COVID-19 - Should I be spending money on coaching and development?
If the last few months have taught me anything, it’s how much of a luxury some people still think coaching and development are.
That makes me sad. For me, it’s anything but. My own business has been impacted significantly by this crisis but I’ve doubled my own spend on coaching and supervision as I know it’s a necessity. I work with numerous businesses who feel the same - I know they’ll weather this storm.
Picture this. You’re about to set out on a long journey. Let’s imagine it’s by sea. You know the journey is going to be difficult, there’s unchartered territory, storms forecast and there’s lot’s of other people setting out on the same journey – all trying to win the race.
You’ve done the right things, shedding excess weight and working out where you’d like to end up. But you’ve never attempted anything like this journey before and you haven’t done any maintenance on your boat for a very long time. You didn’t want to spend money or look selfish. You felt as though because you were leaving people behind who wanted to come on the journey that it wasn’t fair. You felt as though they’d wonder why you’d spent the money on the boat rather than spending it on them.
You’ve told all those people that as long as the journey’s successful, they can come and join you once you arrive.
Once you set out on that journey you realise how hard it really is sailing stormy seas with such a small crew. How little you were prepared. How little time you’d spent thinking about all of the skills you’d need like leadership, resilience and perspective. You feel incredibly stressed, lonely and overwhelmed. You don’t feel equipped to captain the ship, especially on one of the hardest journeys you’ve ever been on and your boat definitely isn’t up to the task.
Your crew are floundering too. They’ve never been on a journey like this, especially one with such unchartered territory. They’re looking to you constantly for direction and you don’t know how to guide them.
Sounds horrendous doesn’t it. But so many business leaders are creating this exact situation by deciding to freeze coaching and/or development spend.
The team that you have left are the ones who are going to make sure that you have a business for customers and furloughed employees to come back to. You need to:
- Look after them
- Help them to manage the inevitable stress that this situation creates for them
- Help them to develop resilience
- Learn from this experience
- Build new skills by working their way through this crisis
But it’s not just them is it. It’s you too. You need to do all of these things for yourself as well.
When the context is constantly shifting it’s almost impossibly difficult to get clear. Fuzzy thinking is the new norm. You need focussed space and time dedicated to reflection:
You need to work through:
- What this crisis means for your business
- What your strengths and weaknesses are
- What opportunities you have
- What threats
- What you need to prioritise
- What actions you need to take
- How you feel about everything that’s going on
- What skills you lack and need to develop
- What skills and experience you can lean on
All of this will give you chance to:
- Make the space to find creative solutions (remember those?!)
- Slow down and take stock
- Focus on the right things
- Take intentional action
- Work out what your team and customers need
Working on these things adds up to a far stronger, more resilient business that is fit for any kind of future. Galvanising your team and business against uncertainty and building the momentum you need to go the distance.
Spending on coaching and development at this time is far from a luxury, it is an investment in the future success of your business so that you can rise above the competition, continue to delight customers and bring back or even grow your team.
A note:
I write this thinking many readers may think “of course you’d say that”!
It may come as a surprise to say that actually I wouldn’t. There’s no worse thing than coaching or leadership development intervention that is badly timed or has no buy-in.
My business has always run on referral and recommendation and I take that very seriously. I work with people that I know will get results by working with me and the ROI that they see is enormous.
I would never, and will never, work with people or in situations that feel contrived or where there is no value to be gained.
In the current crisis I feel that coaching and leadership development are needed more than ever. I feel as though these kinds of interventions, far from being a luxury, really are essential spend to support yourself and your business through the incredibly turbulent times ahead.
If you’d like to chat about how I can support you with any of the above, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line on hello@rebeccamorley.co.uk.
