Coaching for post-COVID conversations: Working through the friction, fears and fiction

Eighteen months since the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, and amid the undulating waves of the Delta variant, workers are asking more frequent existential questions about their lives, labor, capital and time. Creating significant challenges and headwinds for managers and supervisors in retaining critical talent and mitigating business impact with the countervailing forces of grief, burnout, productivity, disengagement, and worse, attrition across workforces.

As a leadership and performance coach, the executives I work with have been reflecting on the demands, constraints and pressures that have been placed across their industries, organizations, communities, families and selves. In my coaching work, leaders are reflecting on and expressing the volatility and uncertainty of both their professional career trajectories and the need to integrate with personal aspirations.

In sorting through varying stressors and issues, it is helpful in surfacing where the weight of emotional worries may reside, and how individuals’ mindsets and behaviors might be getting in the way. It has been asked whether this is the “great attrition” or the “great attraction.” I argue that in the post-pandemic economies, organizations that are considered more attractive are built by leaders who attract more talent than others. With the differentiating feature being those leaders are coaching their workers better than others.

I’ve created a simple framework, referred to as the 3Fs, which stands for Friction, Fear or Fiction. The post-pandemic context has exacerbated the collective introspection and reflection that workers are undergoing. At the forefront of employees’ minds are decisions regarding their life choices, health and well-being, relationships, careers and geography.

The framework is built around three core questions, which can help “unlock” and decouple the above existential themes and enable more transparent and collaborative discussions.  Through coaching conversations, the 3Fs can prompt reflective dialogue linked to post-pandemic sentiment within organizations.

The Three Fs:

• Friction: What is getting in the way?
• Fear: What are you afraid of?
• Fiction: Which story are you telling that is no longer helpful?

Friction

Over time, there are things that get in the way in the workplace: policies, procedures, and expectations of behaviors, assumptions, mind sets and operating models. What may have been helpful before may have exceeded its use-by date. It’s helpful to articulate the sources of friction in both personal and professional contexts to identify where time and attention should be spent.

The simplicity in asking, “what is getting in the way” helps leaders and managers gain curiosity and insight from their employee’s perspective on key activating triggers or concerns that employees are bringing into the workplace and organization. This can benefit leaders and managers to focus on bringing greater clarity or insights into helping their employees work through decision-making and choices. If leaders and managers can work to reduce and remove the friction in organizational settings, the ability to sustain positive employee engagement can be enhanced.

Fear

Emotions often trigger and derail individual effectiveness. Individual fears are often lurking behind origins of imposter syndrome, self-critique and sentiment of low self-efficacy. “What are you afraid of” is a brave question for leaders to ask, given the potential breadth and depth of responses, but it’s one worth asking. As John Hagel III describes the difference between opportunity-based narratives and threat-based narratives — narratives driven by fear — “magnify our perception of risk, shorten our time horizons, cause us to fall into a zero-sum view of the world, and make it difficult for us to trust others.”

Deeper and more introspective conversations are often avoided in the workplace. Returning to the office offers an opportunity for managers and leaders to more closely connect with staff through their own vulnerability and transparency. Openly discussing and identifying fears can be helpful in articulating the “elephants in the room” or simply externalizing emotions which are impacting decision making. In the context of the #the great resignation, openly discussing employees’ concerns relative to their career path, hybrid work environment, and long-term career outlook can be useful as employees process their fears.

Fiction

Stories and storytelling are what we use to understand the world and ourselves in it. As Jim Loehr writes, “Your life is the most important story you will ever tell, and you’re telling it right now, whether you know it or not.” In times of heightened uncertainty, the ability to check in with the stories people are telling themselves is an important way of showing care. In an environment where questions are still being asked around where and how work will get done, leaders engaging with the stories and perceptions employees are creating around their assumptions of the workplace and future of the business can be very helpful in providing clarity and alignment about what may or may not be different in the future and work to foster engagement and buy-in toward that future state.

Conclusion

The call on leaders to be more engaged, curious and present with their employees and teams has never been greater. Some would call this leading with head, heart and hands.

The call for leaders to be coaches is only increasing. Not only leading with their head, heart and hands, they also with their ears. They leverage listening and inquiry skills to ask more impactful questions to drive their curiosity and intent in developing their employees. As managers and leaders evaluate both the push/pull and demands on their time and allocation of focus, leaders will need to coach more.

Engaging with employees’ personal dimensions of life and wellbeing outside of work and aligning the organization’s strategy and purpose with employees’ narratives of belonging in the workplace will largely be experienced in the context of coaching conversations. The question is, how effective will those coaching conversations be?