Has anyone ever had a plan to move their entire life, professional, family, social, into a confined space overnight? Are companies prepared to keep all organisational life active outside the 'building' where sharing, socialising, and interdependence flow naturally?
We are at a moment when "improvised adaptation" (Abrantes, Passos, Cunha and Costa, 2018) will make the difference. For the sake of our economy, it will be necessary that individuals, teams and organisations are able to adapt quickly to the present emergency in an improvised way, i.e. by planning and executing simultaneously, and keeping all organisational life active even if outside their "normal" work context.
According to the authors mentioned, the improvised adaptation process requires psychological security, in which the error is accepted and incorporated, so that learning results in individual and collective effectiveness.
It is much easier to "allow" mistakes and to develop psychological security when we are close to each other, when we can control the possible consequences that may arise, when we are all in the same "building".
So, how can the leaders of organisations live with all the vulnerabilities emerging in this process of social distancing? How can leaders support teams to find their solutions, to learn from what goes less well, and to assume a higher level of responsibility and commitment even when working at a distance?
Coaching has never made so much sense as at the moment we are living in. We can no longer announce coaching as a fashion, because at the present moment, this process of individual and collective development becomes a necessity:
For leaders who use this process to work on their vulnerabilities, bringing out the emotional intelligence skills that are so important in individual and social balance - individual coaching;
For teams that by using coaching skills, will not need control or directives, but will know how to live in partnership, understand their interdependencies, and bring out actions and not unthought and unaligned reactions - team coaching;
For organisations that will need to maintain organisational culture outside the usual place, supporting employees to create a sense of their purpose aligned with business purpose and vision, maintaining support networks and engaging directly in making it happen - group coaching.
When organisational life leaves the "building" and moves to the virtual, when we have to adapt to new ways of working, where there is no physical separation between family life and professional life, when improvisation must be aligned and interdependent, coaching skills help to find a quick balance.
Virtual individual, team or group coaching solutions, or even virtual training in coaching skills, are proven to be effective. But if the time has not yet come to use external support to use coaching as the process in the improvised adaptation, I leave you here some of those skills that you can start using immediately:
Team Focus - give up your need for control and work with the agenda and specific needs of the team, promoting collective (vs. individual) learning;
Mutual Trust and Respect - develop psychological safety, allowing for error to be tried again, but do it in partnership so as to empower the team;
Coordination - at this point your role will be to orchestrate the team, and coordination involves having moments of feedback within the team;
Develop backup and support behaviour - where there are live and always accessible support networks within teams;
Motivate, not forgetting to challenge the team together to proactively find different solutions;
Shared mental models - it will be of paramount importance that there is even more information sharing and that the whole team is aligned with common goals;
Self-awareness and social awareness - take time to reflect and gain more awareness of your vulnerabilities so that they become strengths we are all relying on!
