The Importance of Coaching in Management Training
9 December 2021
Sixteen pleasant emotions
21 March 2022
The End of Work is the title of a 1995 essay by Jeremy Rifkin, an American economist who was very active in trying to predict and explain the effects of the great changes taking place in modern society. Rifkin was not the only one to foresee, a few years in advance, the imposing transformations in the world of work linked to the introduction of digital technologies, but no one could ever have imagined a scenario such as the one we have experienced in the last two years, traversed by the health emergency. In a very short time, a huge number of workers have been able to experience a different dimension of work and, although the current situation is far from stabilised, the feeling that a turning point from which there will be no turning back is very strong. An impression that seems to be confirmed by the strong requests to keep a substantial part of the work outside traditional locations and, more recently, by the phenomenon of spontaneous resignation from work, the ‘great resignation‘, first reported in the United States, but now beginning to take on significant proportions in our country as well.
.
There is a vast literature on strategies to deal with crisis scenarios. The great economic recession of 2008, the increasingly widespread awareness of environmental problems, and now a health crisis of global proportions, have made these events anything but theoretical, very concrete. The ability to deal with the enormous problems generated by these situations certainly depends on the quality of the decisions and initiatives implemented, but a decisive role is entrusted to the people who hold positions of responsibility in various capacities. In the corporate world, a real discipline has developed, called ‘crisis management‘, aimed at studying and resolving these extremely delicate phases, and it has become very important for those involved in training to be able to identify the skills capable of making a real difference during the management of these processes.
Some of the most important qualities revolve around an area of competence that we can effectively summarise through the concept of resilience. At this point, however, a clarification is necessary, because the recent misuse of this word has generated a trivialisation, and sometimes even a misrepresentation of its original meaning. The word resilience appears in the social sciences with a clearly metaphorical meaning, borrowed from the study of materials: a material is defined as resilient when it is able to return to its initial state after suffering a shock. A person or social system is thus resilient when it manages to develop an ‘intelligent strength‘, an evolutionary process that enables it to rebuild a new equilibrium after a traumatic event. This is an expression of a behaviour that does not simply resist, a condition that would produce a gradual but inevitable attrition, but is instead capable of activating a dynamic process, fuelled by positive thinking capable of assessing the critical situation and at the same time showing confidence in its solution. The resilient person does not give up in the face of difficulties, his willingness to be an active subject never makes him feel at the mercy of events, he reacts knowing that he can draw on his own resources and those present in the environment. She listens, observes, seeks to understand, shows flexibility and openness to change, is ready to learn from new experiences through a synergetic process capable of integrating new energies.
Still immersed in a scenario of global crisis, which has profoundly affected people’s lives, with strong repercussions in the economic, political and health fields, it is difficult not to attribute a positive value to the qualities we have tried to summarise. It is therefore good not to be distracted by fashions and superficial glances; the possibility of “educating for resilience” is intimately linked to our ability to restore depth and meaning to this concept, so that we can identify and implement the most suitable training strategies to be able to understand and develop this important competence: one of the most effective adaptive responses in the face of the complexity of the reality that surrounds us.
