At the time of the round table, at the start of the workshop, a participant, HR development manager in an HR consulting firm, tells us about the traumatic context of her company: one after the other, the employees have seen one another: a PSE, a move, a change of shareholder, a change of CEO and a major reorganization which had the effect of confusing everyone and more particularly the local managers.
In the following excerpt, she evokes an example of an action implemented to relieve uneasiness in the company and looks for a specific case that could be explored further with the participants in the workshop.

Participant: I have set up co-development training for these local managers, and I must admit that the facilitator tells me to be careful because they find these people in borderline condition, she thinks they are in bad shape. This co-development allowed exchange, collective words, a great confidentiality, a great behavior, a great force visibly, since the group is excessively united. Finally they were able to verbalize, discuss their suffering which, of course, they never verbalized since as a manager, they must be super managers, "super woman" and "super man"...

LACT: In what form is this co-development?

Participant: This is a group of 7 that meets once a month. Every half day, there is a member of this group of 7 who explains their difficulties. And the whole group behind is there to help him find solutions. This exchange, it is the principle of co-development, also allows those who do not wish to state their case, to recover a whole lot of information, good advice, and they too leave with new things.

So it worked pretty well. I would like to develop them. It is a pilot group. I would like to do this for other managers and for sales people too.

You are asking me to take a particular case, but we really have all the cases that appear in the "Resolve" box of your slide: cases of harassment, burn-out, stress, performance blocking... we have everything there…

LACT: So the one that seems the most complicated to you, the most alarming!

Participant: So for me it would be stress precisely. I have a manager, for example, who has a very invested work relationship, who is in “overwork”. She's a woman, so she often sets the bar a little too high, she's always at a level of excellence that she can't reach. With this degraded environment that I spoke about earlier - job descriptions that are a little too heavy and unrealistic, objectives that I personally find just as unrealistic, in addition there is a variable part and therefore their remuneration goes also depend on the objectives achieved – so there is even more stress.

LACT: Does she set herself the bar too high, because her goals are too high or she goes beyond the goals?

Participant: Both actually. She wants to achieve these objectives that I find unrealistic, but suddenly there is an over-investment, a concern for “over-quality”. Given everything that is asked of her, she would have to agree to work in degraded mode and not seek excellence every time. But this is not acceptable to her. She therefore puts herself in danger because she works too much, she puts too much emotion into it, she lacks perspective and she stopped us for 4 weeks there. Frankly, after that, all that remains is to effectively provide support in order to be able to work on her work relationship, her beliefs about work, the beliefs that she must be both a perfect professional, a perfect mother, a perfect wife, etc.

LACT: It's like Bree from Desparate Housewives.

Participant: Yes, that's it. So, I say to myself, but how can we help this person there, for example, so that he changes his model?

LACT: In relation to this person, how did you find out about his situation?

Participant: She is actually part of this co-development group and she wanted to talk to me. I wanted to know how it went, at least the first group, not to go into the details of what is being said because it's very confidential… So we stayed together for two hours and she confided. This is more of a personal approach.

LACT: So you received her, and she told you about the difficulties on that occasion that she was having?

Participant: No, not quite, well a little. That is to say that the fact of having done her first development session allowed her to unlock her speech and to realize that she was not the only one to be in a stressful situation and therefore she was able to do so. share with his counterparts, which is fine. Indeed, she cannot share it with her collaborators because she is a manager, nor with her director above either since she is supposed to ensure. She was therefore transverse and this term of co-development dropped her word and suddenly she told me a lot of things and even very personal things about her experience.

LACT: and so on that occasion, you realized that she was in this search for excellence, for perdition, did you realize at that moment that she didn't look well?

Participant: Yes it shows on her physique in fact, she still had a tense expression.

LACT: so it can be seen, it's tangible. Did you communicate in any way how difficult she seemed to be?

Participant: Yes of course, we discussed it, she spoke to me about it openly, except that afterwards I said to myself: I am powerless. I'm in HR, I'm not a therapist, that's my limit, it's there. Afterwards, there are the relays, in any support, there comes a time when when you have found your limits, you have to find the relays, the right people with good knowledge to be able to help and support.

LACT: The fact of offering him a relay, is that part of your resources?

Participant: That is to say?

LACT: The relay, it might be to offer her coaching, an intervention that would allow her to manage to set limits, because ultimately she has difficulty in what you say, to set limits. This therefore means setting up resources and coaching. Is that part of the resources you can offer him?

Participant: So, she actually asked for it, but coaching is expensive… I did that for another manager who was also burnt out with major physical problems, she did some coaching and indeed, I did the end-of-support tripartite interview last week. There, it was great because there was a click on the part of the employee, the manager, so it worked well. Well, there is this possibility there, but will I have the budget for it? It's less certain...

LACT: So there is a question about the budget. Are there other things that you have tried or that you think of putting in place to help this person without being a shrink?

Participant: In fact, there was also a second request from her which was linked to her age because she is 42-43 years old… questions from people who need to reflect on their orientation. We are thinking about the second part of my career, “I have worked for 20 years, I still have 20 more in general, but what am I going to do? There, there was a request in the form of a skills assessment. Like: I'm packing my bags, maybe I need to have another reading of what I've done, to identify my strengths on which I can lean to be able to have a little more confidence in her, because she has none. This is the third request of this type for mid-career but mid-assessment, mid-coaching interviews that I have to deal with.

LACT: Thanks to which you have more availability in a sense.

Participant: So there yes because the skills assessment is classic, except that there it is not a skills assessment with a junior junior consultant but rather with a consultant trained coach that must be done to see and analyze. I have an additional difficulty, it's true, these managers are themselves human resources consultants, and therefore the balance sheets they know, sometimes it's a difficulty, but not always. In fact they are human beings, we must stop positioning ourselves always knowing.

LACT: Do you think that this request for a report could solve the problem that you clearly perceive, that is to say that of a person typically in a search for excellence who should be led to set lower limits so that he can be better in the difficulties that are specific to his function as a manager. Do you think this solution will be able to solve this problem?

Participant: What is the fact that …

LACT: The fact that it starts with an assessment of its situation…

Participant: No because afterwards we come to think of a principle of reality which is funding, I think coaching would suit him better but I don't have the budget...

LACT2: And what is the price for coaching?

Participant: Me the coaches that I have referenced and who work with us, they are between 5,000 and 8,000 € for 20 hours of support and 5,000 € is the cheapest. I found another service provider who offers by phone only. It costs less and it's much more mobile and convenient because it's by phone. I want to try. As a result, there are many of us, I say we because I spoke about it with my colleague, there is a lot of demand of this kind... so if we start coaching at €5,000, as with the other manager where there is something clicked – it was an emergency, it was physical since she had been hospitalized. She asked for coaching and we paid her - but, you realize €5,000 per person, I'm going to have 15 to 20 requests without problems there and suddenly I don't have a budget line for that. So after there are the intermediate solutions, the skills assessments, done by a consultant coach who will analyze both his professional career, enhance the know-how, the achievements and at the same time help him to have another representation. work and then his beliefs…

LACT: So in fact this woman is very representative of a general problem: the best solution would be to be able to give her personalized support in the form of coaching, but obviously that poses a problem...

Participant: Especially since I have several requests in this direction following everything I said earlier and in particular the reorganization, the new governance with an investment fund as the main shareholder.

So there is suddenly an incredible loss of meaning and there are plenty of people who do not find themselves in the new organization and then there is mistrust in the new governance... LACT: Ok, so that if you want we can discuss with you to see how we can approach this type of situation with our problem solving methodology, which is a rather economical budgetary solution for the company, on practical terms quite close to co-development, precisely... will therefore give an overview later [link on the formative intervention system] .

I would just like to say that the case of this person is very frequent, that we receive more and more of them, people who today are rather local managers but not only, and who come for this type of difficulty which is very penalizing for her and come to learn how to set limits.