How can therapeutic coaching help empower your employees?

Empowerment has been an overused buzzword for some years now. Its prefix ‘em’ means to ‘put into’. So empowerment means something like ‘to put power into something’. So the idea is that there are let’s say two people Person A, a team member, and Person B, a boss. Person B has the power, and they then ‘put it into’ Person A who didn’t have the power until Person B gave it to them.

Do you see any issues with this?

The idea that I could put power into you is actually not all that empowering. It assumes that you have none and have lots. It also assumes that the only reason you end up with power is because I gave you some of mine. And finally it assumes that power comes from outside of us and is done to us.

So where does power come from?

Well, here when we talk about power we’re talking about something that is inside each of us. It can manifest itself in many ways. It can be confidence, or self-belief, or an acceptance of one’s self despite one's shortcomings. The legendary psychotherapist Carl Rogers found that the therapeutic relationships that were most successful were the ones where a few conditions were met, chief of them all was something he termed ‘Unconditional Positive Regard’. American psychologist David Myers said that unconditional positive regard is: “an attitude of grace, an attitude that values us even knowing our failings.”

So what if real power, is when one has unconditional positive regard towards oneself. An attitude of grace, an attitude that values ourselves even knowing our failings…?

But many of us find it hard to do this. To accept ourselves for who we are. So how might we find this elusive power? Well one proven way to find it, is to be faced with somebody else who has unconditional positive regard for us. Somebody who we can be honest and open with. Somebody with whom we can share ourselves imperfectly and sense no judgement on the other side, only acceptance. This can be life-altering. It can give us access to a type of self-belief that is very different from the superficial types we often see at work whereby we are ultimately trying to have ourselves be liked by others through various people-pleasing strategies.

A client from a major global entertainment company recently had come to us with some sense that something was holding them back. What they uncovered was that they didn’t feel they were being true to themselves, particularly in senior meetings. Then, after a series of developmental coaching sessions with us, they said this: “My validation comes from me now. Not from my company or my rank.” The practical impact of this was that they had started being far more honest and showing up with more integrity to senior meetings and as a result has been offered a new role joining the C-Suite. They attributed this directly to the coaching, and to this power they had found, not outside of themselves, but deep within themselves.

So we can’t really be empowered. But we can find the power that we already have dormant. In searching for that power, it can be helpful to work with somebody who is entirely on our side. This is one of the reasons why at The Listening Collective, our coaches are trained psychotherapists. So that you can work with somebody who has “an attitude of grace, an attitude that values us even knowing our failings.”

This can be a great source of power.