Hands Up If You Hate The Fluffy Stuff?
Which of you has ever used the words ‘fluffy’ or ‘touchy feely’ to describe coaching, facilitation or team development stuff? I bet quite a few! Come on! You know who you are! If I’m honest, I may have done so myself many moons ago, when I was still at PA Consulting running big business change programmes. Mind you, I’m not sure I remember ever being part of a team that was engaged in such a process, nor did I ever have a coach, so I’m not sure what the basis would have been for my perspective.
In the last ten years of running my own coaching and consulting business, I have lost count of the number of times I have heard someone in a session I am running, refer to it in this way. Just the other week, someone in a client session I was facilitating made the same point very clearly to the other people in the room when they said; “I don’t need to know how many cats you all have in order to be able to work well with you!”. Frankly, I agreed with them though mainly because I am more of a dog person rather than because of any particular view I hold about the value of team development.
It’s hardly surprising that my approach can be described in this way. For a start, when running a team session, I almost always set up the room with just a semi-circle of chairs and no tables (it is about interaction and conversation, after all). I would be a millionaire if I had been given a pound for every time someone joked about how it looked like they were coming into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, when they saw the lay-out. Added to that, I bore myself sometimes with the number of times I ask people how they feel — no, I mean, how they REALLY feel, and “No! Busy is not a feeling!” and “No, I don’t really mean how hungry or tired you are!”
I think I learned most about developing a thick skin in this arena, when I was facilitating a leadership programme with a defence sector client over ten years ago, in a room that was composed of 98% men, the vast majority of whom were engineers. As several pointed out to me; “We’re engineers, we don’t do feelings!”. I would persist anyway at the front of the room, waiting for the tumbleweed moment that would invariably come when I would first ask the group about their emotional reality. My persistence seemed to pay off though as people loved the programme which ran for a long, long time in that business — whether because of or in spite of this element of the programme design and ethos, I will never know.
Interestingly, I have proved a popular choice in male-dominated engineering environments over the years and I think it may be because I am a bit like a Trojan Horse: — I present as tough, analytically sharp, direct and challenging (much more comfortable for many corporate cultures) while sneaking in the more intuitive, in-depth inner reflection and self-examination work, or more bluntly the emotional intelligence stuff.
The irony is that there is really nothing fluffy at all about the emotional intelligence stuff. It is really bloody hard. I know that some of the ‘fluffy’ accusations come from people for whom this stuff is simply too uncomfortable and too hard. Give them a technical task and a problem to solve, they are all over it. But invite them into the messy arena of human relationships, personal triggers and team dynamics and they find themselves in a no-man’s land of frustration and ‘not knowing’. What’s more, this territory does not lend itself in the same way to neat and tidy solutions which our organisational norms prize and demand of us. It feels too hard for too little reward. And it can be. But sometimes — when done at the right time, in the right way, with skill and sensitivity on the part of the coach, and receptiveness on the part of the client — it can really open doors of possibility and performance that it is hard to put a price on and transform the way in which individuals and teams feel about and deliver their work.
I am pretty unapologetic for the ‘fluff’. I have a fundamental conviction that feelings are, for a start, what most distinguishes humans from other species. They matter in a way that our humanity matters and they matter because they affect how we show up at work and at home, the type of relationships we build in and out of our organisations and the impact we have in the world. Am not sure what the opposite of ‘fluffy is — is it ‘hard’ or ‘tough’, maybe? Something that denotes substance or relevance? I don’t know about you but I think (based on personal and professional experience) that the hard, tough stuff of substance that can make or break a relationship (in or out of work) is the ‘fluffy’ stuff and I will remain unapologetic and proud of my fluffy credentials.
So, how many cats have you got?
