By Mack Adams
When you’re a guide helping others along their journey you are in a giving mode – you are teaching, influencing, facilitating, cajoling, poking, prodding, showing, modelling and so on. Doing that kind of work day-in-day-out, can have some negative consequences for the agent of change. If those that you are working with don’t care, don’t want to learn, see it as an inconvenience, treat you like a helper, eventually, you will get resentful, and this will show in your work.
The challenge is that if you are a guide, then every time you show up in a room, everyone knows “she’s going to try and get us to do something new or different.” You don’t get the luxury of just “doing your job” as your job is to impact how everyone else does their work. As an internal coach in an organization, you multiply this over a couple of years and you become part of the furniture, and no longer a force for change.
To counteract this, there are two key things to manage so that the pace is sustainable for you, the guide:
Demand Generation for Change
Ensure that ‘demand’ for change is being created elsewhere. This means that due to a Business Outcome, translated by someone in a leadership role, we (the organization) need to improve A by X amount. This equation is created and then as an agent of change, coach, facilitator or other practitioner, you are able to help fulfill this demand for change. It is much less effective and enjoyable for everyone if the demand for change is coming directly from the agent of change. “Please adopt Scrum because I am being paid to make sure you adopt Scrum.” Not a compelling argument and you will eventually get obfuscated by people who don’t feel they need your help.
Renew & Refresh Continuously
If you’re constantly helping others, where is your support network? Where do you turn to for your challenges? How do you advance your craft when you are constantly giving to others? Being part of communities outside your organization, attending conferences to share stories and investing in your own education are all ways that will nourish your energy and allow you to be full present and show up without any resentment to your role. Cynicism isn’t pretty and a crusty coach is likely one that people will not want to work with, thus your influence will be diminished.
If these things are not taken into account, then you will feel the ‘sighs’ whenever you show up into a room of people who are expecting change to ‘happen to them by you.’ Being a Servant Leader can feel like a thankless job and often the impacts are non-linear and indirect, but over time, they will have an impact and you can quietly know that your handiwork is making the overall system more effective.