Adapting Organizational Life Outside the “Building”

Suddenly people, teams, and organizations had to adapt! We all know how tough adaptation is, despite the fact of always having been present at different moments of our lives. Organizations have long been creating contingency plans to address sudden adaptation needs. Many of us have plans A and B, for career management situations, family life management, and even "dinner plans".

Article by Alexandra Barosa Pereira | Reading time 3 minutes

Ben Sweet

Did anyone have a plan to move their whole professional, family and social life to a confined space in the blink of an eye? Are companies prepared to keep their entire organizational routines out of the “building” where sharing, socializing, and interdependence flows naturally?

We are at a time where “improvised adaptation” (Abrantes, Passos, Cunha and Costa, 2018) will make the difference. For the sake of our economy, individuals, teams, and organizations must be able to quickly adapt to the present emergency in an improvised manner , which means to plan and to execute simultaneously, all the while keeping the organizational life active, even if it outside its "normal" work context.

According to the aforementioned authors, the improvised adaptation process requires psychological security, where the error is accepted and incorporated so that learning results in individual and collective effectiveness.

So, how can leaders live with all the vulnerabilities emerging in this process of social detachment? How can they support teams in finding their own solutions, learning from what goes less well, and assuming a higher level of responsibility and commitment even when working remotely?

Coaching has never made more sense than now. We cannot continue to label coach as a trend because today, this process of individual and collective development, has become a necessity:

1. For leaders who use this process when working on their vulnerabilities, developing emotional intelligence skills, so important for their individual and social balance - individual coaching;
   
   
2. For teams that, when using coaching skills, will dispense with control and directives, but will need to be able to live in partnership, understand mutual inter-dependencies and bring forth actions instead of thoughtless and misaligned reactions - team coaching;
   
   
3. For organizations that will have to keep the organizational culture out of its usual place, supporting their employees in creating a personal sense of purpose aligned with the business purpose and vision, maintaining networks of support and getting directly involved in making it happen – group coaching.
   
   

Virtual solutions for individual, team or group coaching, or even virtual training in coaching skills, have proven to be effective. But, if the time has not yet come to resort to external support in using coaching as the process in improvised adaptation, here are some competencies that you can start using immediately:

• Focus on the team – let go of your need to control and work with the agenda and the specific needs of the team, promoting collective learning (vs. individual);
  
  
• Mutual Trust and Respect – develop psychological security, allowing mistakes to happen so that the team is able to try again, but do it in partnership, empowering the team;
  
  
• Coordination – at this moment, your role will be to orchestrate the team, and coordination involves the existence of moments of feedback within the team;
  
  
• Develop backup and support behavior - with living networks of support, always accessible within the teams;
  
  
• Motivate, not forgetting to challenge the team as a whole, to proactively find different solutions;
  
  
• Shared mental models – it will be extremely important to have even more sharing of information and to align the whole in common goals;
  
  
• Self-awareness and social awareness – take time to reflect and become more aware of your vulnerabilities, turning them into the forces we are all counting on!
  
  

Reference:

Abrantes, A.C.M., Passos, A.M., Cunha, M.P. and Costa, P.L. (2018), Improvised team adaptation: a real-time adaptation model, RIGS – Interdisciplinary Magazine of Social Management, v.7, n.3, 29- 57.