Early Reflection

Three days is quite a long time to spend at a conference, stepping away from all the routines of daily life and immersing yourself in people, ideas, and possibilities.  I was a bit tentative about going to this conference even though it was on in Sydney, right at home but duty prevailed and off I went.  I am very glad I did because I had a fabulous time at the conference.  There were many highlights, but for me it was a workshop I attended on the Immunity to Change program developed by Dr Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey.  I have most of Kegan’s books, and Immunity to Change has sat on the shelf for at least a couple of years, despite the fact that I loved reading ‘The Evolving Self.’  Now Immunity to Change is back at the top of my reading list.

The Immunity to Change workshop was the longest of the conference at 3 hours, facilitated by Alison Cameron.  It ran parallel to a number of other sessions, but nonetheless the room was soon full to capacity.  Given it is their stock-in-trade, you would expect coaches to be very self aware.  So when we were asked to write down a goal – zap – as quick as a flash pens met paper.  Then were asked to write down a few more, and this time we were asked to examine our goals through the filter of four questions:

• It’s true for you.
• It implicates you.
• There is significant room for improvement
• And it is important to you.

For many people, their first goal was substituted.  Next, came a short period of deep reflection on behaviours – those we were doing and those we were not doing which prevented attainment of that goal.  So far, it was quite straight forward.  Then, things got a bit more hard hitting.  What were the hidden competing interests that were preventing us from achieving that goal?  We were being invited to confront them, to write them down, to discuss them with a partner in the room.  In Kegan terms, this was a process of making our subjective thoughts the object of our consideration.  It was quite confronting and people were generally looking rather more serious at this point.  Then we came to examine our ‘big assumption’ – what was the BIG ASSUMPTION which upon which these competing interests were founded.

Now a room full of coaches should not have great difficulty with this process, but by the time we all wrote down that big assumption, many of the participants in the room were in tears, myself included.  Women and men.  Something very powerful was at work.  It was this big assumption that was our immunity to change – the reason that our best efforts fail.

It is two days since the conference finished.  There is a lot to absorb and reflect on.   Developmental coaching is not for the faint hearted.  It can be arduous and painful, but there are riches at the end.

Nick Ross’s belief is that the ‘the ability to reconcile the tension between a leader’s external and inner worlds is fundamental to 21st Century leadership.  That the world is in a place of deep crisis is not new.  The complexity of the challenges which now assail leaders is deep and difficult. More than ever, we need to harness all the intellectual resources at our disposal to analyse strategic responses to technical problems.  We hear much about the need for leaders to be more emotionally intelligent, which is a truism, but much less about the inner journey of self awareness and development which provides mental calmness in a storm of uncertainties. The willingness to engage in inner growth which will be essential to combatting the narcissism of leadership certainty.  The business environment is a radically uncertain; the solutions are not self evident; nor at they likely to be universal.

 Coach Works has adopted a new tag line:  “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, is entirely misconceived … If you are not part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution” (quoting Bill Torbert).  On the big issues, total solutions are not out there waiting to be conjured up in the mysterious chemistry of the coaching conversation.  A best fit is often the only action option.  That best fit is not going to be without tensions.  Leaders cannot assume they have made the ‘right’ decision.  They will need be confident that their decisions are values based; that is, they have integrity.  They will need to be constantly adapting their inner worlds to their external exigencies. In this respect, leaders are always part of the problem.  The less self aware a leader is, the bigger this problem is likely to be.  As Kegan and Lahey explain (2009) say ‘When we experience the world as ‘too complex’’ we are not just experiencing the complexity of the world.  We are experiencing a mismatch between the world’s complexity and our own at this moment.”  

 One of the difficulties herein, is that we don’t know what we don’t know.  If we are not aware of a mismatch, how can we compensate for it?   It is widely accepted now, that there is an evolutionary trajectory in the development of each individual.  There are number of theories about the development of adults through their life span, but for pragmatic reasons, the work of Robert Kegan has gained traction in educational, management and psychological circles.  It is hard to disagree with the evidence that we continue to grow mentally throughout our life span.  Over the years, at different rates, we may grow in what Kegan refers to as ‘mental complexity’.  This is concordant with the well known Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  As our needs are met, our values change, and we turn to deeper forms of personal development.  Unlike the (largely) static nature of IQ, levels of mental complexity evolve in relation to challenges across one’s lifespan. As this occurs, so does perspective change. 

 Perspective taking is, in Kegan’s terms, the ability to see how own behaviour or stage of development is self limiting.  By changing perspective to a different level of meaning, we are able to reflect on our own thinking – a metacognition, if you like. Your own meaning making values become the object of reflection.  In making one’s thoughts, values and orientation to the world object, an individual is no longer subject to the constraints of their own level of maturity.  Kegan refers to this process as ‘subject-object’ relations.  As mental complexity evolves, a former selves can be seen more clearly, and a new level of meaning making is adopted.  This is a representation of cognitive stages of development.  There are other ways to track adult development – ego development, spiritual development, for example.

KEGAN’S ORDERS OF MIND 

The sample sizes upon which Kegan draws are skewed towards middle-class, college-educated professionals.  Among their findings is the claim that in a majority of respondents, mental complexity is not as far along as the self-authoring mind – exactly 58% are not at this level.

This blog entry is making the case for leadership development that develops self awareness, and from that awareness, the ability to take responsibility for one’s own actions.  

I finished my Masters degree in coaching from Sydney University three months ago. Dr Tony Grant, the Director of the Coaching Psychology Unit, said to us at a meeting of the University of Sydney Coaching and Mentoring Association that we shouldn’t think that just because we had a Masters, we were masters of coaching. So it proves to be … the more I learn about coaching, the more I find I still need to learn. Nonetheless, my years of coaching experienced have now been ‘certified’ and I can approach my coaching assignments with the confidence of a professional, but with a level of self-awareness that reminds me to be humble.  A coach accompanies a client knowing that answers to all the challenges and goals s/he may articulate lie within that person.

This is the first post of my new website. I have put it together myself, and it remains a work in progress. Future posts will be about coaching – research, insights, innovations, anecdotes and context. One of my signature strengths is a love of learning, so I am hoping that visitors to this site will do a bit of their own hitchhiking by providing me with comments and feedback. To paraphrase Sir John Whitmore, be aware; take responsibility.

Have you caught up with the London School of Economic’s Mappiness Project.  To date, 31,795 Brits have signed up by downloading an app to their smart phones which beeps them as a prompt to rate how happy they are at any particular moment.    The primary goal of this project has been to learn the effects of different environmental conditions on relative happiness.  Notwithstanding the rather ugly British weather around this time of the year, it is emerging that on average people are happier outdoors in a natural environment than indoors, although, unsurprisingly, less so when it is windy and rainy.  Also early results show that people are happier in non work hours than leisure hours, with Saturday being the peak.  Check it out on www.mappiness.org.uk.  An academic paper is planned to be submitted by early February.  My work is centered on the search for happiness in the workplace.  We spend way too much time, and invest way too much of ourselves in our workplace identities, to perform work which is unsatisfying.  Work should be playful, in my view, even at its most serious.  This research also makes me wonder – are people with outdoor jobs more happy than those who work indoors?  Or perhaps happiness experienced outdoors is higher because of the contrast to working indoors. Just being outdoors may be a surrogate for leisure.  Interesting stuff!

An International Coaching Federation professional development seminar this September featured Donna Czupryna, who has developed an intensive coaching program focused on transpersonal techniques. According to Donna, transpersonal literally means ‘beyond the person’, but transpersonal coaching is hard to define. Arguably, all professional coaching provides a safe environment for the achievement of transformational change, but transpersonal coaching attempts to reach beyond the cognitive/mental models of coaching to explore higher awareness, mind-body wisdom, creative capacity and connectedness (with community, planet or universe). This approach probably lends itself best to life coaching, but its methodology can contribute to both career and developmental coaching, particularly in respect the self-discovery work of identifying life purpose and core values.
I found Donna’s map of human transformation particularly relevant to processes of change. It is based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which is very much a Jungian concept. Change is rarely a straight trajectory and each stage may be re-visited several times. Change takes courage and persistence. Setbacks are always part of the journey, and finding the resilience and strength to persevere is an heroic journey no matter what descriptive tag is attached to coaching practice.

I am still beavering away at my group career coaching workshops, and will soon have this project completed.  Finding the right career is not the same as finding the right job.  Career work is very much about the heart, whereas jobseeking is more about the head – the use of good tactical skills.  However, career work does need reality checks about where future employment opportunities might lie.  The World Future Society has just published the following jobs forecasts for the United States, and it is a good guide to trends in Australia.  This is it:

Hottest jobs for 2016:

– Network systems and data communications analysts

(53.4% more U.S. employees than in 2006)

– Personal and home care aides (up 50.6%)

– Home health aides (up 48.7%)

– Computer software engineer (up 44.6%)

– Veterinary technologist/technician (up 41.0%).

Coldest jobs for 2016:

– Photographic processing machine operator

(49.8% fewer U.S. employees than in 2006)

– File clerk (down 41.3%)

– Sewing machine operator (down 27.2%)

– Electrical and electronic equipment assembler

(down 26.8%)

– Computer operator (down 24.7%).

— “U.S. Employment Ups and Downs, 2006-2016,”

Sep-Oct 2009, p. 30

I have been working away at developing a career coaching workshop. Using a group coaching format and staying true to the ICF coaching competencies is a challenge, but progress is being made. One of the topics I have been playing with is that of life purpose. It can be seen as a bit ‘fluffy’ by hard heads (myself included), but if you believe, as I do, that career aspirations have to be located in the broader context of family, community and personal wellbeing, then finding one’s own life purpose is a prerequisite. There is quite a lot of literature on life purpose which is based on religion: God’s purpose for you. This is definitely not my starting point. My hunt is purely secular. I was interested to read an on-line article by Clayton Christensen who is a professor at the Harvard business school. He says of his students that “clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces. “ This is a great quote which I can use in my workshops. Meanwhile, the task goes on to successfully incorporate life purpose into a workshop format where the main focus is on career development.

Kevin Rudd has the reputation as being a control freak. Putting aside the ‘big Australia’ blunder, I thought the policy agenda he was driving was generally sensible. His apology to the stolen generations was particularly moving. So what de-railed him, when he had enjoyed so much support for the directions in which he was taking Australia? Any number of issues, especially when you offend the mining industry, whether on climate change or taxation.
I was interested to read a recent Harvard Business Review alert on controlling bosses. It seems that people who deeply value their autonomy and freedom will react negatively to even an unconscious memory of a controlling person. Known in psychological literature as ‘reactant’s, individuals who love their freedom, may “do anything to protect it.” So it may be that when his popularity fell so dramatically, the former Prime Minister was particularly exposed to Cabinet dissatisfaction with his management style. On the other hand, this may be pure fantasy on my part. However, I do think the deposing of Kevin Rudd is of great interest from a management perspective and perhaps over time we will read more about it.

EVIDENCE BASED COACHING – DEVELOPMENTAL COACHING (Pt 2)

It was a privilege and an inspiration to attend a conference workshop by Jennifer Garvey Berger at Sydney University’s Evidence Based Coaching Conference.  Her topic was developmental coaching, and having trawled around trying to find out what was distinctive about developmental coaching, I was intrigued by what she might have to say. We all know the terms ‘staff development’ or ‘personal development’, and generally understand them to mean acquiring new skills and professional insights.   Jennifer’s background and academic work is in the field of adult education and her coaching work has its theoretical foundations in the work of Robert Kegan. 

Kegan has developed a model outlining stages of development through life’s course – to quote Jennifer ‘developmentalists believe that humans grow and change over time and enter qualitatively different phases as they grow’.  Integral to Kegan’s theory is the concept of meaning, and how the way we make sense of the world is constructed through our prisms of meaning .  Transformative development  occurs when those prisms change – it occurs when an individual gains insight into how his/her ways of knowing change.  Kegan enunciates five ‘orders of mind’, each of which represents greater complexity over time in the way we construct reality, culminating in the fifth order – the ‘self transforming’ mind.  Very few adults reach this level, but when they do, Jennifer has found in her executive coaching that often the transformation is so complete that corporate life loses its appeal. 

So, now I understand developmental coaching to be a transformative journey through relatively discrete stages of self awareness.  I suspect that there are not many coaches out there with Jennifer’s knowledge and great karma.  She is certainly a gifted speaker who inspires great humility and awe for what can be.

GDP (gross domestic product) has long been the instrument for measuring national economic wealth.  However, it has  increasingly come under fire as being too narrow and many social commentators have called for measures of GDH – gross domestic happiness.  However, critics argue that neither  measure takes into account activities that degrade overall quality of life, including damage to the environment and the social costs of certain forms of development.  For example, you may think you are both happy and financially secure, but if the place where you live is contaminated by pollutants (let’s say asbestos) then the downstream impacts can be enormous.  If this subject interests you, see http://www.ethicalmarkets.com.