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Together separately

‘We are all in this together. And yet increasingly, we are all in this separately’.

Tim Harford’s article in the Financial Times of 23-24 May 20 ‘Reopening economies will divide societies’ looks at the range of criteria that could be applied to the phases of lockdown and at what rhythm. Moral and ethical codes. Statistical, economic, societal criteria. Maximisation of health or wealth? None of it, he says, brings any sense of connection or integration, but rather fragmentation and separation.

Isolation obstructs the human need for connection

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have created many more questions than answers, and more uncertainty and unpredictability than stability or discernible pattern. The isolation that has been a feature of life worldwide ever since the known beginning of COVID-19 in Wuhan is fundamentally at odds with the fact that human beings need to connect with each other in order to survive and to maintain our mental health. But we have had to isolate in order to protect ourselves.

In isolation employees experience more intense communication, unpunctuated by the casual water-cooler conversations that oil the social and psychological wheels, that provide space in which people can take a few minutes’ time out, and that broaden, consolidate and enrich connection. The excitement of being in crisis mode has, in some workplaces, given way to a less energetic engagement with work, a weakening of connection between colleagues and an intensifying of relationships at home.

Medical staff and their patients need human connection

Medical and care staff are separated physically from their patients by their Personal Protective Equipment at a time when those patients desperately need the human connection. And those medical and care staff members – as I know from my work with Coaching through COVID – need to feel connected, supported and heard, whether during the peaks that will probably go on for some time, or the intervening periods of relative calm when it is anticipated that mental health issues will emerge and may well get worse over the forthcoming months and years.

Team leaders are exploring individual and team purpose more than usually

Leaders are having to work hard to keep (or become) connected with their teams, while equally it can be hard to spot the team member who’s becoming disengaged, as psychological distancing follows physical distancing. Team members can lose touch with what it means to be involved and engaged, and in fact with what their purpose is. I’m finding that the leaders I’m working with are interested in questions of personal and team purpose more than usually.

When common purpose can tip into heroic behaviours

Fascinatingly, the Coaching through COVID team, which came together as an entirely new team, experiences a profound sense of connection, which I suspect is related to a deeply held common sense of purpose, besides its high level of psychological safety, mutual support and compassion. We are conscious, however, that that passion and connection could – if we don’t pay attention – tip us into heroic behaviours that could mirror the behaviours of the frontline staff we set up to serve. We occasionally see this in the wider community of coaches who also clearly connect with the cause and in some senses over-identify with it.

Under threat we need social contact

I’m curious about whether this commitment, passion and connection to a cause might be serving as a search for compensation for the lack of social contact and isolation. Looking at it systemically, that could make sense: we are social creatures who, under threat (such as a pandemic), need social contact. And social contact is the very thing we’re being denied, in the interests of physical survival (as, for example, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, Dr Stephen Porges’ extensive work on this topic, including the polyvagal theory, demonstrates).

The polyvagal theory – and the need for connection

So what can leaders and managers do in the context of a team at a distance? Dr Porges, in his work on the polyvagal theory, comments that through evolution, mammals couldn’t survive as isolates. They needed interaction with others of their species. Our purpose as human beings is to be connected, because without being connected, our minds and bodies wither and waste away.

How to build connection in isolation

Dr Porges tells us that we can create ways of helping ensure that colleagues feel connected. He recommends particular awareness that a lot of modulation in a voice – rather than monotone delivery – along with a friendly face, and open body language, maintain calm and nurture engagement. Similarly, smiling conveys cues of safety and empathy because it involves movement in the muscles round the eyes which, in a smile, convey the message ‘I’m happy to be with you’ – and a sense of safety encourages both engagement and learning. In terms of tone, it pays to know that a higher tone of voice can convey anxiety, while a lower tone of voice can convey threat. Neither of these is conducive to safety and engagement.

Remember too that reflective listening techniques (seeking to understand a speaker’s idea, then offering the idea back to the speaker, to confirm the idea has been understood correctly) can help people feel a connection.

Isolation, health and team effectiveness

Connected team members will benefit from a reduced sense of isolation – and that in turn can help build team health and effectiveness.

Photo by Rod Waddington via Compfight

Isolation, connection and leadership in COVID-19

The isolation that has been a feature of life worldwide ever since the known beginning of COVID-19 in Wuhan is fundamentally at odds with the fact that human beings need to connect with each other in order to survive and to maintain our mental health. Dr Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory tells us that we can create ways of helping ensure that colleagues feel connected. He recommends particular awareness that a lot of modulation in a voice – rather than monotone delivery – along with a friendly face, and open body language, maintain calm and nurture engagement. Similarly, smiling conveys cues of safety and empathy because it involves movement in the muscles round the eyes which, in a smile, convey the message ‘I’m happy to be with you’ – and a sense of safety encourages both engagement and learning.

Coaching through COVID

Coaching through COVID is a pro bono coaching programme which offers a listening ear by psychologically-minded coaches to any NHS or care worker during and beyond COVID-19

A high-performing team through COVID-19

While it’s still early days, this programme is without question delivering value at a time of considerable stress, anxiety and exhaustion for NHS staff dealing with COVID-19. High-quality coaches at an advanced stage of coaching maturity are supported by teams of wellbeing and trauma specialists, and the core team shares a clear purpose, to which all team members are passionately committed. We are privileged to experience humble and inspiring leadership from Mark McMordie, constantly with an eye both on the present and the future, and with a focus on both the big picture (a systemic, creative and far-reaching view) and the operational detail to implement it, and attention paid to team members’ wellbeing and self-care so that we can sustain ourselves as well as the programme. This is distributed leadership in action, with all team members feeling free and trusted to take initiative, and all working with agility and flexibility. The outcomes of the team ethos are showing in coachees' positive feedback.

Pro bono NHS coaching for COVID-19

In COVID-19, NHS medical staff are facing an encounter with an illness whose scale and rate of transmission is nothing like anything they’ve ever encountered before. They are frightened, stressed, anxious, exhausted from working long shifts in a new, uncertain yet threatening context, and in some cases, they're traumatised. The pro bono coaching programme COVID-19 Rapid Response Coaching (C19RR), set up in mid-March, is a professional, high-quality coaching programme, supported by supervision, trauma specialists, counsellors and therapists, and is being rolled out at speed. It has started with a pilot at a large London teaching hospital, and demand is growing exponentially.

Never enough time

The underpinnings of clients' 'too little time' often turn out to be something from a completely different source, such as patterns related to taking responsibility, unclear priorities or unclear purpose, being distracted by the short-term rewards of 'helping', or aiming for perfection. The costs of striving to fit an unrealistic amount of work into too little time can include stress and exhaustion without ever feeling you've got anywhere. So struggles with time are often actually struggles with embedded patterns of thinking, behaviour and loyalties. Gaining insight into those patterns and so giving oneself more choice is the key - and fundamental to that is taking time for honest and courageous reflection, either alone or with a skilled coach.

Seeking momentum

For momentum to build and sustain, whether for growth, cutting costs or increasing profit or benefit, organisations need their people to be aligned in their purpose and focus, and they need their leaders to inspire them and keep them on track. Momentum seems to me not be a linear process, but rather a complex process – and leaders sometimes forget to what extent the pace and the momentum inevitably create disruption and turbulence, both of which inhibit the momentum. The effort to achieve momentum may be experienced as turbulence for some time before there’s any sense of things settling into a pattern, and particularly any sense of wellbeing with and within that pattern. People struggle to build momentum while things feel turbulent or unstable: momentum and turbulence are uneasy companions. Leaders need to anticipate this process as part of their planning for the momentum they want.

Presence and gravitas

Leadership is at least as much about being as about doing - so a leader’s presence and gravitas help resource them to motivate and inspire others. Personal presence is most obviously about authenticity, integrity, non-judgmental awareness of, and openness to, all aspects of one’s environment (internal and external), and acceptance and self-acceptance. Gravitas results in impact and influence through the power of communication and the impact of relationships. It conveys a sense of authority, substance and weight, but also includes humanity and humour. Contributing factors to gravitas are presence, behaviour and expertise – and they are all necessary conditions. In other words, gravitas combines being with doing and communicating.

Keeping quiet and carrying on - or finding your voice

When most of us see or hear - or indeed experience - behaviour by our leaders at work that lacks integrity, justice or humanity, our usual response is to keep our heads down and carry on, fearing the penalties if we speak up. When we have an emotional reaction to what we've witnesed, as long as we don’t act, both the injustice and our own lack of action may continue to rankle. So we get caught in a double bind: it’s too dangerous to speak out, and it’s too uncomfortable not to speak out. Speaking up can require significant courage. As an executive coach, I’m privileged to be able to provide a safe space in which leaders engage with the risky process of finding their voices, articulating their own truths, becoming more of who they are – and in the process becoming more effective and compelling leaders, invariably with greater integrity and humanity.

Saying goodbye to the glitter

My article 'Saying goodbye to the glitter' has been published in the November 2019 issue of Coaching at Work. When a very high achiever is obliged, or has chosen, to move on from the peak of their career, the experience can be akin to a bereavement. They can experience their sense of identity, their sense of belonging, their sense of meaning and the knowledge that they are making a difference as at risk: they need to recreate their sense of self.

The loneliness of the long distance runner

Leaders who are at the peak of their careers, while anticipating or indeed experiencing the fulfilment of achievement, are frequently lonely, isolated and lacking the safety of honest conversations. They feel deeply the pressure of expectation. They have inadequate opportunity amid the intensity of pressure and complexity to have safe conversations in which to maintain or create clarity about what they really want to do. At some point for leaders in all such situations, the need and search for ‘self’ becomes imperative: they need to rediscover - or indeed discover – themselves in order to articulate their choices and manage those choices. They realise they can reduce the loneliness by articulating and sharing ‘what is’ with a compassionate yet challenging coach with whom they feel safe, connected and trusting, and who has no vested interest in their challenge.

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