Coaching and the Three Degrees of Organisational Change
You recognize a change intervention is required and so you bring in a well-known consulting company. The company’s executive coach decides to help Phil with his leadership style. The coach (adopting a first-degree change approach) firstly teaches Phil to give more constructive feedback to his team. The coach encourages Phil to notice when he is being critical and to “reframe” criticism into a statement that is more positive and encouraging. The coach also teaches him a relaxation technique to apply in situations where he notices the anger and frustration rising. Realizing that the team also needs a change intervention, the coach arranges for her colleague to come and do a team-building day where the team learns about conflict management and better communication.
Phil, who is always open to improving himself, responds well to the intervention. He works hard to perfect his feedback skills, and practices the relaxation technique three times a day in an attempt to improve his mental state. Phil’s team reports that he is friendlier and less critical, and for a while the morale is good.
But eventually what seemed too good to be true is exposed.
Phil is booked off from work for what the doctor describes as “burn-out”. Phil had been taking more and more responsibility for tasks in his department and had been working twenty hours overtime a week! To avoid situations where criticism of his team felt inevitable, Phil had delegated as little tasks as possible while working himself beyond a state of fatigue. Now the team was without a leader and the huge load of Phil’s work was creating a great deal of conflict and confusion amongst his ‘abandoned’ team – leaving them feeling incompetent!
How and why did this happen?
A Second-degree Look at Phil and his Team
What had remained unchanged by the first-degree coaching intervention was Phil’s underlying framework of beliefs about himself and the world. Phil was driven and motivated by the belief that he and the world were full of imperfections that needed to be improved or corrected. His core belief and the accompanying need to avoid criticism and mistakes, was fuelled by his habitual focus of attention on what was ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ in himself and the world. Phil’s critical and angry approach was merely a symptom of a deeper and limiting worldview. Ultimately, his attempt to perfect himself as a manager by “fixing” his critical leadership style had played straight into the hands of this limiting worldview.
No one in the team saw Phil’s ‘breakdown’ coming, since he worked hard to suppress and internalize his negative emotions and anger, which in itself resulted in a wearing down of Phil’s resources and energy. The first-degree team-building day had also not been able to address the inevitably recurringsystemic problems, since the “real issue” had not yet been uncovered. The team was most certainly not functioning at its optimal level before or after the intervention by the coach. In fact, despite their complaints about Phil, the team had been lulled into his taking responsibility for many areas of functioning in the department, for which they now felt ill equipped.
Second-degree Coaching and Organisational Change
First-degree coaching interventions that encourage individuals and organisations to overcome their difficulties by learning new skills, theories and techniques, tend to leave the system’s underlying patterns unchanged (if not reinforced as with Phil and his team). In a sense, first-degree change requires very little of both coach and client, since the underlying rules of engagement aren’t fundamentally challenged.
In order to shift individuals, teams and entire organisations out of the grip of long-standing, complex and habit-driven problems, coaches need to help clients identify and critically evaluate their, often unconscious, behavioural patterns, driving assumptions, rules and beliefs. This is a ‘paradigm shifting’ approach that aims change interventions at a deeper or second-degree level. Second-degree change is more uncomfortable and challenging than first-degree change, because it requires a commitment to ‘letting go’ of not only the usual ways of doing things, but also the safety and comfort of our dominant worldviews.
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