Weeknotes #68: Skills for Change
An exploration of skills we might need to develop in our teams for change that lasts.
You are reading Coaching Weeknotes by Roxana Bacian Coaching: explorations at the intersection of coaching, inner and organisational development.
I’m Roxana, I help teams and leaders build the skills they need to make change last. These week notes are multiply authored - arrived at in conversation with many:
I’ve been working on articulating what I help teams do in coaching sessions. I’m working to put words to what I want, very passionately, to help them do - and that is to create the conditions that enable them to create positive impact on the world; without unnecessary or additional discomfort, other than the one inherent in their task. In doing this, I’ve been reminiscing the work I’ve been doing with teams in the last 2.5 years coaching with NEON.
Most teams and individuals come to coaching because they want or need to make a change happen to an organisational process, team dynamic or a governance model.
To identify that you need to change, whether as an individual actor or as a team, is the first step, but does not in itself transpire into actual change or a new reality. The next step would be to instigate that change - to seek it out and source the support and resources one might need to take actions towards unravelling the change process.
And this is why I’d like to focus this weeknote on speaking to skills for change. Because before we can talk about changing our teams and our systems, we need to understand what these processes of change might ask of us before, during and after - the kind of people, teams and organisations we might need to become in the process.
A lot of the insights that might emerge in this article will have been inspired by moments in coaching in the last couple of years where things went haywire or when forward movement felt impossible. Those were the moments I am grateful to now and can engage with fully, to draw out the learning that was offered to us in them.
So what are some of these skills for change? I may find it easier to start by talking about the skills that will break our chance at meaningful change. We will all have travelled through some of these and I believe it’s precisely in being able to see ourselves in them, that we get a chance at doing the very opposite. Some are:
The Individual:
a) Perceving newness and feedback as rejection and being wrong ourselves;
b) Being afraid to live into our next level of potential, letting other people take the limelight because we think they’ll do it better;
c) Needing to maintain an outsider persona, in one way or another, so that we don’t feel belonging and can use that as a crutch to avoid commitment.
The Team:
a) Perceving new members as less knowledgeable, hoarding power in years of experience instead of allowing others to help us see our organisation with new eyes;
b) When egos become more important than the collective stake at hand. When the leadership is about followership instead of bringing out the creativity of the team;
c) To let the demands of the days and of economics to alter the deeper mission we are here to serve instead of focusing on building a caring team and organisation.
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What do you think? What would you add to this list? And what if we now turn our attention towards the skills we do want to foster for true change to be possible?
What would these be? Or are they virtues? Patience, humility, integrity. And how do they develop - in individuals and in teams? In my experience these qualities are deeply relational and develop in connection with other people, over time - we aquire them in practice through trial and error, connection and disagreement.
We won’t be asked to know how to be these things; these qualities will be forged within us as we strive to live into them - in every trial we will feel the consequences on our teams; and as this happens we will build new collective instincts and lived experience of aiming, learning and winning together.
Is your team ready to start thinking about building skills for change? I can help.
My approach works because it goes to the core of what isn’t working in a team.
After working with me, leaders and teams talk about our work as profound, compassionate and cohesion-bringing.
“Roxi has been a fantastic organisational coach for our team as well as coaching individual team members. She has helped us navigate a time of significant organisational change and we have come out of the other side a more cohesive team with stronger shared sense of - and processes for - working together.”
- Mark Walton, Ex - CEO & Co-Founder of Shared Assets
‘Roxi provided a solid structure for keeping us on track and moving forwards after an already extended transitional period - gently encouraging us to delve into some things deeper. She was a great support to move us through decisions and discussions which we had previously been getting stuck on.’
- Shared Assets, CIC in Land Justice, UK
This week I fell in love with this essay:
Essay on The Psychology of Cowardice by Manfred Kets de Vries:
Manfred describes it as: ‘An attempt to explore not only the behavior of politicians and business people, but the deeper human capacity for self-deception when the pursuit of power and greed collides with the faint, persistent voice of conscience.’
‘Cowardice is not only tragic, but ridiculous, a distortion of self-protection that borders on self-sabotage. It invites both sympathy and satire because it exposes a universal human folly: the wish to live without risk, to preserve the self so carefully that one forgets to inhabit it fully.’ - M K V
Thank you for reading as always.
See you next week,
Roxana
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Roxana Bacian Coaching ACC (she/her)
Team and Leadership Coach
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