A cartoon image of a frog jumping out of a pot of boiling water. The frog is saying, "I'm outta here!"

Coaching in the Age of COVID

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Put a frog in boiling water and he will jump right out. Put the frog in cold water and then turn up the heat, and he will cook to death, not noticing the slow change in temperature. We’ve all heard this, but I read recently that this is just wrong. Frogs are smarter than that. But people? Maybe not so much. Over the past three years, COVID has changed our lives, even for those who never had it. The boiling water in this case is the generalized increase in stress that we have all experienced. Stress from fear of an unpredictable invisible enemy. Stress from reduced social contacts. Stress from having to put off needed surgery. Stress from having to teach our kids at home – while working! Or having to go to work, just waiting to get sick and maybe die. Stress from shortages. Stress from seeing loved ones…

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Coaching for Resilience

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Thanks to COVID, pretty much every organization a coach visits these days has more stress than it did two years ago. Want data? The demand for mental health services is at an all time high. People are acting out their fear and anger in unsocialized ways, including more violence, parents yelling at school boards, political hysteria, alienation based on COVID attitudes, increased traffic accidents, you name it. It is a rising tide floating all boats into treacherous waters. The impact on organizations has been immense, with leaders having to face near impossible questions. “Will we be able to stay in business?” “Should we work at the office or at home?” “When should we go back to the office?” “What policies should we have about vaccinations? Masks? Social distancing?” “Should we fire employees who won’t get vaccinated?” “Do we really have to reconstruct our entire ventilation system?” While case counts are…

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Coaches Make a Difference

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Sometimes it helps us have the courage needed to do our work as coaches if we remember the value we bring. A 2021 article in the Consulting Psychology Journal by Robert Hogan, Robert Kaiser, Ryne Sherman, and Peter Harms (“Twenty Years on the Dark Side: Six Lessons about Bad Leadership”) provides important data. For those of you not immersed in psychological literature, the Hogan Suite of psychological assessments, which the authors relied on for much of their data, is one of the most widely used suites of assessment tools in business psychology. It is particularly effective in predicting leadership success . . . and its absence. Due to the Hogan’s widespread use, and the authors’ dedication to ongoing research, you can trust that the insights they provide are based on hard evidence. In their article, the authors provide stunning numbers concerning the incidence of bad leadership in modern organizations. For example: “. . .…

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