Coaching for Culture and Resilience in Organisations

Coaching for Culture; Building Resilience into Organisational Culture

Coaching for improved organisational culture requires a unique synthesis of coaching and facilitation skills where the coach becomes the holder of the group energy, facilitating a journey from what is not working to what else might be possible within the organisation.

This usually means something slightly (or sometimes vastly) different for each individual, depending on their particular filters for life, organisational or industry background and access to generating innovative solutions and harnessing workforce energy to implement positive change.

Organisations that experience adversity as part of the everyday offer an uncommon opportunity for coaching impact in so far as they are usually comprised of a workforce made up of individual who occupy one or more of the following categories:

Experienced in looking for and quick to embrace alternatives to create more harmony within the organisational environment;

Aware of and managing the personal impact of everyday challenges that occur within the environment,

Lacking insight and responsibility for their role in or contribution to the current culture, or;

Burnt out from prolonged exposure to the above and disengaged from the possibility of improved workplace culture.

Many organisations have an embedded culture of negativity which is evidenced through behaviours such as gossiping, complaints and bullying (to name a few) but also, and perhaps even more difficult to address are the less overt behavioural patterns, such as the formation of cliques which cause fractures within the team, withholding work or passing along work that could easily be completed. Sometimes, very ordinary and seemingly inconsequential occurrences (like not cleaning up communal eating areas) can be interpreted as a sign of disrespect and contribute to a decline in morale which often precedes an escalation in conflict.

But of course, some organisations are particularly prone to dealing with adversity on a daily basis. Working in the corrective services environment, prison staff (Corrective Services Offices) encounter a range of complex and challenging situations as part of their everyday work environment. Adversity is an ongoing element of the organisational culture. They face potentially perilous situations as a matter of course during their work day/s and receive significant public backlash when an event or incident is reported in the press, without really experiencing appreciation or understanding of what they are exposed to and almost never receiving public acknowledgement of their commitment to protecting society through rehabilitating offenders.

Additionally, there is an entrenched set of cultural dynamics that makes it hard to unify individuals at times. These include:

a rostered workforce who are not consistently working together and building rapport

vicarious trauma through prolonged exposure to prisoner behaviour

a distinct split in the employee base of:More experienced staff who hold the firm view that things should be done as they have always been done, despite their observation that the prison environment is much more pleasant a place to work these days that in previous times and;

Younger staff who may hold qualifications that outrank their more mature counterparts but who lack the maturity and experiential depth of these colleagues.

Given the rostered nature of staff and the distinctly different approaches of generations of staff working in the same environment, it is essential to find the common vision that underlies their commitment to working in the field. I find that fundamentally there is always a commitment that is shared by the majority of the workforce population. In the case of corrective services officers, the commitment is to community safety underlies opposing approaches. Once you work back to the baseline commitment and have group consensus, you can rebuild culture.

The place to start in coaching groups around these types of complex issues the same as all standard coaching frameworks; address individual needs by working through real life scenarios to identify current and desired states, clarify the barriers to bridging gaps then develop potential solutions. The application is slightly different as it requires a multi-level approach; working with individuals while simultaneously managing the energy of the group, caring for each person present and presencing possibility for listeners through participation and exploration of that individual story. This can be achieved through group check ins to manage listening and create alignment of interpretation.

If effectively facilitated, these discussions also bring forth the peer support model by leveraging diverse skills within the group and can begin to mend some of the relationship/ rapport issues by re-establishing the two-way flow of communication. Sometimes it is also necessary to take a side step to into a kind of debrief discussion that disrupts the group trajectory (the current culture), inspires insight at the individual level and creates pathways for action, reorienting the group towards the shared vision and fundamental commitment that lead to organisational outcomes. It’s a particular kind of dance which weaves itself in and out of honing an individual focus and broadening the view to cater to group needs.

Mostly, as humans, we want to be right rather than to collaborate for improved outcomes. I think this is largely a result of the interplay between certain organisational elements that prevents powerful communication and improved outcomes at the group level. Commonly, wherever I see conflict, I see stress, change and poor resilience (at the personal, team and broader organisational levels).

Stress and change are the Punch and Judy of organisational dynamics these days. They travel everywhere together, playing off each other and exacerbating reactions and responses that add to a decline in culture and create intensified experiences for individuals. There is true neuro-science behind vocabulary. Language sparks a reaction in us that brings forth feelings, thoughts, memories and past experiences associated with those worlds- thus, our words have the power to create worlds.

When People get locked into positional communication and their interactions are driven by cortisol fuelled interactions rather than stimulating oxytocin, so they become fixed on their ideas and perhaps closed to considering win-win scenarios that blend, for example, experience with innovation, the tried and tested with something fresh and new.

On the upside, there is always some stuff that works about organisational culture; for example, sometimes those cliques form a necessary peer support model. Within specific teams, I regularly hear individuals reporting how great their own team is, how well supported they feel and how comfortable they are debriefing and sharing openly with their immediate peers, even while collectively the group speaks of organisational dysfunction. Employees uniting is not always a bad thing. The ultimate of course, is to assist and enable individuals to harness their energy to create improved outcomes, within the culture and for the organisation as a whole. Because let’s face it, at the end of the day, an organisations culture is the sum total of all the positive and all of the negative behaviours, attitudes and thinking. If we want to change the culture of the organisation, we must first impact the thinking of individuals.

People always to me say “what about those people who really don’t want to change? The ones who are really attached to their negativity and want to bring others down to their level? You know, those really difficult personalities”. My first reaction is that while ever we have someone categorised into an inherently negative space, our own thinking has been pulled toward that energetic vibration. We are now seeing that person through a specific filter that keeps them obstructionist, everything they do is of course, a mirror of that filter, a reflection for our own thinking.

That way of thinking creates a very fixed response from our side where we can only see black and white, right or wrong. Essentially, judging others keeps us in negative space ourselves. A more powerful context is to ask ourselves how we might approach this person to enable or engender a more positive outcome, I call it communicating for outcomes.

One of the most constructive ways to build skills around communicating for outcomes is through the development of resilience. Resilience is a foundation for healthy response mechanisms. It’s one of those qualities we develop in the background (through self-care, emotional intelligence, social connectivity and cognitive advancement) that is simple to understand but not easy to build because it requires real presence and commitment to something that no one will really see until adversity strikes and then all that is observable to the naked eye is a kind of bounce back that can be aspirational.

There is a specific framework for building resilience that applies to organisations and works at either the team or whole of organisational level. This approach centres around building ‘cultures of excellence’ where the organisation commits to individual wellbeing through the provision of psych education, providing opportunities for personal growth through reflection. Importantly though, for real engagement, there must be pathways to translate individual insight into action that results in organisational outcomes. Otherwise there is no perceivable benefit, for the individual or the organisation.

Pathways for action include an organisational gap analysis that addresses four fundamental areas (or thematic categories) that employee issues and concerns can almost always be categorised into:

Leadership

Communications and culture

Workload and resources

Personal and professional integration

This analysis can only be undertaken authentically once individuals have reflected personally and made the shift from judgement to observation, identifying clearly what works and what does not work in relation to the desired outcome.

Underpinning all of this, there must be a genuine approach to integration and engagement that is based on two-way communication. The organisation must be truly committed to engaging with and listening to what employees have to say if they want an engagement exercise to cause a genuine shift in culture (including behaviours and attitudes). Positive attitudes create positive behaviours, positive behaviours result in improved organisational outcomes.

Both parties must be open to an approach that is driven by:

Relationship Management

Outcomes Based

Action orientation

Human performance improvement

So that there is a win for everyone that motivates true change.