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Sandy Burgham is a principal at Play Contemporary Leadership CoLab, a consultancy practice specialising in leadership development and organisational culture. She writes for listener.co.nz about her observations of modern corporate life. Here she writes about why the power of small groups to change the world should never be doubted.
I am still a bit unsure how I found myself in the professional development sector, working with leaders. It didn’t seem to be a conscious choice; it just happened that way.
I rather fancied myself as a social insights researcher but soon after I left a more traditional career pathway to devote myself to the former, I became interested in how few leaders seemed proficient at navigating the contemporary leadership landscape. I wanted to know why. That led to looking at how leadership development itself was delivered.
By that point, I had done a coaching certification primarily because as soon as ambitious careerists like myself turn 40, they get plagued by younger women wanting to be mentored. I had been mentoring a few younger women when I realised that I was just telling them what to do despite a) not particularly even liking my career at the time, and b) them being completely different individuals to myself. This led to an “a-ha moment” - that coaching is more about having the questions for an individual, rather than the answers.
During the past 25 years, leadership coaching has become commonplace. Cynicism around leadership or executive coaching has dissipated given the emphasis on performance, winning, goal setting and KPIs in the workplace. People need to be challenged in an objective and supportive way.
But one downside to one-on-one coaching is that while people like to be challenged intellectually, even emotionally, a one-on-one session is still a likely to keep people in their comfort zone. So is going to a leadership seminar, another comfort zone, where a participant can easily blend in and not be challenged at all.
A change process for the individual can be kickstarted in both scenarios, but leadership development takes time and usually organisations don’t have the sort of time that it might take. So, what heats things up and moves things along? A group process.
The idea of doing professional development in a small group setting of eight-10 people where no-one can hide makes most people, understandably, a little uncomfortable. What if I don’t get airtime? What if I don’t like the others? What if they don’t like me? But the biggest one is always what if other people get vulnerable? Awkward. Or worse still, what If I get vulnerable and reveal my slightly chaotic/repressed/insecure/judgemental internal world? More than awkward.
That’s the whole idea. If you want to change an organisational culture, then leaders need to get out of their own comfort zone and into the uncomfortable reality of the growth zone. This is where real development begins.
One-on-one coaching is important and can be transformational for an individual. But if it is organisational transformation that is required, then it is important that these individuals come together as a group.
In a typical one-on-one coaching approach, the coach hears only what the person in the chair is telling them. It generally excludes the perspective of the coach and others. However, a group process ensures the coach gets to see how people play in company.
While participants may decide to be a little guarded initially, it only takes one person to go a little deeper, be a little more open than usual, and a new group norm around openness and sharing is set. Once this happens, people lean in more to the group and become less individually focused.
The result is that trust and team bonds arise by default rather than by deliberate and superficial team-building exercises. Without this sort of process, teams routinely just wallpaper over the deep unacknowledged cracks which play havoc soon after the glow of the team’s away day has faded.
Our lives are enacted in small groups – family, neighbourhoods, communities, work teams and working groups, peer groups, boards and so forth - so it makes sense that professional development might be best in a small group setting.
A group process provides a coach with a handy heat map revealing how an individual plays with others. What is their role in the group? Who annoys them? Who do they annoy? And most importantly - how are they showing up?
Having the courage to surface all these discomforts and knowing how to explore group dysfunction with the group itself is key to transforming the culture of an organisation.
In the words of anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
