Why should we retain a sense of humanity when people upset us at work?

"That person's an a******e. They just totally screwed me over!"

"Well, why don't you go talk to them about it and sort it out?"

"I couldn't possibly do that."

"Why not?"

"Didn't you year me? They're an a******e!"

Work is often a tough environment. Annoying stuff happens and it happens fairly regularly. People often don’t treat each other well and much of the stress involved in work is created by colleagues rather than the inherent complexity in the work itself.

A small percentage of people (1-2%) are psychopathic and either enjoy causing harm to others - or just don’t care if they do. Of course, most people are not like that but that doesn't stop ordinary people from causing harm to others.  They may be feeling stressed and anxious, trying to protect themselves, they may be short of time, trying to choose the least worst option or just trying to keep their head above water. They may even be inconsiderate and petty. But they’re not taking pleasure in screwing other people over. It’s just the situation that’s making that seem like the best thing to do. 

And very often, the very people who are acting aggressively believe they have been wronged in some way. There's a part of human nature which means we feel a kind of 'righteous anger' when we've been wronged – we feel obliged to redress the moral balance and set people straight. But it doesn't lead to a better work environment for anyone in the long run.

When we feel we’ve been wronged we may avoid that person in the future. Or we may confront them because we see them as a ‘nasty piece of work’ who needs 'a piece of our mind'. But as Aristotle famously said:

"Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."

If we don’t understand the intention behind people’s actions it makes us see them more as a persecutor – in our minds it magnifies the effect of the harm done to us and leads us to feel more bitter, resentful and picked on. (Research on subjective experience of pain shows that when we believe people are deliberately causing us pain – rather than doing it by accident - we feel a much higher level of pain). In other words, if we realise someone has wronged us as a result of a 'screw-up' rather than a 'conspiracy' it can lessen the pain we feel. 

So if we’re able to understand where the ‘persecutor’ is coming from we’re better able to move on from the pain that it caused. Every action has some form of positive intention, even if it’s a selfish one. So it's important to have honest conversations after we feel we've been wronged, even if we'd much rather avoid people or lash out.

The last thing I'm advocating is a Pollyanna attitude or some trite nonsense around forgiving and forgetting over a cup of tea. But if we have conversations that help us understand others' intentions astutely, and realise that for the most part the people who’ve caused us pain are simply flawed human beings who are just trying to get by in difficult circumstances, it makes it easier for us to move on afterwards. More importantly it makes it easier for us to get to know them and work out if they can be trusted after all. Then we can either build a trusting relationship with them if they are trustworthy, or make a plan to work around them if they are not.

Beware the Rise of the Robots

It’s hard to escape the current barrage of articles issuing dire warnings of the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Personally, I’m quite excited about that (but that’s another article for another time.)

I’m more worried about a rise in "robotic" behaviour in people at work. People doing things monotonously, robotically and almost without thinking. We all do it from time to time – we do things the same way we’ve always done them, or do just enough to keep the wolf from the door that week and move on to the next.

It’s not completely our fault. Organisations are – obviously - ‘organised’ in a particular way to align our collective efforts to a common purpose. They impose a structure and expectations on us. But in managing our performance and mitigating risks, there’s a risk we’re constrained and infantilised. And the way organisations are designed is apt to make us risk-averse particularly when things seem uncertain. Although leadership teams talk about being innovative and ‘ahead of the curve’, the truth is that for many of us our work environment is more likely to reward a safe, steady approach.

What’s the way out of this? When working as a coach I’ve noticed that, as my clients progress in their careers to more senior roles, the boundaries of their jobs become less clearly defined and more fuzzy. Most of them have more latitude than they realise to take bold decisions and do things differently. And ironically, most of us have potential to add a huge amount of value when operating at the edges of our roles (as long as we’re keeping things ticking over at the core too).

Most of us feel that working at the edges of one’s job can be scary – and so we often avoid it. One approach that worked for many of my clients who sit on executive teams is to consider “Where’s my sense of adventure?” This idea of an adventure is powerful. In an adventure you know you’ll face challenges, you know things won’t go as you expect, and there’s an element of risk. But in the end, it’s exciting – and it’s something that changes us. How many of us think about our work that way?

Of course, I’m not saying that people should be reckless – but most people aren’t considering all the options they have before them because they’re not thinking in an adventurous way.

We can probably all think of people we’ve worked with who are too reckless and bold and aren’t conscientious enough in the way they work. Yes, they can cause all sorts of problems. But the truth is that these people are few and far between. There are far more people who play it safe – frustrated by constraints that are in part imaginary and self-imposed.

One note of hope is that research shows that we’re pretty poor at accurately estimating our capability (the Dunning-Kruger effect – if you don’t know it, google it, it’s eye-opening). Just as people of low competence often over-estimate their abilities, highly competent people consistently under-estimate themselves. In particular a lot of highly competent people underestimate their ability to operate at the fringes of their job – that place where real change and adventure happens. People are capable of more than they realise but they need to be prepared to take a bit of a risk.

So, I invite you to ask yourself: do you want to feel like an adventurer or be part of the rise of the robots?

What is a coaching culture - and do we need one?

These days I’m asked more and more often by my clients about how to create a “coaching culture”. But they don’t always have a clear idea of what that means – or even why they might want one.

Here’s my take on a coaching culture. It’s based on what I've seen in organisations I’ve worked in as a coach or consultant. These are places where there’s been a real effort, from top leadership downwards, to use a coaching approach as much as they can.

In a coaching culture, most staff use a coaching approach in their daily life – with each other, and with external stakeholders and with customers. A true coaching culture is just ‘part of the way we do things around here’. But it’s not all motherhood and apple pie. There’s a hard edge to it. A coaching culture is about delivering results, improving performance and making the most of people’s potential. The emphasis is on delivery and helping each other (and the wider organisation) to be more effective. It’s NOT about having coaching conversations for their own sake, or as a diversion from other activities!

If you could be a ‘fly on the wall’ in a place where there’s a coaching culture, here’s what you’d see:

● Managers looking for opportunities to help others to learn

● People asking each other open questions

● Employees at all levels having open, honest and supportive conversations with one another

● People routinely giving one another feedback even when it’s difficult – and giving supportive and critical feedback

● Managers coaching team members to help them develop, rather than just to tackle poor performance

● Coaching and mentoring relationships forming without people being told to

● Senior leaders with a clear vision that coaching and mentoring are at the heart of how we work

● Teams working with clear goals, roles, processes and relationships

● Relatively few people will be ‘playing politics’

● A pragmatic focus on results. And at the same time on building the long-term health of the business.

So is there a catch?

Like many things in coaching and mentoring, a coaching culture is a simple idea but it’s challenging to put into practice. Developing and sustaining a coaching culture requires effort over time, and it’s only sustained through support and a clear vision from senior leaders. Senior leaders need to give up a fair amount of power to leaders and employees at lower levels. And they need to do this consistently. Some leaders are uncomfortable with this transfer of power, and this is the main reason why coaching cultures don't develop.

A coaching culture isn’t utopia. A coaching approach just isn’t right in all situations. There are times which demand 100% focus on immediate delivery – where coaching isn’t the right thing to do. As we often say, “You don’t coach someone out of a burning building”. The most important aspect of a coaching culture is that leaders have a good sense of when to coach others and when not to. Leaders balance the need to deliver results now with the need to build a healthy business that can deliver results for the future. A healthy coaching culture is a challenging but stimulating place to work – but it’s not a soft option. Leaders get the best from their people over a sustained period without ‘sweating the assets’ too much for too long.

Are all coaching cultures the same? No. A coaching culture in one place will look and feel quite different from another. Organisations have their own heritage, history, strategies, and business models – and all of these impact on what a coaching culture looks like. To bring this to life, let’s consider an FMCG business and an engineering business. They have very different competitive environments, different levels of complexity in the manufacturing process; and crucially, one is business-to-consumer and the other is business-to-business. So the coaching cultures for each business must be quite different from each other.

How to create a “coaching culture”

The first step is to create clear vision for the culture. It doesn’t have to be a perfect picture but it does need to be inspiring! How will the culture help you deliver your strategy? What’s in it for leaders – and for all employees? How will it benefit your customers and shareholders?

It’s also important to know where you’re coming from. You can conduct a ‘readiness audit’ to find out how much coaching and mentoring are already happening in your organisation. And how receptive people are to doing things differently.

And it’s important to have some first steps. In the early stages of creating a coaching culture, you’re likely to rely a lot on external coaches and external support. But this soon drops away as you train a cohort of internal coaches and/or mentors – as well as leaders who use a coaching approach in their daily lives. This trickles down to how employees work with each other.

Creating a coaching culture takes time but doesn’t always take a lot of investment if it’s done in a smart way.

How does coaching actually drive performance?

Coaching, whether delivered by internal coaches, line managers or external partners, can have a lasting, positive impact on an organisation.

But what does an effective organisation look like?*

 At its simplest, it performs at a high level and it has "organisational health":

High Performance: achieving directly measurable business results
 

Organisational health: “the ability of your organisation to align, execute, and renew itself faster than your competitors… organisational health is about adapting to the present and shaping the future faster and better than the competition… Healthy organisations don’t merely learn to adjust themselves to their current context or to challenges that lie just ahead; they create a capacity to learn and keep changing over time”*

Even in high performing organisations, there’s sometimes tension between Performance and Health.  Sometimes it’s important to invest for the future at the expense of today – sacrificing short-term results to invest in the business for the longer term.  At other times it’s necessary to focus on short-term performance at the expense of longer-term organisational health, like when overcoming a crisis or when preparing for an IPO.

Where possible, organisations need to act in ways that build BOTH performance and health.  Sweating the assets too hard for too long might help this quarter’s results but can cause you problems later.  But losing your competitive edge by focusing on projects that build Health won’t work either.

It’s easy to see how coaching can help build health – it often focuses on thinking about the long-term, achieving potential and managing change.

But business leaders don’t always see the link between coaching and performance.  When working in a fast-moving environment, held to account for short-term results, they might be forgiven for viewing coaching as a ‘nice to have’. 

Leaders often feel that it takes too long to have an impact, requiring more patience on the part of line managers and coachees than is practical.  As leaders we can sometimes be gripped by the urge to bark “Just ****** do it!” at people who are taking time to achieve results.  And while we know that a coaching approach might help, we feel we don’t have the time or patience to coach. 

But when done well, coaching is a driver of short-term performance as well as organisational health.  Coaching can help individuals and teams to come up with solutions that were there all along but which were not obvious – and which need a different way of doing things.  Where the problem is complex and where different groups of people need to come together to make things happen, coaching for key members of the team can keep projects on time and to budget – whilst building capability in the team at the same time. 

To get the best from coaching, senior leaders need to use it as a strategic enabler – with clear goals linked to overall business objectives.  This approach enables leaders at the top of the organisation bring people with them in executing strategy and – more often than not – building future capability. 

*McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011 “Organisational Health – The Ultimate Competitive Advantage” – Scott Keller and Colin Price