Are you ever pricklier than the flower of Scotland?

It’s spiky and prickly on the outside and we avoid it in case we get scratched.

But why is prickly? It’s a vital protection mechanism against the harsh scottish climte. When the sun is out and it’s warm, the thistle opens up and it allows its downy soft centre to be seen. It’s so soft you’ll want to reach out and touch it, brush it against your face.

Just like thistles, we react to our environment – opening up and moving towards nourishing warmth and closing down and moving thistle floweraway from pain, danger and cold.

As a leader or manager, it’s easy to forget that we create that environment for our teams and colleagues. Sometimes we see prickly behaviour from colleagues and immediately avoid them, or decide that they have a bad attitude. This has come up a lot in recent coaching sessions with a number of different clients. As the coach, we encourage you to get curious about this behaviour and consider why this reaction is happening. Once you are able to look for the person behind the behaviour, the answers become clear very quickly. By creating a warmer, more nourishing environment in our team, we can watch those same prickly colleagues open up and show us their softer centres. They become easier to work with and the work gets done more quickly.

It is easy to create a climate that triggers prickles – Driving ourselves or our teams to complete tasks relentlessly will eventually take its toll. Instead, making sure that we take time to plan, rest and refuel as well as pacing the work for our teams will help.

Three coaching tips to help prickly team members show their softer side:

Build in planning and review times to your diary
Look out for the signals and feedback about the climate you are creating
Don’t rush to judgement – Get curious about irritating behaviour and what might be causing it

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like to check out our earlier posts: Managing Your Boss Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3.

If you are interested in how coaching could help you or your team, please contact clare@businessjigsaw.com