Week 4- Coachee (sorry this is so long!)

In this week’s session with my coach, we focused on my tendencies within the Four Player Model. My coach asked what roles I’m most comfortable with. At the time, according to my notes, I said follower and opposer, but I should have said was follower and bystander and sometimes mover. I’ve been caught up with the word “comfortable.” In general at my core I am mostly a bystander. I like to observer and describe and relate. It’s a tricky question because it’s so contextual – with some people I am an bystander, with some people I’m a mover, etc.

In my work, where I had my first conversation of the week, however, I am mostly the follower and the opposer – a odd combination. The funny thing is that I am extremely non-confrontational in my daily life - so much so that I am often told it is a fault - but at work or in academic settings I have the confidence to speak my mind, be oppositional, and confront issues head on. The problem is that I have a very hard time suspending and detaching myself from my ideas when I’m at work. Teaching is an emotionally intense job. You become attached to your students and are emotional invested their success. Furthermore, I have deep political/ideological convictions about schools, so as I said, it is hard for me to detach from my ideas. Thus, when I am the opposer at work, it is not always productive. Instead I get offended easily and perhaps take things too personally.

Interestingly, in my personal life I am all things except an opposer. I never say no and I don’t like to criticize. I have always had much more confidence in myself as a student and as a teacher than I do in my personal life. In my personal life though, I also am a bit of a “control freak.” I always insist on driving. I like to walk in the front of the group. I feel most safe and secure when I am in charge.

I find myself very uncomfortable in situations when there is more than one mover, especially if I am one of them. I’m sure this all comes back to the fear of conflict that I mentioned earlier. Multiple movers means multiple ideas about how to do the same thing and that can yield conflict and debate.

Anyway, my first conversation of this week’s coaching assignment was a team meeting at school. I work on a team of six teachers, one of whom is our “team leader,” but I use the term loosely. There is no direct supervision over the team, so no one checks in to make sure we’re doing OK. In my opinion, we are not doing OK. The team seems to be dominated by people who advocate and only two of us inquire. One other woman and I are the followers/bystanders in the group. That leaves four movers/opposers. What I’ve begun doing out of frustration though is playing devil’s advocate all the time. It’s not fair to call what I’m doing opposing because it is completely unproductive. My frustrations with what I see as maltreatment and a lack of respect from my team has driven me to be defiant and even petulant at times, which is completely against my nature.

So the goal that I established with my coach is that I want to be a more constructive opposer. I think it is important that someone play the opposer in a productive way, and I have no reason to believe that the four opposers on the team will oppose productively. As my coach wisely reminded me though, I can’t control them; I can only control myself. So if I cannot make them constructive opposers, I will take that job.

We also talked about some ways that I can behave differently in my team meetings so that others may act differently in response. Since I believe that I am being treated unfairly and being treated essentially as a doormat, I need to advocate for myself gently and calmly. In doing so, I will force someone else to experiment with being a follower since I will not always be the team’s loyal foot soldier any longer.

One strategy that my coach suggested was “rearticulating” or “reframing” my problem (i.e. “opposing for opposition’s sake” is not getting me anywhere. In what ways might I become constructive in expressing my views to the team?) I can also reframe by looking at one issue at a time. Instead of getting caught up in a big idea like “team dynamics” or “failing students,” I can look at individuals problems and recognize what my position is on each issue and how I can constructively express that position to the team.

I think my favorite suggestion that I got from my coach about this problem was that I should ask questions which are more oriented toward problem finding. I don’t always need to be playing devil’s advocate to be an opposer. I good opposer helps the rest of the group see the problems that they are facing as a group, and I can do that by asking questions. Before my next team meeting, I am determined to formulate a list of such questions that I can use to probe the inner opposer in each of my teammates.

Because this post is already too long, I’m only going to talk briefly about conversations #2 and #3. In conversation #2, I told a group of my friends about the Four Player-Model. Despite my attempts to go into great detail about the inter-relationship of each role and a vivid description (including examples) of each, the group unanimously agreed that the theory was overly simplified. Additionally, I think without reading deeply into the objectives of genuine dialogue, there are semantic roadblocks. If you use the term opposer (which I naively did), people will automatically have negative associations. The same goes for “follower.” The issue with “follower” is much deeper though. As Faheem posted about last week, Americans are obsessed with leadership. American schools (especially colleges) brag about producing leaders. Today’s high school graduating class is filled with the “leaders of tomorrow. We see Americans either as leaders or the people who work for the leaders. Therefore, anyone who wasn’t well read in this topic would probably create a mental hierarchy as my friends did. The mover is the highest, follower in the lowest, and the other two are in the middle.

My third conversation was with a girlfriend who was having trouble with a boy. I had the goal of being a good bystander and just telling her exactly what I saw in our conversation. I think that went exceptionally well and she ended up formulating a strategy for dealing with her boy problem based on the observations I was relaying to her. My coach talked about how reflecting a conversation back to a person is a counseling strategy, and in a lot of ways the bystander is the counselor and reporter of any group I suppose.