When we think of coaching we typically think of a relationship between coach and client where the client undergoes some sort of change, whether that's learning a new skill or something more developmental. But what about the coach? What happens to them in the coaching relationship? Where does the change come from? Does the change come from within the client? Does the coach change the client? Does the coach get changed as well, or are they separate?

I have been talking to a lot of other coaches recently and asking them how they see their relationships with their clients. I typically get one of four answers. I have started calling these the compulsion model, the crucible model, the catalyst model and the constituent model. Or, if you prefer, the 4Cs.

Over the last few posts we have been looking at self care, why it's important and how to be realistic about our goals, especially in times that are chaotic and stressful. One thing I haven't really touched on much is that self care isn't something you need to do alone. I know that sounds counter-intuitive but trust me on this - self care is often a great group activity. We, and by we, I mean people here in Australia and other similar western countries, have a real bias towards individual effort. We raise rugged individualism almost to a national characteristic. We feel that we should be self reliant. If it's our problem, we need to fix it ourselves. If it's our goal we need to reach it ourselves. Individual effort is seen as better and more pure than team efforts. Team efforts are seen as more dilute and somehow less worthy.

We see this all the time. We reward the hero employee who worked all night to fix a problem but not the well functioning team who prevented a problem from occurring in the first place. We have the hero leader who rides in, fixes the problem and rides out again. The solo entrepreneur who brings their dream to life. The hero CEO who turns a company around. Even in our team sports we single out the most valuable individual player each game and give them an award. Reaching out to others for help is seen as unworthy. Weak.

Last time I talked about the importance of self care and how caring for self is what really enables caring for others. Care for self is what recharges our reserves and gives us the energy to do the same for others. Care for others without care for self is draining and unsustainable. This time I'm going to talk about some strategies for practising self care in stressful times. This really applies all the time but is particularly relevant when we are under unusual stress.

This past 12 months have been a very difficult time for many, if not most of us. Pandemics, lockdowns, work insecurity, added to natural disasters and a long overdue reckoning on racial injustice made for a very stressful time. During stressful times, self care is especially important and many people recognised that at the beginning of the pandemic. There was a lot of talk initially about using the lockdowns to reset and invest in self care (Covid baking, sourdough, cooking, exploring your neighbourhood, investing in home exercise equipment, colour coding your bookshelves). Followed a few months later by guilt and shame at not being able to maintain that initial drive long term. Many people found themselves paralysed and unable to even start the simplest of projects. Lots of time but no energy.

Last time we looked at care as a leadership strategy - how care for others is the key to great leadership. Leaders who truly care for the welfare of others and demonstrate that continuously are the ones who can lead their teams and organisations through uncertainty because their people are more willing to follow and try different things. Care builds trust and trust is needed if you want someone to move willingly out of their comfort zone and try something new. Particularly if that change will be an uncomfortable or difficult one.

There was one aspect of care though that I didn't talk about and it's a really important one - always remember that care is not just for others. Care for Self is really important, and, sadly, often overlooked. I have seen many leaders who care very deeply about their people and their organisation. They devote themselves to their organisation and their teams and they work tirelessly to make them better. And they completely neglect themselves.

I am a biased person. I will freely admit it. I have plenty of biases. So are you by the way (if this is a human reading this, of course). If you are an algorithm, then you probably have biases as well depending on your training data. If you are some alien tapping into our internet to work out your invasion plan, then I can't say whether you have biases or not, but I do welcome you as our new overlords. The thing is, we all have biases. Some that we recognise and some that we don't.

When presented with solutions to a problem, I will generally pick the one that is best for the environment, or the one that is best for growing community. You may pick the one that makes the most money or is cheapest. Or you may pick the one that conquers the native population of the planet the fastest. The problem is that as coaches we are supposed to help our clients achieve their goals. Not ours. We are supposed to put our own biases aside and give the client what they want. But how can we? If we are filled with biases ourselves, can we really put them aside?

When you come up with a new idea for a project, whether it's for work, as a side hustle, or just something to do around the house, what's the first thing you do? Usually, you will start to work out what you need to do to get the job done - start putting together a to-do list. For large projects that to-do list won't be for getting the job done, there will be a significant to-do list generated just to get the project started. Sadly, this is where most projects stop. With an ever growing, ever more daunting to-do list. A list that no matter how much you work on it never gets any smaller. Energy drops off. Enthusiasm wanes. Projects stall.

For some projects, even putting together the to-do list to get started is too daunting a job. It's so much easier to carry on with life as usual, forever putting it off and dreaming of how much better things will be once you can get started. I have worked with some people whose ideas have sat idle for decades because they just couldn't get started. In working with people whose ideas are stuck I have found that there is usually a way to get things unstuck and moving again. It's nothing to do with them. They don't need more motivation or drive or skills or willpower. They have plenty of that. What they need is a network.

Here in Australia (and around the world) we have seen crisis after crisis recently. In the last 6 months or so we have seen a horrific fire season that flattened whole towns and vast areas of wilderness. We have seen a global pandemic that has devastated lives around the world. We have seen the Black Lives Matter movement sparked by events overseas, but now shining a long overdue light on the lives of our Indigenous people and their often horrific treatment by law enforcement, and society in general. So far, 2020 has been a year of constant crisis.

It's an old cliche that every crisis is an opportunity in disguise. It usually pops up on awful inspirational posters or the social media posts of people who look insufferably smug. Sadly, it seems that those posters and smug social media folks are right. A crisis provides a shock to the system. It breaks the existing order. It forces a rebuilding and that rebuilding is where the opportunity is, if we can seize it.

As coaches, we have it drilled into us that coaching is about results - help people and organisations set goals and achieve them. We get fixated on getting the result we (and hopefully our clients) want. Particularly in the agile coaching world, we want our clients to "be agile" and we work hard to get to that result. The problem we have is that we are looking for big changes and big results - make this whole organisation (or BU or Team) agile. That requires a lot of change and the one thing we know about change, any change, is that it's hard and slow. Big change is even harder and slower. Big change that not only changes the way people work, but changes the way they think as well, is just about the hardest thing you can imagine doing. Especially at any sort of scale.

So we are often looking for particular results, but not achieving them. The system is changing but not enough to get us our result. So our instinct is to push harder. Drive the change more to speed up the result. The big problem with that, as we saw last time, is that pressure drives resistance and the harder we push, the harder the system pushes back. By trying harder to achieve our result, we make our result harder to achieve. So what do we do?

One of the biggest changes the Coronavirus has made to the way we interact is that we are now interacting with each other not in the office, but in each other's homes. Their living rooms, kitchens, verandahs and home offices. The thing that strikes me about this is how personal those spaces are compared to our offices, and how comfortable people appear in their own spaces. Seeing this really brings home how much physical space matters in our work lives, and how much the design of our offices really lets us down.

Offices these days pretty much come in two flavours - the sterile cubicle farm and the modern funky. Your cube farm is the classic office layout, all beige or pastel panelling. An off white plywood desk in a tiny individual cubicle or (horror of horrors) a communal "pod". The modern funky office on the other hand is all bright colours, faux industrial chic furniture, exposed plywood, lots of communal spaces and plenty of green. This sort of office space is designed to scream out "Look at us…look how modern and funky we are!" Both of these office layouts are bad and, despite their very different appearances, for essentially the same reason.

I have been thinking deeply about my approach to coaching over the last year or so. Out of that has come my own personal coaching approach. I happened to mention this approach in a LinkedIn conversation with my good friend, Dan Prager, and this generated some interest. So, it’s time for a blog post on my approach to coaching. To be clear here, this isn't a collection of techniques. It’s not a way of structuring conversations. It’s not a set of categories for coaching interactions. It isn't any of the things you usually see in coaching approaches. It’s more my philosophical underpinnings of what makes for good coaching.

I call my approach the two C's model. Those two C's are Curiosity and Compassion. Those two things underpin my approach to coaching. To me, a great coach approaches the coaching with a spirit of open curiosity about the subject. They should also approach from a position of compassion for all those involved. For me, those two things are what distinguishes great coaching from good coaching. You can be a good coach without those things, but to be a great coach they must be at the heart of your practice. Let's look a bit deeper into why.

I was talking the other day with Peter Lam - a fellow agile coach - and, as conversations between coaches often do, the conversation turned to coaching. We were talking about the idea that the coach should not have an agenda when coaching - the coach is a facilitator for someone's personal growth. They are there to help the person with whatever it is that they want to work on. They aren't there with their own agenda. They shouldn't be there with their own agenda. Their own agenda gets in the way of the subject's personal growth. 

That's the idea anyway. But Peter said to me " that's all very well... but most of the time I do have an agenda. It says it right there on the label - Agile coach. I am there to get you using Agile techniques. That's what the organisation has hired me to do. I have a very clear agenda". So how does this sit with the idea of an agenda-less coach? Are Agile coaches, or any other "system" type coaches - devops, Human Centred Design, lean, change management, etc - doing their clients a disservice by coming in with an agenda?

Last time, I started talking about complexity and uncertainty, and how the rapid increase in both has made the world a very hostile and confusing place to many people. Why would a rise in these two things cause the world to look hostile? The study of adult development gives us the reason - people only develop the ability to understand and deal with complexity and uncertainty at later stages of adult development. Until people reach those stages, they will seek certainty, or at least the illusion of certainty. 

When that illusion is shattered, as it so often is these days, people need to re-form their illusion of certainty around different things - maybe my job is no longer certain, but at least my family is stable, and so on. When this happens again and again, people feel that their defences against the world are constantly under attack - the the world is against them. Their view of the world, one that might have served them perfectly well in the past, is now constantly under attack. All the old certainties that people used to rely upon - job, family, community, identity - are being continually challenged.

I thought I'd kick the year off with a few thoughts on coaching. I should make it clear at this point that I mean proper coaching - helping people develop themselves and not the "showing people how to to agile" type of coaching that should really be called agile process consulting rather than agile coaching. Over the last couple of years, I have been moving away from "agile" coaching and towards a more developmental style. As I have made that shift, I have seen that typical agile coaching is fundamentally limited. I'm not saying that it has no value, just that it has real value only to a relatively small subset of the population. 

I remember when I first found agile techniques and they felt intuitively right to me. They felt natural. They felt liberating. Many (if not all) of the agile coaches I have spoken to about this had a very similar experience. As coaches, we have all had the experience of an individual, or a team, or even an organisation that just "got it". They got what agile was about and just went for it. But we have all had the opposite (and far more frequent) experience of individuals, teams and organisations that just fail to grasp what agility is about. For whom agility is just following a new set of rules. Having different meetings. Doing standups and retros. When I speak to those people about agility they have a very different reaction to my first reaction. For them, agility is confronting, wrong and even suffocating. Why would that be? Why would people have such diametrically opposed reactions to the same thing?  My journey into developmental coaching has given me a hint of the answer - it’s our relationship with uncertainty and complexity.

Last time we started looking at the drama triangle - the three roles of victim, persecutor and rescuer - that people tend to adopt during a conflict. We saw that although the roles may shift over the course of a conflict, people remain stuck in that triangle, unable to break out, continually swapping roles but unable to resolve the conflict. We also saw the first hint of a way out of the triangle, by changing roles, not into one of the other classic drama triangle roles, but into something completely different.

Those different roles are creator, challenger and coach. To break out of the triangle, the victim needs to become the creator, the persecutor needs to become the challenger and the rescuer needs to become the coach. These three roles, although quite similar the victim, persecutor and rescuer (because after all they are the same people in the same conflict) have a shift in mindset that allows them to break free of the drama triangle and resolve the conflict.

You have walked into a firestorm. On the first day, management takes you aside and tells you that the teams just aren't up to scratch. They are always late, they don't have the skills, they don't care about business outcomes. Don't they realise that If we don't make the date, the company will struggle? Can you please go in and fix them?

On the second day, the teams tell you about management's unreasonable demands and how they are working late nights and weekends, with no recognition, struggling with poor equipment and environments, slow processes and constant micromanagement. Can you please get management off their backs and let them get on with it?

Day three you turn up and have both sides looking at you with pleading in their eyes, expecting you to come to the rescue and solve their problem. Welcome to the Drama Triangle. The Drama Triangle comes out of the family therapy area and was first described way back in 1968 by Stephen Karpman. The Drama Triangle states that in many interpersonal conflicts, people will assume one of three roles - the victim, the persecutor and the rescuer.