist sympathisers – reject them!’ It poses an either-or, black-white choice. To say, ‘It’s complicated. It calls for a sophisticated response’ sounds like a cop out, a refusal to take sides, a stance devoid of passion, a betrayal of a cause. So we find ourselves facing an existential crisis, created and fuelled in part by a perfect storm of influences. These include: spread of Islamist extremism, growth in right/left wing nationalism, intolerant illiberal liberalism, gross economic inequality, unprecedented global awareness via the internet, powerful social media, more failed states, huge displacement of people, alarming climate change. It can feel perplexing, confusing, debilitating. How to take a stance in the midst of all this? Adrian Spurrell (Synapse Solutions), my professional mentor, has been a persistent voice of challenge and support this year. ‘We can be driven by fear or by hope. Choose hope.’ It reminds me of hope in the Christian gospel too – a faith I experience as real – when we affirm the birth of Jesus Christ. It’s a mysterious faith that holds onto hope, is held onto by hope, often in the midst of hope-lessness. May we know peace and hope this Christmas time and the courage to stand in 2016. Do your conversations ever feel dull, pedestrian? Do you find yourselves reaching agreement quickly but sense there’s a lack of inspiration, depth or stretch to what you’ve decided? There’s an idea in Gestalt coaching that involves experimenting with polarities. When exploring an issue or when people can’t think of useful options, try introducing opposite extremes.
I met with a leadership team this morning to look at talent management. Rather than opening with a proposal, a colleague and I sat at opposite ends of the table and role played a conversation in which each of us argued passionately for radically contrasting approaches. We invited the team to listen, to feel, to see what it evoked for as we played out the different scenarios. Claire Pedrick uses a technique that involves opening the arms out wide to signify a polarity. ‘Let’s imagine this extreme (looking to one hand) involves doing nothing. Let’s imagine this extreme (looking at the other hand) is the ‘nuclear option’. What would the nuclear option involve doing in practice? Now let’s explore other options that lie in the space between.’ I sometimes use a polarities technique in leadership workshops. For example, if exploring directive vs non-directive approaches, I may walk an imaginary line across the room and explain at each end what that extreme represents. I then invite the group to stand along the line. ‘Where do you find yourself most of the time?’, ‘Where you would like to be?’ When using physicality like this, it can be very powerful to ‘do it’ rather than ‘imagine it’. So, if the group is standing along a line as above, I will invite them to move physically to where they want to be, rather than just talk about it. Then, ‘How are you feeling as you stand there?’, ‘What do you notice about where others are standing?’, ‘Have a conversation – where you are now.’ Another polarity technique is great for exploring the merits and risks of a proposal. Using a flipchart, I will start by inviting the group to brainstorm all the positive benefits. I will then use another flipchart and invite the group to brainstorm all the reasons why it won’t work. I use a final chart to brainstorm, ‘So, in light of that…what would it take to make it work?’ The benefits of polarising in ways such as these can include: stretching the imagination, discovering new/radical ideas, surfacing diverse views and feelings, experimenting with courage, testing different experiences and approaches, releasing fresh insight and energy. If you have worked with polarities, I’d love to hear from you. What did you do? What happened? ABC - Always Be Contracting. (Brian Watts)
A coach friend commented recently that he keeps annoying clients and is not sure why. He likes to challenge people’s thinking but they don’t always respond well. I asked, ‘Have you contracted first with your clients about how you will work together?’ Great questions at the outset can be, ‘What are we here to do?’ and ‘How shall we do this?’ It creates opportunity to discuss and agree what to focus on and what kind of relationship and ways of working will be most useful. I had another experience where contracting proved valuable. I had joined an organisation as a new team leader and one of my team members led a presentation. Afterwards, she asked if I could give her any feedback. I asked with a smile, ‘Are you asking for affirmation – or critique?’ ‘I’m so glad you asked that’, she replied. ‘I’m really just hoping I impressed you as my new boss!’ That opened a very different conversation about how we would like to work together in the future. What we are talking about here is similar to a counsellor establishing a 'therapeutic container’. It’s about creating psychological, relational boundaries, focus and ground rules together that enable honest, robust conversations to take place (high in support and high in challenge) without feeling threatened – because that’s what we’ve agreed to do in that context. We can renegotiate the terms of engagement as time or things move on or if the context for the relationship changes. I worked as coach with a leadership team that was struggling with internal conflict. It felt caught in a vicious cycle and couldn’t find a way out of it. I invited the team to imagine a team meeting that, by contrast, felt incredibly inspiring and effective. They painted a vivid picture of a very positive team experience. ‘What were you and others doing that made the difference?’ They agreed behaviours, began to practise them and the team’s experience was transformed. The core principle here is about making the implicit explicit. Rather than assuming that different people share the same underlying assumptions and expectations, raise them to the surface – especially if establishing new relationships or working with people from different backgrounds. ‘ I think a great outcome would be X. Is that what you think?’, ‘I see my role in this as X and yours as Y. How do you see it?’, ‘I’d find it useful if you would X. What would you find useful from me?’ If things feel tense or stuck, I find it useful to imagine myself speaking from an observing place, as if I’m standing outside of the room looking in, and comment dispassionately on what I’m noticing here-and-now. ‘I’m aware this conversation is going in circles without moving forward…and I’m wondering how we might approach this differently to get a different result.’ It invites insight from the other person too and opens opportunity to contract to solutions that will work for both. |
Nick WrightI'm a psychological coach, trainer and OD consultant. Curious to discover how can I help you? Get in touch! 
Like what you read? Simply enter your email address below to receive regular blog updates!
|
RSS Feed