Do you have a ‘sense of agency’? Use it!

One of the privileges of working with lots of different organisations is that I get to pick up subtle shifts in their conversational focus and thus build a picture of how the workplace is changing. As part of the increased attention to employee-wellbeing over the last decade, ‘Resilience’ has been hogging the limelight – and rightly so – just in time to deal with the onslaught of things that we have needed to be resilient about!

As the challenges continue to mount, there is growing recognition that we can’t just hunker down until the old world is restored. That’s not going to happen. I am hearing mutterings of concern mixed with impatience and frustration. Dare I say…it might be time to move beyond work/life balancing, being reflective and mindful, and come back to the reality that work is a significant, and necessary part of our lives. It is a major part of what it means to be us – giving meaning, purposeful activity, social interaction and fulfilment. We literally need it!

A ‘sense of agency’ is defined in the psychological literature as “a feeling of control over actions and their consequences” (Moore 2016). It is the sense that you are the author of your life, your actions, and your thoughts and that this enables you an impact on external events and people around you.

During the past 2 years our freedom and choices have been heavily restricted by COVID. At the same time there have been civil liberties incidents and debates, a rise in conspiracy theories about societal control, censorship and surveillance, and a reduction in freedom of movement and travel – with many even working in ‘touchfree’, access-controlled offices. The behavioural and psychological implications of perceived lack of choice and control are well documented – not least in the literature surrounding prisoner of war camps during the Second World War. It does not bode well for post-pandemic recovery – particularly if we don’t balance compassion with accountability.

I was coaching a client yesterday who had a serious road accident during the pandemic. We were talking about getting back on the bike and the sense of safety whose loss was inhibiting this.

Psychological safety has come up repeatedly during my work over the last two years – but generally with an onus on employers creating conditions of psychological safety for their staff. We need to be encouraging, enabling and at times cajoling individuals to re-take ownership and let’s face it, JOY in their own ability to influence the world around them. Whilst lockdown allowed (even forced) people to step back from accountability and to lead a more relaxed life, many are struggling with the desire to step back up and hold the reins….and many businesses desperately need them to! LIFE needs us all to. The recipe for long life is intertwined with purposeful engagement and interaction.

I encouraged my biking client to add a post-it to her laptop urging her, in her cycling and her work to “JFDI”. She didn’t need to reflect, consider, stay safe, ask permission. She could decide…and act. She sent me a photo later of her out on the bike and smiling from ear to ear ;-). “It wasn’t easy” …she tells me, “but I did it!”

How many of your people are waiting to be given permission, expecting to be asked, ready to be required to re-engage, to stretch themselves, to take action and agency once more?

I will be running a short, educational, interactive, exploratory, and most importantly FREE session on Building Agency in the next few weeks. If you would like to know more, to explore what it might mean for you and your business, or you’d simply like to be part of the discussion, please do get in touch.

http://www.changingdialogues.com – racheljackson@changingdialogues.com

Things are hotting up…

So today I have spent my day juggling small boys who have accidentally spilt suntan cream/pressed exit on their Superhero Game and killed Spiderman/ emptied Travel Battleships pieces all over the floor…as well as negotiating with a Virtual Assistant from Time etc (recommended to me by Carrie Beddingfield from the glorious OneFishTwoFish), researching website redesigns and….agreeing to host a FREE Resilience session in October for HRDs across Suffolk and East Anglia in association with Waddington Brown HR recruitment specialists.

The event will be a half day session aimed at fraught HRDs who support fraught employees, fraught managers (and equally completely calm “hand it to HR” managers) and generally work to keep the ship afloat whilst potentially also juggling a similar home-life to myself!

At the moment we are looking at a couple of venues in Ipswich with a ‘stay for lunch afterwards’ option and are hoping to offer 13-15 places for that intimate feel, with a potential for follow on events (also FREE) where demand dictates.

Delegates will be treated to a discounted rate on the Open Sessions that I plan to run in November/December on EI, Leadership, Recovering from Motherhood and Managing in Uncertainty

Details to follow.  If you are interested in registering your place, drop me a line at racheljackson@changingdialogues.com…and remember – its FREE!

Leader – Manager – Coach

One of the most frequent questions I get asked in my training sessions around leadership is how to balance leading staff, managing their performance and coaching their development without losing the integrity of any one of these activities.

Many managers have grown up through the ranks amongst the teams they lead and the transition from team member to leadership is rarely an easy one to navigate.  I have even listened to a number of leaders downplay their role in order to retain the warm and comfortable relationships they have previously enjoyed with their erstwhile peers.  Whilst this shows a great and laudable degree of empathy and support for their people, it can be tough to lead from the middle and it’s worth making the essential psychological step of recognising that if your name is on the door with “manager” written underneath…then you cannot help but play your part.

There are a number of things that can hold leaders up in this transitional period.  The first comes from the fact that many leaders are promoted because they are the best at their particular role;  They are great with customers, they thrive on the challenge, they bring in the highest sales.  They are motivated primarily by the desire to do a brilliant job and gain recognition for that.  Sadly, the recognition they often receive is a promotion to a role where they are no longer the highest performer, they do not speak to customers or have nice numerical KPIs with which to measure their performance.  In short, the very activities that lead them to love their job, are now done by the people they are expected to motivate and manage.  Many many leaders then find it all too easy to slip into treating their people like an extra pair of hands and try to achieve through demonstration, advice and micro-management.  They want to stay close to the action and be in control and their teams respond in one of two key ways: they become dependent and simply follow, or they feel constrained and play up or leave. Helping new leaders to shift to leading rather than managing means finding them new goals and new measures for success and helping them to understand the new behaviours that will enable them to develop the autonomy of their teams and performance on a higher stage.

The other thing that holds back new leaders is the fear of not being taken seriously by staff who may often have applied to the same position that they have been granted.  Such managers resort to passivity and platitude rather than authority and leadership and often create the very conditions that they fear. It is not easy to juggle empathy with authority but one sure way to maintain closeness with your team at the same time as providing sufficient separation to retain authority is to engage in coaching discussions.  I’m not talking here about one to one long term therapeutic sessions or once a year performance discussions, but simply the day to day act of listening and facilitating rather than telling and directing.

Whatever your history in the organisation, you will have a different perspective and different information than the person you are leading.  Most managers I have trained find it almost impossible to avoid using that perspective to provide answers and suggestions as the first response to staff questions.  If you can hold back all your incredible wealth of knowledge and experience and instead adopt a coaching curiosity, you may be surprised to find that your team have the capacity to advise themselves…and that the added confidence they gain from you biting your tongue so that they can explore their own potential means that you get more time to lead and less time spent managing. It may not be as instantly gratifying or self-assuring…but it will make you a more inspirational and connected leader in the long run.  You may also be surprised how much less your people need to be “managed” and motivated by you and how instead they take accountability for their own performance.