Thriving in Dizzying Change

“Today is the slowest rate of change we will ever experience.” Jonathan McDonald
“Change is changing.” Torben Rick

How’s that for delivering a kickstart to your amygdala (i.e. fear)? Even better, if you haven’t done so, read Tom Friedman’s book on the age of accelerations (Thank You for Being Late), our featured book this month, which chronicles four forces driving accelerating and changing change: technology, globalization, climate change, and population growth. All together these forces make our future impossible to predict, while fueling scary scenarios.

What is important to coaches here? Friedman shares in his book a graph described by Astro Teller at Google:

The human capacity to change and adapt isn’t fast enough to keep up with technological change. Teller was referring only to change brought about by technology. Add the other three forces of accelerating change and we go from afraid to dizzy.

Given that coaching is the professional competency devoted to helping people change—self-innovation you might call it—coaches are now called to the front lines of dizzying change to become leaders, innovators, and collaborators as we noted in the opening of our 2017 IOC conference. Inspired by our age of accelerations, the emerging Institute of Coaching strategic themes are:

1. Lead the dissemination of the coach approach to everyone
2. Invent new approaches to helping people grow faster than ever before
3. Help people thrive while changing and growing

Let’s focus today on the third theme.

It’s not surprising that instead of keeping up with accelerating change, burnout is rampant. To help leaders, The Harvard Business Review has a category called STRESS that just featured “To Recover from Burnout, Regain Your Sense of Control.” In July 2016, we explored in a webinar by Harvard physician and executive coach Gail Gazelle and our coaching report, how coaches can help address the healthcare crisis of physician burnout.

This month, our next IOC webinar on burnout is led by two physicians, Drs. Steven Adelman and Les Schwab, in the trenches delivering coaching to struggling physicians in order to help them restore their mental health, elevate their performance, and get onto a path toward thriving rather than giving up.

Our featured research paper, a meta-analysis of leadership and stress, suggests that higher levels of stress and burnout are associated with lower levels of transformational leadership. Hence the impaired ability to engage in self-transformation and facilitate transformational leadership may well be a close companion of stress and burnout:
Dizzying change causes burnout, and burnout impairs the transformational change needed to navigate dizzying change.

Never before has the art and science of coaching, i.e. facilitating change and transformation, in leadership, healthcare and wellness, and life, been more timely and compelling. Let’s raise our games together.  

Happy New Year!
— Coach Meg