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As I write this, we’re on the threshold of a New Year. I don’t generally set much store by this moment in the year: for me it’s usually just another day, with no particular significance other than its place on the calendar. Somehow, though, this year feels a bit different – and I think it’s because of what feels like the huge significance of what’s going on in the world.

Tangled up in the moment

Over the holidays, I took my grandchildren to the pantomime. The funniest moment was unintentionally hilarious: during a song-and-dance routine that became increasingly out of hand, the Dame whirled into the voluminous curtain at the back of the stage. In the process she pulled the curtain half-down, and got tangled up in it, unable to escape except with the help of stage hands who ran on to the stage. She was finally extricated from the curtain and resumed her place in the singing and dancing. Everyone – actors, stage crew and audience – was in fits of laughter.

The tangle and the Dame’s frantic efforts to escape, took all the attention – and once I was over my fits of laughter, it struck me as a metaphor. It’s so easy to get tangled up as we race through our lives, as a crisis, or even simply the demands of the moment grasp our attention. In the process the plot – our purpose and our place – of our lives might get completely lost, and we lose sight of the bigger picture (if indeed we ever had it). It’s prompted me to think (again) about why I’m here, and moved me to more serious topics.

The world

The war in Ukraine – the incursion of a huge power, ravenous for territory – continues to cause untold misery. Repression in Afghanistan causes heartbreaking deprivation of all kinds. Loosening of the COVID reins in China, with inadequate vaccination, is creating a rampage of the virus.

Climate change this year has caused searing heat and wildfires in the UK, followed barely 5 months later by days on end of sub-zero temperatures.

Closer to home, food banks are run off their feet, while energy costs are causing desperate suffering to ordinary people who can’t afford to heat their homes. Many of these are the same people who are using food banks: people with jobs and salaries.

My place in these challenges

As the year turns, I’m reflecting on my place in these developments. Our society and our world look and feel very different from last year, and I’m exploring with curiosity where I belong in them. The quality of leadership – for all that it was critical before this year – feels even more critical now, and I’m conscious of my huge privilege in being able to work with leaders across a wide range of sectors, facilitating them to find and implement styles of leading which build on greater awareness, create greater psychological safety in their environments and thus more flourishing, bring more compassion and self-compassion, exercise greater wisdom and insight, enable for themselves greater personal peace and fulfilment, and contribute to creating a better society and a better world.

Responsibility

Responsibility matters. Leaders have a responsibility to themselves (to take care of themselves, to conduct themselves with integrity, to ensure they’re constantly learning and developing), to their people (to ensure a working environment in which those people feel safe and happy, can flourish and develop, and can deliver effectively to the society they operate within), to the healthy co-design and fulfilment of the missions of their organisations, and ultimately to the wider world (to ensure the operations and products of their organisations are ethical and make a contribution to preserving our precious planet).

Responsibility and relationship

We can’t just live and work as separate individuals if we’re to fulfil the responsibility of our roles as members of society and as leaders. In the view of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (2013), international religious leader, philosopher, award-winning author, and respected moral voice, ‘where what we want to do meets what is crying out to be done, that is where we should be’. And that demands being in healthy relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the systems we are part of.

Stepping back

As the we enter the new year, I’m exploring what becomes possible when I’m not tangled up in the backdrop, not only now when I feel fresh and renewed, but through the year, by stepping back from what seem to be the immediate imperatives – when I can take alternative perspectives. I’m reflecting in the same vein for my clients too.

^{Photo by Kier… in Sight on Unsplash}

Thoughts on entanglement

It’s so easy to get tangled up as we race through our lives, as a crisis, or even simply the demands of the moment, grasp our attention. In the process the plot – our purpose and our place - of our lives might get completely lost, and we lose sight of the bigger picture. Responsibility matters. Leaders have a responsibility to themselves, to their people, to the healthy co-design and fulfilment of the missions of their organisations, and ultimately to the wider world. In the view of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (2013), where what we want to do meets what is crying out to be done, that is where we should be. And that demands being in healthy relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the systems we are part of. I’m exploring what becomes possible when I’m not tangled up in the backdrop, by stepping back from what seem to be the immediate imperatives.

Coaching through COVID and Beyond drawing to a close

Coaching through COVID was born out of a compassionate response to what NHS and care workers were going through when COVID hit the UK in March 2020, and intended most of all to serve, rather than help or fix. It was set up spontaneously by a small group of executive coaches (including myself), and began to offer coaching within days of being launched. After 2½ years, what started as Coaching through COVID, and became Coaching through COVID and Beyond, has drawn to a close, having offered coaching to 650 people, through 250 experienced and qualified coaches, culminating in a final, celebratory (virtual) conference at which we marked the ending.

Power, voice and the relational nature of work

He was a C-suite leader in a multinational company, fulfilling a demanding, multi-faceted role. His CEO wanted staff in the office four days a week, and he was beginning to feel peripheral to his family. He knew that for his own and his family’s wellbeing he wanted to be in the office only three days a week. He was, however, very hesitant to raise his dilemma with his CEO: he felt out on a limb, risking his sense of belonging. It struck me that the predominant dynamic was an imbalance of power, in contrast to the possibility of creative collaboration, and he didn’t seem to be hopeful that he would be heard. How might leaders enable their people to step into, and leverage, more of their own power? How might both leader and led transform their perceptions of their roles and their places into something less atomised and individualised and something more relational?

A journey through risk

An emergency admission to hospital..... Until the surgery had been completed and pronounced successful, and the biopsy showed there was no ongoing problem, the nature of what my life was to be was at the extreme end of uncertainty, with a possible threat to it. Being present to my own experience without resisting it, and accepting both the experience and the situation on a moment-by-moment basis, have, I realise, been central. I feel sure that my years of mindfulness practice accounted for my capacity to accept, and to face in to all the available facts and the possible outcomes. During my hospital stay and afterwards I’ve been struck by how many people remarked on my effect on them. For leaders every action, every tone of voice, every conversation has an impact. The leader who accepts mindfully that things are as they are will be realistic and very likely have more insight than the leader who resists a situation they wish was otherwise. They’ll feel calmer too, and that will be viral. The leader who’s appreciative, supportive and caring (and who encourages that sort of culture) will have a workforce with high levels of engagement, discretionary effort, effectivenes and customer satisfaction.

Slowing down to speed up

A potential client, ‘a man in a hurry’, was looking for answers. Now. Another prospective client slowed down long enough to engage with the notion of the challenge – and the benefits – to him of that very slowing down, because he was interested in ‘exploring the hidden in order to grow’. The nature of organisational life frequently means that leaders are pressured to achieve clear, ‘correct’ outcomes – fast and with urgency. While this is standard, it militates against the possibility of achieving richer, wider, more sustainable outcomes because space hasn’t been made for reflection and for experimenting. A leader might consider becoming aware of when speed is the lived priority, and reflecting on the impact and outcomes of that priority. They might also consider putting in place processes, approaches and forums in which people can honestly express what’s going on for them, be truly heard without being offered opinions or judgments, and be acknowledged for who they are rather than what they do.

The horse, leadership and me

I’m with a group of colleagues, learning about experiential leadership with executive coach and developer of leaders and teams, Jude Jennison, and her herd of horses. With a horse it’s critical to be in relationship (and useful to be able to identify how that manifests in your body), to be curious, to be present, to respect the horse’s freedom to choose and to offer clear direction. What won’t work is to be concerned about your competence or performance, because the horse will instantly pick up on your insecurity and will feel unsafe. And it’s hard to be in relationship when lack of safety is there. Jude’s insight about the importance of allowing the horse space and freedom so that together we can fulfil the task feels like an important illumination. We learn that the whole team needs to be in sync. Communication up and down the line is essential if the team is to stay cohesive. And the horse needs confidence in the clarity, intention, direction, energy and trust of both the leader and the whole team.

What’s love got to do with it?

Client A is close to burnout. He constantly over-stretches himself to meet other people’s requests for help and for task fulfilment. As a child, he felt neither loved nor lovable: the only way he ever felt approved of or accepted was through his intellectual ability and achievements. Client B alienates others with her ‘honest’ but brutal and judgmental behaviour, has very high and unforgiving expectations of herself and of others, and is never satisfied with her own performance. These behaviours are getting seriously in the way of their leadership, and they both want to understand how to manage themselves differently. Besides the negative impact on their wellbeing, each is also damaging their career prospects. The coaching enquiry means they each experience a freedom in an awareness that gives them choices that they hadn’t offered themselves before. They learn, each in their own way, that there is strength and safety and a new-found sense of wellbeing in learning self-love, learning how to listen to their own needs, and self-acceptance. Love has everything to do with it.

Endings and leavings

The primary emotions that arise from losing a sense of belonging need to be attended to, just as much as organisations need to acknowledge the contributions made by those who have left. Endings (and the associated feelings) that aren’t resolved or aren’t fully integrated into a system somehow ‘hang about’ and leave their impact to be felt, sometimes for decades, in the form of burdened roles. A particularly impactful ending is represented by death. There’s value in accepting ‘what is’, and being alert to what may be emerging: experiencing it as a state of being rather than thinking or doing. Loss or ending might actually be, above all, a fertile space – the Gestalt notion of the Fertile Void. Good endings allow for good beginnings.

Are you being heard?

Voice matters because it is a channel for the self-expression that people need in order to feel acknowledged and seen, and – more broadly – because it can have a significant impact for a team or organisation when judgment, uncertainty, ideas and innovation, collaboration, communication and coordination are in the mix. An absence of voice may mean compliance or obedience, but it isn’t territory for sustainable engagement - and sustainable engagement is essential for the flexibility and adaptability that characterises resilient, robust, flourishing teams and organisations. What enables voice is psychological safety: believing that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. That belief means the leader, in the first instance, consistently modelling behaviours that authentically welcome inclusiveness and diversity (including diversity of thought), that mean that help is offered and requested freely, that engage without judgment in taking risks and failing, and that make open conversations the norm – all this without fear of judgment, penalty or exclusion.

The illusion of solutions

Family therapist Barry Mason characterises solutions as ‘only dilemmas that are less of a dilemma than the dilemma one had’. There’s no such thing as right or wrong in the coaching encounter: no predetermined answers, no pre-set course, but rather flow and emergence, and the noticing of these. And here’s where certainty and uncertainty arise, mirroring the working environment - and particularly the leader’s environment. Thinking in terms of certainty may mean that the leader doesn’t see all the tripwires, since not everything is either certain or predictable. In my experience of coaching leaders, the capacity to allow, and allow for, uncertainty – frustrating as that may be – also allows for versatility, responsiveness to the situation as it is, rather than as one wants it or assumes it to be, and creativity. Which in turn allows for a more agile response.

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