A summary of what you’re getting. Hint: You’re reading it right now.
The crisis impacted organizations and leaders woke up to a new reality.
Suddenly responsible for a workforce uprooted by a massive disruption, leaders dug deep to find meaning and answers.
The right approach emerges as human-centered leadership that empowers employee contributions to organizational agility, resilience, and performance.
Coaches have supported and can continue to support executives on their journey as human-centered, agile leaders.
Summing up the last two years in one word is easy – disruption. This disruption to every major area of our lives led to feelings of isolation, anxiety, and depression. But what was the result of that? How did we rally, pivot, and adapt and what does that mean for our collective future?
A group of nineteen IOC fellows, executive coaches with extensive experience in coaching executives in large organizations, wanted to find out. They interviewed thirty-three executives in five countries, all of whom were invited to reflect on what they have experienced and learned about leadership and the role of coaching in leadership.
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Once March 2020 happened, leaders had no choice but to see the critical role of the workplace in meeting vital human needs for social connection and engagement.
A compassionate, whole-person approach to employee well-being and resilience was a key driver of performance.
Individual resilience = organizational resilience.
At the outset of the pandemic, executives dealing with their own sense of loss could empathize with the loss their employees felt. Fortunately, virtual tools allowed us to shift overnight and maintain some sense of togetherness.
Employees across the board rallied. Rather than seeing productivity declining, they found ways to make working at home productive.
Large-scale stress and exhaustion determined that future workplaces should be designed to optimize the physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being of employees to support engagement, productivity, and collaboration.
A silver lining? The increased importance of human-centered skills at work like: authenticity, empathy, compassion, shared purpose, transparent communication, and trust building.
For all of its awfulness, the pandemic shone a spotlight on what a more human workplace could look like. Leaders are learning, albeit at different paces and levels, that the future of work and the workplace will call for compassionate leadership – the integration of connectedness, flexibility, well-being, mutually supportive teams – in order to succeed. Organizations that succeeded in sustaining engaged, productive, and high-performing teams in the midst of a pandemic have demonstrated the benefits that flow from prioritizing human thriving at work. As one leader noted:
At an organizational level, leaders adapted their strategies and priorities to be more human-centric – caring, compassionate, and authentic. They also became more agile and open to rethinking strategy and direction.
The pandemic brought leaders an opportunity to step back and reflect, to raise their conscious awareness of the broader scope of responsibility and possibility that comes with being a leader.
Leaders were called to empathically and courageously connect with all stakeholder groups – especially employees, building trust and instilling confidence, through a calm, empathic tone.
Leaders have woken up to the realization that employee well-being is connected to performance of both individuals and teams, even when the overall context has returned to more stability.
The focus on social issues has led many leaders to appreciate the power of inclusion: seeing, respecting, and valuing each person alongside seeking and incorporating a wide array of diverse perspectives.
Cultures can change and adapt, especially in response to disruption. The early adopters are setting the pace; they’re leading with humanity as a competitive advantage, as a retention tool, and as a way to be ready for the next crisis.
Source: McKinsey & Co. Mind-sets matter in transformations: A conversation with Jon Garcia. 2019 (February 15).
https://www. mckinsey.com/business-functions/rts/our-insights/mind-setsmatter-in-transformations-a-conversation-with-jon-garcia. Accessed June 21, 2021.
As they lived and led through 2020 and early 2021, leaders questioned and re-examined the role they play in building trust and creating a safe space for brainstorming, innovation, and productivity. They’ve recognized they need to expand beyond the mandate of producing financial results to optimizing the lived experience for individuals and the collective, all while delivering the same, or even better, results.
Many leaders turned to coaches to recalibrate, to get validation, and to feel grounded. It allowed them to test and reflect on their observations and assumptions against a confidential, impartial sounding board for feedback.
During times of the greatest challenge or crisis, many leaders are required to focus on immediate action – on implementation and execution. Coaches can help leaders pause to expand and diversify their perspectives and possibilities before moving into action.
In support of more agile and versatile leadership, coaches can help leaders zoom out to a meta-view, to see the broader systemic implications of their decisions. Coaching can get leaders to become aware of and challenge established habits, mindsets, and ways of thinking, and to consider trying new approaches.
A coach can contextualize the feedback in a way that acknowledges a leader’s strengths while helping them see what gets in the way of seeing themselves as others see them. An effective coaching dynamic supports leaders in reframing, exploring, and considering alternative options around their beliefs and principles to help uncover both conscious and unconscious biases.
Coaching relationships can assist leaders in expanding their underused capacities, helping them realize there is a better version of themselves that they hadn’t appreciated. With this greater sense of their own capabilities, leaders are able to take on bigger challenges.
With a skilled coach, leaders can expand from being a one-note operator—decisive, authoritative—to becoming more agile and capable of utilizing more diverse approaches. Coaches can also help leaders engage in the self-transformational leadership needed to support transformation of their organizations, whether intentional or in response to crisis and collaboration.
The pandemic left leaders, as one pointed out, needing to “change tires while driving.” But those interviewed who had formal coaching benefited from just-in-time guidance to discover, leverage, and expand their repertoires.
The coaching process occurs in real-time, is confidential and customized, and can therefore increase the speed of learning and adoption of new skills, thinking, and behaviors. In the midst of human change and growth, the coach acts as a catalyst, enabling and accelerating individual change, growth, and transformation. Leaders can also develop more sophisticated people skills modeled by coaches—coaching, inspiring, providing feedback – that are a prerequisite for the human-centered, compassionate leadership needed today.
Today’s workplace calls for agile leaders who have a varied set of skills to meet the diverse and often opposing demands of rapid and complex change. Coaching conversations model a human-centered, values-based approach. The coaching process helps leaders become more compassionate, authentic, and inclusive of diverse perspectives, while accelerating growth and improving well-being. Coaching ignites agile thinking, disrupts thinking and behavior patterns, brings more purpose and strategy to empowering and developing people, and enables individual and organizational reinvention.
