How having a therapeutic coach will make you an attractive employer

Being a leader in the 21st century involves so many moving parts. In the past years we’ve all seen our teams feel the very direct impact of the pandemic, of the invasion of Ukraine, of the energy crisis, the economic crisis…

It seems to be a constant domino effect and everybody feels it. We work with leaders from all sorts of different industries and business areas who say they feel the heat. From the CEO of a travel company who sees their holiday destinations open and close unpredictably, to a Head of Sales whose customer base is suddenly changing and who notices the economy pinch pockets, or a Head of Engineering whose team is suddenly impacted and unable to work at the same speed, needing extra care and training people as the ground shifting beneath their feet.

The work with people dotted around the globe and because of the high degree to which the world is connected today, nobody escapes it.

Leading change today means working with complexity in a very direct way and this can be a big stretch for people in leadership positions. In this post we’ll look at why that is the case, and why leaders looking for new roles are attracted by places that offer therapeutic coaching to help them perform and cope.

Leading today means working in a world in constant change, as well as having the responsibility of creating change inside an organisation. It is complex cognitively because quite often it means working with strategy which requires the coordination of many different factors and variables. And it is complex in that being a leader means working with people, and we humans are not just complex, we are messy!

So being a leader today is hard in two ways:

1/ Performance: it’s hard to perform cognitively at a high level because it requires a set of skills that we weren’t taught at school;

2/ Emotionally: it’s hard emotionally because this complexity can be overwhelming. In fact transformation and change programmes and projects are shown to be a cause of burnout.

It’s hard and it can be lonely at the top. Which is why our coachees at The Listening Collective, are grateful that their coaches are trained psychotherapists. This means that they can start to overcome both of the problems stated above. In terms of their professional performance, working with a coach that can help them go deeper into their thoughts and personal processes means they can not just solve the problems they face today, but they can look under the hood of their own reasoning in order to re-emerge with new ways of making sense of the world they are working in and the decisions they have to make. Working with a therapeutic coach means working on their own meta-cognition, that is their ability to think about the quality of their thinking itself. This is where we can have a transformative and lasting effect on our performance.

And when it comes to overwhelm the feedback is clear: our coachees find that working with somebody who is trained to really hear them can be the outlet they needed before it was too late. Because when we’re dealing with difficult personal feelings, we want to be working with a safe pair of hands, somebody who has done the work themselves and are trained to work with you safely. In the words of one client of ours ‘Internally, I was screaming. I was lacking confidence in myself. And the shift happened from day 1. You don’t realise how strong you are until you have a coach that understands you.’

We are working in a candidate led market which means there has never been a more business critical moment to offer a therapeutic coaching service. By doing so, you’re sending important signals to the best talent there is:

You're telling candidates and employees you care about them. You’re saying you care about their health and wellbeing.

You’re also backing them because you’re saying ‘I not only believe in your current ability, I believe in who you can grow to become’.

You're leading in a modern way, a way that premised on people development and listening, rather than and industrial style top down approach. This tells candidates you are relevant.

Your new employees get access to therapy, where they can talk about their work and their role, but also how it connects to them personally. By focussing on the whole person you showing care for them as people and belief in them as professionals,

If you’re looking to attract talent into leadership positions, you’re looking to work with people who are being asked to outperform themselves whilst also dealing with a lot of stress. Providing them with a coach who is a trained psychotherapist is offering them the hand they need to push the business forward, whilst keeping themselves feeling whole as people.