Adapting together: Harmonic Leadership brings balance to a dynamic workplace
The prevalence of stress and change fatigue in the workplace calls for a new vision for human-centered leadership. As a coaching-informed strategy, Harmonic Leadership balances work-focused and people-focused energies to facilitate a caring, diverse, and sustainable workforce.
Challenge:
The workplace is experiencing a human energy crisis, where employees feel disengaged, anxious, and isolated
Opportunity:
Coaches and coaching approaches offer a remedy, helping organizations strengthen human capital
Impact:
Coaching-informed leadership introduces innovative ways to support human-centered work
Wisdom Weavers
Future-fit leaders will need to address stress, change fatigue, and disconnection in the workplace
As organizations aim to adapt in a rapidly changing world, workers are falling behind. Analyzing data on worker stress and burnout, researchers point to change fatigue as a driver of poor workplace well-being. The realities of technological innovation and automation, climate change, and demographic transformation mean organizations and their employees are navigating change so quickly that skills and roles become obsolete in only a few years. Other global surveys, like the State of the Heart Report, reveal that constant uncertainty and stress are weakening social and emotional resources that support resilience and well-being. Labeling these challenges as a “Human Energy Crisis,” the State of the Heart reports a global decline in empathy, motivation, and optimism.
“If you do not create well-being in the workplace, people will vote with their feet. It was not always this way. So, senior leaders have been both quite surprised by that and open to fixing it.”
The relationship between negative emotions and work in a changing world indicates an urgent need to rethink leadership approaches and corporate culture. At the heart of this shift is creating cultures designed to strengthen human capacity and well-being for long-term human sustainability. When workers are supported to care for their own well-being and find support in their team, they are better suited to leverage human skills like creativity, adaptability, and collaboration to navigate change. Coaches are already working with organizations to guide systems-level culture change and support leaders in transitioning to human-centered work. Other approaches include training leaders to use coaching skills as they interact with their teams.
Reflecting on changing views in workplace well-being, Wisdom Weaver Haitham Elmasry sees Gen Z employees “leading change in the workforce to support communication, conflict resolution, address burnout, and create early checkpoints that detect the signs of these things before they become problems. This means we are moving toward a more sustainable relationship with work, and this is fundamentally about using coaching skills.” Haitham expects new leadership styles to emerge as organizations work to scale coaching for development and well-being support.
Coaching and the future of workplace well-being
In organizations where coaching is embedded in the corporate culture, the idea of “leaders and managers using coaching skills” has the potential to evolve into new coaching-informed leadership styles. Building off thirty years of coaching and leadership experience, Brian Lowell French presents a model for coaching-informed leadership that addresses many of the current challenges of poor employee well-being and advocates for a culture of care that extends beyond the workplace. The Harmonic Leadership model is designed to help leaders promote a culture that values, motivates, and cares for each individual, resulting in a workplace that generates and sustains human energy.
Blending coaching tools, behavioral research, and leadership philosophy, Harmonic Leadership centers on the idea of inclusive, mindful caring. Leaders may have different strengths or approaches to achieving these goals. Still, ultimately, Harmonic Leadership is about infusing the traditional task-focused energies of work with the people-focused energy that drives dynamic teams. Through this approach, leaders embody coaching skills and principles to create an inclusive workplace and balance different caring priorities for a sustainable work environment.
Harmonic Leadership sets the tone for a diverse and dynamic workplace
Inclusivity, the first component of Harmonic Leadership, builds off core coaching competencies foundational to the coaching relationship, including cultivating trust and safety and active listening. Inclusivity involves seeking to understand an individual’s unique values and perspectives and appreciate how those characteristics positively contribute to the group. This coaching-informed leadership also promotes communicating and partnering with individuals in ways they prefer to be engaged. This type of deep listening and empathetic communication is valuable on two levels: it establishes a culture of care that helps employees feel individually valued, and it helps facilitate a culture of appreciation for group diversity.
Caring for the individual
Creating an inclusive culture and showing care for individual employees can contribute to greater psychological safety and buffer against workplace stress. A review of compassionate leadership styles during the Covid-19 pandemic highlights the role of care for the individual as strengthening employee well-being. Beyond the impact of listening to employee needs, compassionate leaders in the study reported changing their leadership approaches to verbally acknowledge employee needs and take steps to act on those needs by partnering with their employees. Reflecting on her experience coaching organizations in the United States, Wisdom Weaver Sackeena Gordon-Jones calls leaders to go beyond perfunctory check-ins to engage with employees in an authentic, open, and honest way. “Only then,” she asserts, “will leaders start to see our interactions become more humane and create spaces where people can feel like they are seen, heard, accepted, and safe.”
Building off research on workplace stress and adaptability, Wisdom Weaver Mimi Nicklin warns that organizations not creating inclusive and caring environments struggle to overcome stress in productive ways. Empathy becomes a critical future skill to promote workplace inclusivity because “if people do not feel safe enough to use their voices, they self-censor. When self-censorship goes up, everything else goes down — performance, creativity, innovation, design thinking, motivation — because if you are self-censoring, you are not able to bring your whole self to work. Which then creates adrenaline and cortisol in the blood and impacts the nervous system. There is a whole ripple effect.”
Caring for the group
Another benefit of inclusivity is that harmonic leaders leverage a coaching approach to highlight differences as an organizational or team strength. This strengths-based approach can underscore the value of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs as it helps employees gain new insight and perspectives into complex challenges. When diverse teams can view their differences through a strengths-based lens, it can lead to greater levels of workplace satisfaction and engagement.
Coaching-informed leadership also serves to model the deep listening skills needed for collaboration. As a consultant and advocate for empathy in the workplace, Mimi shares that generational differences are a growing concern for workplace cohesion because “even if people are speaking in the same mother tongue, they may not be speaking the same language.” Working in East Asian companies where leaders and entry-level employees often have a sixty-year age gap, empathetic listening helps employees at every level of an organization engage on a human level to communicate needs and honor the needs of their peers. Reflecting on similar generational shifts in the Middle East, Haitham believes “coaching can help bridge old leaders and new, improve workplace cohesion, and support diversity in the workplace by enabling empathetic listening and skills development. This will, in turn, improve well-being, reduce stress and conflict proactively, and improve the sustainability of growth.”
Mindful Caring: Balancing energy for a sustainable team
Mindful caring, the second component of Harmonic Leadership, involves prioritizing the long-term sustainability of the team by balancing focused energy between caring for others, caring for the group, caring for the work, and caring for self. According to Brian Lowell French, each component may take a different amount of time, but emphasizing the equal importance of each type of care helps leaders understand when there is an imbalance.
The impact of imbalance appears in many forms. In an unbalanced system, some individuals may sacrifice their needs for the group, leading to resentment and burnout. Alternatively, when an individual’s needs overpower group needs, this can cause team friction. Reflecting on her work at Well-Being Designers, Wisdom Weaver Réka Deàk shares that a large part of her coaching practice involves helping individuals understand their own well-being needs and then learn to honor the well-being needs of others. To adopt a Harmonic Leadership style, leaders can consider what aspects of work and life support and deplete their energy, passion, and focus. In the balanced caring model, caring for self is just as important to team performance as caring for others, the group, and the work. While some leaders mistake human-centered leadership as self-sacrificial, Réka helps leaders ground their own self-care in the team’s success. “When leaders sacrifice themselves, they are not there to encourage their team in the long run. So, there is this fine balance of caring for your own well-being in a way that is not at the price of the team’s well-being.”
As leaders uncover their own well-being needs, they can use this process as a starting point to understand the diverse needs of the team. Using coaching skills, Harmonic Leaders ask open questions to help team members consider what it means to feel cared for, valued, and motivated at work. Mindful caring helps leaders tune in to the needs of the individual, group, the work at hand, and themselves, to identify when energy must shift to address an emerging situation. Once the situation is resolved, mindful caring leaders bring balance back to the other areas. Harmonic Leadership encourages rest and care after resolving a challenge, helping the team recover energy and strengthen resilience for future challenges.
“Leaders need to embody where they want to go and how they want to bring the team with them. This does not mean that leaders are perfect, but they have to be authentic in themselves”
Harmonic Leadership, as a coaching-informed approach, prioritizes human capital for organizational success. This approach works to strengthen team resilience by establishing psychological safety, promoting collaboration among a diverse workforce, and balancing energy to adapt through change. As workplaces evolve and leaders prepare for the future, coaching-informed leadership models provide new opportunities to strengthen employee well-being and readiness for change.
A Call to Action for Coaches
Investing in human capital involves more than just adding learning, development, and wellness programs to an already overwhelmed system. It requires disrupting the system to reinvent the relationship between individuals and work. Coaching-informed leadership underscores the skills and qualities needed to lead a diverse workforce in an uncertain world. However, there is limited research investigating how the diffusion of workplace coaching programs is transforming leadership and organizational outcomes. Future research in organizational psychology, coaching, and well-being can expand to better understand the many facets of coaching in the future of workplace well-being.
Transformational questions:
- How do coaching-informed leadership styles differ from coaching? Where do they overlap?
- What would a coaching-informed approach to workplace well-being look like?
- In what ways can coaching skills strengthen team communication?
- How can coaching-informed leaders balance energy among team members post-challenge?
- What role can coaching play in strengthening resilience in the workplace?
Learn more about human-centered leadership and the future of wellness at work:
- Dig deeper into Harmonic Leadership with tools for coaches and leaders
- Read Tomorrowmind by Kellerman and Seligman to learn more about the connection between workplace well-being and the ability to adapt to a changing world
- Explore the latest research from the International Coaching Federation and Human Capital Institute Defining New Coaching Cultures to learn how coaches are supporting workplace well-being
- Learn about group coaching for well-being from researcher Ana Paula Nacif
