Every coaching relationship has a beginning, middle, and end. Each phase has its unique challenges for my clients. Overall, though, the coaching journey is one of evolution, insight, and growth.
A recent client, I’ll call her “Sarah,” as all coaching relationships are confidential, is senior legal counsel at a tech company based outside of the United States (yes, I coach attorneys all around the world). When we first began our coaching relationship, she was experiencing a significant amount of stress. Her biggest struggles were in the areas of leadership, executive presence, and navigating wearing multiple hats as legal counsel and empowering the company’s leadership team to take steps to move forward in the face of risk.
Mastering Effective Communication in a VUCA World: Essential Skills for Business Lawyers.
For in house counsel like Sarah or, really, any attorney who advises business clients, being able to communicate effectively with their clients in a way that not only recognizes the risks involved in conducting business in the current VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) regulatory and business environment is one of the greatest challenges. The absolute worst communication style for Sarah to have adopted would have been one where the legal department became known as “the department of no” or, worse yet, “dream killers.” The thing is, attorneys are trained to be risk averse and attempt to create conditions where the risks are recognized and avoided at all costs. In the business context, doing so has the result of killing great ideas, stifling innovation, and an almost adversarial relationship between the entrepreneur/business person and legal counsel. Not an effective place to be for a lawyer.
I learned this lesson years ago when I was advising a client about the risks of their proposed course of action. As we sat around the conference table at my law office, I was listing the steps the client ought to take to reduce the risk to my risk tolerance. Three minutes into the presentation, the client held up their hand and said: “You know, John; if we took your advice, our business would shut down! There’s no such things as zero risk.” After a beat, I realized my error: my risk tolerance as a lawyer and the client’s risk tolerance as a business person were different. Speaking to them from my risk tolerance was the absolutely wrong way to go.
Having had this experience as a practicing attorney, I paired my knowledge with my coaching training and worked with Sarah to shift the focus from an attorney’s risk tolerance to that of her company’s leadership and to speak in a different way. By doing so, Sarah was able to approach, what had previously been viewed as “challenging” conversations which were somewhat adversarial in nature, in a way which encouraged her client to effectively evaluate the risk acceptable to them on a scale and to move the business forward based on the range of risks associated with any particular action based on sound legal advice.
Overcoming Burnout with Strategic Delegation: Essential Skills for High-Achievers.
The second area Sarah identified as a potential growth opportunity was her ability to delegate. Having worked as an associate in a large law firm prior to joining her current company, Sarah recognized her natural tendency towards ownership over everything, whether it was, in fact, her ultimate responsibility or not. This “the buck stops here” mindset, while lauded by society in general, is an absolute killer when it comes to the ability to focus on what matters, to maintain an acceptable life/work balance (yes, I meant to write “life” first…who the hell decided “work” comes first in that construct?), and to foster positive relationships free of doubt and resentment.
I introduced the framework of the four levels of delegation (Level 1 - assign a task; Level 2 - assign responsibility for the task; Level 3 - ask the person to own the results of the project; and Level 4 - ask the person to own the outcome of any delegated task, which is consistent and continuous excellence over time). Doing the deep work involved in becoming a world class Level 4 delegator, Sarah was able to begin the journey of becoming a Level 4 delegator and to release ownership over things which she, in fact, own. By doing so, she increased her understanding of other’s struggles, was able to re-set her view of a fair expectation for performance of others, and, most importantly, battle burn out.
Building Resilience: Techniques to Stay Focused and Avoid Fight or Flight Responses.
Finally, and, in my view, most importantly for continued personal evolution, Sarah addressed her tendency to too easily trigger her sympathetic nervous system and drop into what my coach training classifies as a “catabolic” state. When our sympathetic nervous system is engaged, and we’re in a catabolic state, our fight or flight mechanism it triggered, adrenaline and cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine, are released and our minds, which haven’t evolved all that much over the millennia, truly believe we’re in a life-or-death situation. The result is an inability to be strategic, to see all options available, to think through not only the immediate consequences of any action, but the secondary and tertiary consequences as well (of course those secondary and tertiary consequences are often not only unwanted, but contrary to our ultimate goals).
By doing the deep work necessary to identify the thoughts which had Sarah’s mind believing it was in an epic life-and-death struggle akin to being chased by a lion on the Savannah, a new framework was created. That framework transformed Sarah from a reactive leader to something quite different, a responsive partner. Sarah became, if not a master, then a person on the road to being better able to identify the patterns and habits which caused their fight or flight reactions. Sarah was empowered with a framework to catch themselves before going catabolic or, just as importantly, recognize when they were and take steps to engage their parasympathetic system to create the conditions to be a more strategic thinker and world class leader.
By beginning the journey to mastery in these three critical areas, Sara his firmly on the path towards mastery and becoming the type of person who can empower herself, the company, and those around her, to perform at their best.
My clients are the best attorneys in their field. They increase revenue, master their time and focus, and improve performance while enjoying more free time and suffering less burnout. You can too. Schedule a complementary 30-minute discovery session with me here, or send me an email.