October Notes: Give It Time

Some thoughts on silence, storming, supervision — and why our urge to be useful might be worth paying attention to.

I’ve been noticing time lately. Meandering your mid-forties has a way of inviting such reflection! Not in the productivity sense — I’m not about to recommend a new morning routine, a better diary system or getting up at 5am — but the amount of time we allow something to exist before we decide we need to do something about it. I’ve noticed it showing up in different parts of my work recently, in ways that initially seemed unrelated. The more I’ve thought about them, though, the more I think they might be pointing towards the same thing.

In mentor coaching, I’ve been listening to coaches and paying more attention to what happens immediately after the client has spoken. There can be an almost physical pull towards the next question. The client finishes, the coach understands — or thinks they understand — and in we go. Often it’s a perfectly good question. But I’m becoming increasingly interested in the few seconds before it (or after the client finishes), because when the coach doesn’t immediately fill the space, something else can happen. The client carries on, changes direction, or says the thing underneath the thing they just said. And perhaps just as importantly, the coach gets a moment to notice what is happening in themselves rather than simply preparing their next intervention. The pause isn’t empty. Quite a lot seems to be going on in there.

It has left me wondering about the urgency to help – our urgency to help as humans, perhaps. We spend a lot of time developing our capacity to listen, question, challenge, reflect and intervene, so it makes sense that we want to use those capacities. But I wonder whether some of our urgency to do something useful has less to do with what the person in front of us needs and more to do with our own need to feel useful. That is a slightly less comfortable thought, particularly because I recognise it in myself.

I’ve noticed something similar working with teams. We talk a lot about helping teams align, collaborate and perform, and understandably so. Usually somebody is paying us because they would like the team to work better than it currently does. That creates a particular temptation for the person facilitating the work: we can start to feel responsible for getting them somewhere. Agreement would be good. Clarity would be good. A shared way forward would certainly make the final twenty minutes easier. Except teams don’t necessarily develop that neatly, and some of the things that look like a lack of progress may be precisely the things they need to experience together.

Sometimes teams disagree. Sometimes the conversation becomes uncomfortable. Sometimes somebody says something that has clearly been waiting to be said for quite a long time. Sometimes the team appears to go backwards before it goes anywhere useful at all. We know the language of forming, storming, norming and performing; we put it on slides and explain reassuringly that storming is a perfectly normal part of team development. Then the team actually starts storming and suddenly there is a strong temptation to facilitate the hell out of it. I’m increasingly interested in the difference between helping a team work with what is happening and helping them get away from it. I’m not always sure our facilitation methods know the difference. And I’m not always sure I do either.

Then there is supervision, where I’ve noticed something different in myself. I naturally create much more space. I’m less concerned with where the conversation is going and much more comfortable staying with something without immediately needing to turn it into an insight, an action or a useful conclusion. At first I wondered whether I had simply become better at slowing down, but that explanation didn’t quite satisfy me. I don’t think I suddenly become a more patient human being when someone calls the conversation supervision.

I think it’s the contract.

Not only the contract agreed with the person sitting opposite me, but the quieter one I’m holding with myself about what I think I am there to do. If I believe my job is to produce movement, I will probably look for movement. If I think I’m there to help somebody find an answer, I’ll be alert for the answer. If I feel responsible for making the conversation useful, I may start trying to make it useful rather quickly. None of those intentions is necessarily wrong, but they begin to matter when they dictate the pace, because the contract I hold with myself shapes what I notice, what I intervene in and, perhaps most importantly, what I am prepared to leave alone.

That has made me wonder whether pace is really about time at all. It may have much more to do with what we think our job is in that moment. There are, of course, times when we need to intervene. A team can go round in circles, a coaching conversation can drift, and silence can become avoidance just as easily as it can become reflection. Giving something time isn’t the same as abandoning responsibility. But perhaps we could be a little less certain about when our usefulness needs to become visible.

I’m noticing this more in my own work now: those moments when I feel the urge to move something along, resolve something, ask the clever question, bring the team together or make sure we leave with something tangible. Rather than deciding that the urge is wrong, I’m trying to get more curious about it before I act on it. What happens if I wait? What might the client say next? What might the team need to work through rather than work around? What might I notice if I’m not already preparing to be useful? And, slightly more uncomfortably, was my need to be useful part of the problem in the first place?

So I’m experimenting with giving things a little more time. Not because slower is necessarily better, and certainly not because everything should be left to resolve itself. But because not everything that feels uncomfortable needs my help, and not every silence is waiting for me to fill it.

I want to see what can materialise when I don’t.

It always comes back to the contract.