Huff Taes and Coaching

“Huff Taes” are familiar to those in Scottish education but the culture behind it will be familiar to all I am sure. In the East Coast, you might also hear “Another Yufftae!” echoing around staffrooms.

A ‘Huff Tae’ or ‘Huv Tae’ or ‘Yufftae’ is translated as ‘You have to’; a requirement. The phrase is used, with a nervous smile, as your line manager approaches and asks: “Can you take this class for an absent colleague?” Except, normally, this is not really a question. The response can be: “Is it a huff tae?”. This is the power question to find out if it’s a directive or a kindly request for a friend and colleague.

Of course, normally, it’s a directive.

It’s become part of the language in Scottish Schools, “Sorry I can’t help you just now, I have a Huff Tae” followed by a weak smile. It’s a missive from above. This is different from the things you have to do from day-to-day, the things that are preplanned and within your schedule. A Huff Tae usually emerges from someone else’s problem and you are the immediate solution. I have seen variations of this in different industries, and I have done this to others many times. But if a school or other organisation, finds itself overusing the humble Huff Tae, it can be a symptom of other, bigger, more concerning issues.

Over the last month I have worked with organisations in three different business areas — Engineering, Education and Hospitality — and each one of those has variations of the Huff Tae. What has really struck me is how much the whole organisational culture is set from the unthinking little things people say and do. It’s clearly not the desire of the leadership to command and control — they’ll say as much — but their actions betray them. When they’re under pressure, the way they react reveals a command and control default behaviour that years of MBAs and professional experience haven’t managed to hide.

As I talked about this with colleagues, Ewan told me about an article he’d spotted somewhere about American Football coaches. The article told how, when under pressure, these ace coaches revert back to an older style of coaching. All the slick, performance-enhancing tricks they’ve learned are lost. But what is interesting is that the style they revert to is not a recent one: they revert to how they were originally coached, sometimes decades before. They go right back to the start (do not pass Go, do not collect £200, and so on…).

So the unthinking action of the leadership when under pressure tends to go back to how they were treated when they were on the shop floor themselves. Think about how were you first treated in your first jobs, and you can maybe see the problem. Was it with respect and a push for you to become autonomous, or was it with command and control?

What truly brought into focus for me was coaching a peer this week. She is a fellow teacher leader, and is far more experienced and qualified than I am in Coaching. But she had started in a new organisation, she was under pressure, and, we discovered, she had reverted to how she was treated in the past. Now she was really struggling to identify what was happening around her. She was being hit by Huff Taes and she was doing the same to other people. She was firefighting. It took 40 mins of coaching online for her to see a way through. It was an investment of her time which allowed her to reflect outside herself and have a neutral voice, not telling her what to do but listening deeply, not trying to provide answers but asking simple questions and then allowing ample time to respond.

So when you’re under the pump, in the middle of things, how do you treat others around you? How do you reflect on what is happening? Who do you speak with? How do you get feedback from those around you? How do you give time to coach others?

Ian Stuart works for NoTosh, and provides ample time and challenging questions as part of his daily work.