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choice Magazine
choice Magazine
Episode #37~ Let Down - Coaching teams through disappointment with guest, Julian Humphreys
In this interview, we talk with Julian Humphreys about his article, Let Down ~ Coaching teams through disappointment.
Disappointment is often a visceral experience that can feel like the wind has been taken out of your sails, and it can have a long-term impact on the motivation, trust and commitment of a team. Team coaches have an important role to play in helping teams process their disappointment so it doesn't get in the way of setting and meeting future expectations that propel the team forward.
Team coaches need to check in with teams about the attributions they make, so the causes of behaviors that are experienced as disappointing can be more accurately understood and addressed.
Team coaches need to be brought in early so disappointment can be addressed proactively, before it becomes chronic. Team coaches also need to be aware of their own feelings of disappointment, understanding the expectations that are put on them, and that they put on themselves.
To avoid unnecessary disappointment, coaches need to ask themselves
the same questions team members do – are the expectations explicit, are they reasonable, and are the attributions made when expectations are not met accurate enough?
Julian is a Global Executive and Team Coach, helping senior leaders around the world take their careers to the next level by developing critical thinking, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, mindfulness, authenticity and integrity.
He is an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC), the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the international coaching journal Philosophy of Coaching, and the developer and instructor for the advanced-level ICF-accredited courses Psychology for Coaches, Philosophy for Coaches and Level 3 Mastery.
Join us as we learn more from Julian about what he has found to be effective in coaching disappointment - in individuals and teams?
Watch the full interview by clicking here.
Find the full article here: https://bit.ly/btp-Humphreys
Learn more about Julian here.
Listeners can access additional resources on coaching through disappointment by visiting julianhumphreys.com/disappointment
Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/
In this episode, I talk with Julian about his article published in our December 2022 issue.
Hi, I am Garry Schleifer, and this is Beyond the Page brought to you by choice, the Magazine of Professional Coaching. choice is more than a magazine. It's a community of people who use and share coaching tools, tips, and techniques to add value to their businesses, and of course, impact theirs and their clients' lives. We're an institution of learning built over 20 years, as we just finished celebrating our 20th year publication, dedicated to improving the lives of coaches and their clients. In today's episode, I'm speaking with global executive and team coach Julian Humphreys, who's the author of an article in our latest issue about team and group coaching entitled Let Down- Coaching teams through disappointment. While Julian is a global executive and team coach, helping senior leaders around the world take their careers to the next level by developing critical thinking, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, one of my favorites, mindfulness, authenticity, and integrity. Actually, they're all my favorites. He is experienced in using 360 assessments to gain insight and awareness of a leader's strengths and opportunities so that the coaching focuses on the right things at the right time in the right way. He earned his MA from McGill University and his PhD from the University of Toronto. He has presented at international conferences in both Europe, North America, including at Harvard and UNESCO. Very impressive. Julian is an IC Professional Certified Coach, or in our lingo, a PCC, as am I, an editor-in-chief, for a publication called The International Coaching Journal Philosophy of Coaching. Please check that one out. And the developer and instructor for the advanced level ICF accredited courses, psychology for coaches, philosophy for coaches, and Level three Mastery. Welcome, Julian, and thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 1:I do have a question because this has just come up recently. This h as not even related to that. Level three mastery. Did we change the titles and nobody told me?
Speaker 2:Well, the ICF has changed the titles,
Speaker 1:When, what? They didn't tell me,
Speaker 2:Well, they sort of told everyone, but I guess.
Speaker 1:Okay, I missed that memo. I'm not in the official Slack channel about renaming things, apparently.
Speaker 2:No, it's been a huge initiative on their part. So it's basically so that they get rid of all the word salads, like ACTPPP and all that stuff. It's very simple now, actually. It's kind of straightforward.
Speaker 1:And to your knowledge, is there gonna be a level four? Because they always talk about something after
Speaker 2:Well, level three takes you to MCC. So whatever comes after MCC will be whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Well, and I truly get why master, it's like that whole, we're talking about DEI and B, that kind thing. You know, even though mastery is the journey to mastery and level three only gets you there, that doesn't mean it's the end of the journey folks. Right.
Speaker 2:Very true. Very true.
Speaker 1:But anyway, that was my little aside. I just started hearing about it, so you're one of the first people that I got to ask about it. So for those of you in the dark, like me, ACC, PCC and MCC is now level one, level two, level three.
Speaker 2:No, actually, it's not that ACC, PCC and MCC still exist but the programs that get you those credentials, the names of the programs have changed. So Level One gets you to ACC. Level Two gets you to PCC, Level Three gets you to MCC.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. That's interesting. I like that.
Speaker 2:I should say that I'm teaching that course with an MCC.
Speaker 1:I was going to say, I was going to ask you. You're only a PCC. You're not an MCC.
Speaker 2:I have actually submitted my application for an MCC, but I'm teaching that program in a partnership with an MCC right now.
Speaker 1:Who is it?
Speaker 2:Andre Ribeiro. I don't know if you know him. He's based in the UK.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. Two guys with a British accent. Awesome.
Speaker 2:Actually, he's not British. I think he's Turkish originally or something.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:He lives in the UK.
Speaker 1:And lives in the UK. Our multinational, multicultural world. I love it. Well, listen, let's dive in a little bit about the article. So obviously you wrote this piece because you saw this and you saw this as an opportunity. How did you become so interested in that topic about disappointment?
Speaker 2:So firstly, I should acknowledge that talking about disappointment is in a way a slightly risky thing because I think it has an emotional charge for a lot of people. Nobody wants to be disappointed and nobody wants to be a disappointment. Right? So it's one of those topics that, you know, you're inclined to steer clear of, I think in general. But the reason I wanted to talk about it was because I have been, for the past four years, in a process of my own sort of psychoanalytic process where I've looked at my own disappointment and found it fascinating in terms of how expectations get set and how then you or me in this case can be disappointed with respect to expectations, but how realistic were the expectations in the first place. So that's one piece of this. Then as I was doing that work within myself, I started noticing in my individual clients, I do mostly individual coaching. Maybe 10% team coaching. So I noticed in my individual clients how disappointment was showing up for them. And then this was actually a retrospective take on this team coaching case that I've included in this article because then I started thinking about previous cases and how disappointment fit with that. And this just really stood out as a case in where disappointment was just like so spread throughout the team that I thought, this is a great topic to look at in terms of team coaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And how did you, like, seriously, what triggered that topic for you with these people? Like, what is it that they actually did that you went aha. Or was it because you were on the process of the journey yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, it was, when I looked back at that case through the lens of disappointment, it became incredibly obvious to me that the central challenge on the team was disappointment, which is to say disappointment in each other. So there'd been let down by each other multiple times, and it had never been properly addressed or processed. They were disappointed in themselves as a team because they started out having this very early success, and then it had got difficult subsequent to that early success. And so they were kind of disappointed that they hadn't continued in the way that they'd expected to. And then there was disappointment in themselves as individuals because they knew they had disappointed one another, and yet they still had to show up every day at work in this context of disappointment. So in all sorts of different ways disappointment was just diffuse throughout the team, and it was really causing problems because it's difficult to get excited and energized and ready to go to work if there's all this disappointment hanging around.
Speaker 1:Well, and especially the example you used of the fellow who had chronic pain and using medical marijuana to cure his ills and not telling anybody. Cause of course, it deals with the chronic pain but it also causes some other funky side effects.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I felt a bit weird saying that because I'm not sure that it always does, but in this case I think it did.
Speaker 1:Well, and just the chronic pain, not knowing about that, regardless of how it was treated. It affects your performance, it affects your life. It has too.
Speaker 2:That's right. It has too.
Speaker 1:So that was a retrospective. What are the signs you think a coach might see that they could say, oh, this might be a case of disappointment that we need to work on?
Speaker 2:So the sort of central pillar of disappointment, as I'm understanding it in this article is that it's always in relation to expectations. So the only way you can be disappointed is if you had an expectation and then the expectation was not met. When expectations are exceeded, you feel elation. When the outcomes are not what you expect, you feel disappointment. And it's a visceral experience. It's not just like, oh, I'm disappointed. It's often a visceral experience and a demotivating one where you have to lick your wounds and hopefully come back and try again. But if you have too many experiences of disappointment, it's really difficult to do that. You just kind of get demotivated to the point where it's really hard to come back. So one of the signs I think that team coaches can look out for is, are expectations being set? Are they being set actively, proactively, and realistically? Are they extremely high? Which can be just as problematic as if they're not high enough. And are they being talked about and measured and analyzed, and then debriefed? Were they met? If not, why were they not met? And can that conversation happen in a fairly, open and honest way so that these things don't become sort of chronic?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, you know, you're saying that, and it comes to mind when you said visceral reaction. I've had two clients in the past year who were up for promotion and they were not able to get that promotion. And one was in breakdown, like breakdown. And the other one was just, like you said, I was so disappointed because they went through so much work, put these packages together, interviewed people. They called it a promo pack. Just the amount of work and the expectation. They really felt that they were ready, their bosses felt they were ready, and it still got kiboshed by the higher ups. But then raises the question, how do you handle it? It sounds a little bit more like therapy. Obviously we listen, we ask them what did you learn and things like that but what are we really doing with that visceral reaction disappointment?
Speaker 2:Well, I want to say that the two examples you give, and those are great examples, and I think coaches encounter disappointment all the time in their clients of that kind, career related disappointments. If we were to pass off every case of disappointment to a therapist, I think, you know, we'd be,
Speaker 1:We'd have no clients. We better get referral piece.
Speaker 2:But the two examples you give one who was just sort of devastated by it and the other one he said, I'm so disappointed. So I think the first thing that coaches can help their clients do is actually name it. If they can actually own the fact that they had a hope and the hope has been dashed and the consequences that they're disappointed. Then if they can actually talk through the feelings associated with that disappointment. Coaches do process coaching or emotionally focused coaching. So there's no reason why a coach can't ask a client or help a client understand their emotions, debrief something of how they came to hold those expectations. What do you think happened in the minds of others such that those expectations weren't realized? Normally there's a story and then once and only once, ideally those emotions have been properly processed, can you have a conversation about what do they want to do about it. Do they wanna find a different company where they're may be more appreciated, or where they have less baggage or history, or do they want to continue doing what they're doing and try again? The next steps, the action steps need to follow a proper emotional debrief of the situation, I feel.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, and you know, true to your earlier point about, you know, we don't just give away people every time they have a little bit of an emotional breakdown. We're there for them. We listen to them and in both of those examples, I continued to be a coach with them for about six months. One of them was like, he stayed, but it was this FU situation where it's like, I'm going to work to rule. You just let them be and then in the end the boss that didn't promote him got fired. So that kind of took the fuse out of his flame. The fuel from his flame and his character wouldn't allow him to not be a hundred percent. Like your point about authenticity, it can change you obviously, but it doesn't have to change you permanently. In my experience, disappointment has been, in individual circumstances, a temporary thing. And truly they are so much stronger after that. It's like, oh, okay. What cou ld I do differently? What could I have done differently? That sort of thing.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking of a client right now who was promoted, but not in the way that he wanted to be promoted. And it's really stuck with him to the point where almost every sort of thought he has about the job now is filled with this feeling of sort of infused with what can I do about this situation now? He's a new client, but we're working through it because he never quite understood how it happened. He was up for this job, and then all of a sudden it came and he said, I only want this job. I don't want the other job and then all of a sudden it was a sort of effective that he would take this other job and he had another one lined up. So there was just a lot going on at that time and the whole thing went as it went. There he is at the end and he's like, hell what just happened? How do I get out of this situation? So in that instance, he hasn't named it as a disappointment. I guess there is a question in my mind is how helpful is it to name it as a disappointment and then to look at it as disappointment? What caused the expectation? What caused the disappointment? What expectation was in place? And how was that initial expectation set? And also, how much of a right do you feel to have your expectations met? Because if you think that you have a right to have any and all expectations you set met, and then they're not met then you're gonna be unhappy a lot of the time unless you set very low expectations. So there's a whole sort of matrix of expectations and a sense of how reasonable or right it is that you have those expectations met and then what you do within yourself when they're not met.
Speaker 1:As a coach, why is it even a question? It would be our job to offer the possibility of what we're noticing. Just say, I'm noticing disappointment. Right? That's our job.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, you seem disappointed. I mean, sometimes it's just so obvious, right? You would not want to say that. You may want to empathize and say I can see that you're really disappointed. I know how much you want this promotion. So Yeah. You can name it, I guess, as the coach.
Speaker 1:I would think so. Why not? Otherwise it's the elephant in the room. Because to your point earlier, it is not something that we want necessarily to name, but there's lots of things when we're coaching that we don't want to name that we end up naming.
Speaker 2:Well, if I can just back up a minute and say why I think this topic is so interesting and important now and relevant to coaches because coaches can, I think less so now but in the past, coaching has been very oriented toward optimization, right? We're in the optimization business. Come to me as a client and we will work on optimizing you for the particular career that you want, the particular job you want. We're gonna make you better, at least was the rhetoric up until five years ago, pre Covid. So there's this pervasive idea of optimization even in the culture if you go on LinkedIn. Again, l ess so since Covid, but before Covid, there's even like optimized self. Do you know this? O r quantified self. There is this whole like thing where you measure everything about yourself so that you can optimize Right. What this means is that people's expectations get set very high. And I'll give you a n example. I was just on a call with a client a couple of days ago, and he was saying in his mind, there's an optimal way that he could h ave invested for the last 20 years. If he bought Apple shares here, he would've made this. If he had bought that, t hen, you know, there's this optimal idea he has in his mind o f how he could've invested.
Speaker 1:Could've.
Speaker 2:Could've, exactly. Could've. But in his mind, it's almost like he beats himself up for not having done the optimal. If he'd been a better, smarter guy, he would've done the optimal. So that's an insanely high idealistic expectation that he's putting on himself. And then he's disappointed in himself that he didn't do this optimal thing. That's an extreme case and he was funny about it. He was sort of joking about it. But I think that we're all guilty of that some extent, at least I was, and this is one of the things that I feel I've worked on the last years, is to not feel that because I'm not optimal, that I'm somehow failing because optimal is a dream.
Speaker 1:It's a machine conversation. You want optimal performance of your automobile or your furnace. I mean, yes, you'd love optimal performance on your investment portfolio, but you can't even. There are some people that seem to do it well like Warren Buffet and things like that, but honestly, the common person, you got so many things to think about. You got a family, we got a snowstorm coming, we got all this. What? So if you take your eyes off the ball, like how does optimization handle that? Anyway, we could go on on that one.
Speaker 2:You are right. Some people do it right. Warren Buffet does it and these days you can feel very close to these people who are kind of optimal, almost God-like in their abilities. You can follow them on Instagram. And so the younger generation, I think, really struggles with this. They see Warren Buffet or they see whoever they follow on Instagram and they think, why can't I do that? They can do it. They seem to make it look easy. Why can't I do it? There's a whole sort of mental health crisis I think that comes out of this.
Speaker 1:Hello. It's not the younger ones. I wish I was doing as well as Warren Buffet. The people you're talking about are a third of my age. But anyway, here's a scenario. One thing that comes to mind in order for me to help one or two of my clients, their organization has unreasonable expectations. How do you help coach a person? Can you avoid disappointment? How do you coach them to deal with that when they have no control over the organization. I'm thinking of one client in particular. They keep throwing new systems and this and this and this. Half the time, nobody knows why and no one's allowed to challenge it. They're just supposed to suck it up and bring it forward, aAmake it work on top of everything else that they've been doing.
Speaker 2:Are you talking about Twitter right now under Elon Musk?
Speaker 1:Oh, well, you know what? Now see there's, I heard a little bit about that this morning and I thought, how dare you? Has he not heard of the Great Resignation and what is the other one? Quiet quitting. Well, they're not being quiet about it. They're going out. It's like we just went through this whole exercise of quality of life and reframing and looking at purpose and what's important. All of a sudden you're saying nothing important but working here. Like, really?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, I may have a slightly different take on this than I think a lot of people because my criticism there would not necessarily be on the high expectations. And some firms, for whatever reason, I don't think it's a particularly great strategy, but some firms seem to think that it's better to set very high expectations and have them consistently not be met than to set realistic expectations that have them be met. So that's like a motivational thing and I don't know what the research is on that. Yeah. But I think a firm is entitled to set whatever expectations it likes. What I don't like is you saying that there's no opportunity for them to negotiate with those expectations because then there's not open dialogue or there's not a two-way street.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a dictatorship.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a dictatorship. Exactly. And I don't think dictatorships either politically or in organizations belong.
Speaker 1:Hello Russia. There's something else that you just said because I'm thinking of that particular client and there's no negotiation. The client I'm thinking about, it's like you do it or you know. Here's what it was. It was what you said about, or what I was thinking, the unmet expectations might be understood by the organization, but it's not understood by the individual. They're going tostill strive to meet those expectations because they don't really know or are not party to the fact that the organization is okay with a lot of unmet expectations, but the individual hasn't been told and the individual doesn't know. So the individual is driving themselves crazy working more and harder and trying to meet those unmeetable expectations.
Speaker 2:So you can see from the organization's point of view that that might be considered success.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, from the organization but the person is wicked smart, but is so stressed, gaining weight, health is deteriorating all as a result of the fact that she can't get out of the office and it just gets piled on and on and on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And sooner or later, I mean, because after the first year's expectations aren't met and the organization says, oh, no problem. You know, just carry on next year, at a certain point, she's going to clue into the fact that the expectation is that the expectations are not going to be met.
Speaker 1:Yeah.<
Speaker 2:So at that point, she'll probably either completely disengage and say, well, who cares? It doesn't matter one way or the other, or at least dial back the effort she's making, hopefully.
Speaker 1:That's just the type of individual that she is. It's like there's no such thing as dialing back. I'm here to do my best. I've been here for 20 years. I've always been known to do my best and to perform and meet expectations. Ican't just dial it back. So we're talking about retirement. It's like, so how close are you to retirement? We literally had some exercises about, so what about you and your partner would excite you about retirement on the same page? How would that work? What would that look like? So we toy back and forth, and she's also well connected. So it's easy to say, well, so who do you know that you could ask these questions to? Who do you know that you can share your feedback that will listen and possibly make a difference. There is anumber of different ways to do it.
Speaker 2:I'm curious how it is that there's no opportunity to negotiate those expectations.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's top down. It's like, you know we're doing this, it's firm wide. We're all doing it and you're going to make it work. Then a week later there's a new system or project or something and this particular person's in charge of a couple hundred people, not directly, and you don't have a choice. You make it work. No why's. Not a hell of a lot of communication. So there's lots to work on, and I'm really happy t o be working with this individual. You just never know. I always love saying that the best laid plans, but when you open the door, just be prepared to open the door to chaos when you are coaching a client. Just take them where they are and help them get to where they w ant t o go or need to go. More w ant t o go because need to go is my thing, not theirs. Wow. We've talked a lot about unmet expectations both i n t he school and the organization and you had a couple other pillars. Did you w ant t o talk about those briefly?
Speaker 2:Well, there's the expectations, the disappointment when expectations, there's the elation when outcomes are exceeded and that's pretty great,
Speaker 1:And notice how even you perk up, right? It's elation. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I guess if we look at it from the organization's point of view, if the organization is setting the expectations, and I think in a negotiation, the employee is probably always going to try and negotiate it down because that feels less stressful and easier, and the organization's probably always going to want to negotiate it up. There's probably a sweet spot where you get the best of the elation and limit the negative of the disappointment. So you have people sort of optimally motivated by the expectations. I think that's difficult to achieve but that would be the goal, I guess.
Speaker 1:Well, it makes me wonder about my team. What expectations have I set for them? I hope I've set one of ease and quality and importance of life. Interestingly, most of my team have people in their lives, usually parents that are ailing and that they have to drop their work at a moment's notice to take a parent to a hospital or some of them had to be put into care facilities and later passed. And all that has to be handled with all of that. So I think what we do is we give our people a lot of grace and a lot of space to do the work. And we have a fine tuned machine and schedule that gets our magazine out. Technically we're never late on an issue. We've built in enough time now where we can get things done with that ease and grace in space. But having had this, I'm going to just say maybe on some one-on-one, how do you see our expectations or what do you feel are the expectations of the organization and you in particular and any disappointments?
Speaker 2:We have been talking about expectations that are set not by you. I think that the most disappointment comes when you set expectations for yourself. Not when you fail to meet other people's expectations. That can be bad for sure, but when you fail to meet expectations that you put on yourself
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you've disappointed yourself which can be worse than disappointing others.
Speaker 1:Very much so. Very much so. Yeah. And then Elon Musk comes into the picture, and then it's like, really? WTF, man. Just tip over the apple cart. Oh my gosh, obviously, we can go on and on. We've got great client examples. I always like to ask, what would you like our audience to do as a result of this article and this conversation?
Speaker 2:Okay. I would like them to, first off, notice disappointment when it shows up in both individual and team coaching clients. I'd like them to ideally name it and I'd like them to then look at what the expectations were, how the expectations were set that the disappointment is related to and ask and this is a tricky process because often those expectations are set in complex ways. The expectations tend to be driven in part by outside factors. And those outside factors can be what they see on Instagram. It can be what they learned as a child from their parents. It can be what the organization expects from them, but get a sense of, of how ultimately realistic those expectations were. Were they idealistic, which is to say inherently going to lead to disappointment sooner or later. Because if you go through life only setting idealistic expectations for yourself, you're going experience a lot of disappointment and ultimately, you're going achieve less because that's going be super demotivating. I set up a page specifically for this. If you go to julianhumphreys.com/disappointment, that's not to say, Julian Humphreys is a disappointment but julianhumphreys.com/disappointment.
Speaker 1:No. But you could say manage your expectations.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, but for now, it's set up as julianhumphreys.com/disappointment. There are some additional resources there.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, you just covered my final question. What is the best way to reach you? Would you like them to do that or any other way.
Speaker 2:They can do that and then they can sign up for my mailing list if they want to. And we can keep in touch.
Speaker 1:Well, I have to say this conversation has not been a disappointment.
Speaker 2:That's good to know.
Speaker 1:I am elated.
Speaker 2:Maybe you had low expectations to start.
Speaker 1:I see. I knew you were going go there. I knew you were gonna go there. No, I have very high expectations of everyone within, but realistic. You wrote an article, you're the person that knows about that particular topic in this moment, and who I'm interviewing, and I just love finding out more. Thank you for that clarity with which you just gave our audience the next steps of what to do as a result of both the article and the conversation.
Speaker 2:Great. It's a pleasure. And can I just say publicly to all your listeners, how much you helped me when I was setting up that philosophy of coaching journal. You had no reason to do that other than the goodness of your heart, and I'm still extremely appreciative of the time.
:Oh, you're very welcome. You're very welcome. And congratulations on its success. It's still going. Yeah, I know. I'm on your mailing list.
Speaker 2:Oh you are? I don't run it anymore.
Speaker 1:Which is the beauty of it. There's a lot of things I don't do anymore at choice. You're very welcome. It was my pleasure. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app. I know we're on Apple, Spotify, and well, right on our page, choice-online.com. And while you're there, don't forget to sign up for your free digital issue of choice Magazine by clicking the signup now button at choiceonline.com. I'm Gary Schleifer. Enjoy your journey to mastery.