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Friday Coffee Break: The secrets of a happy workplace

IS YOUR business masculine or feminine? It may sound like an odd question, and one many bosses have little time to ponder as they lose themselves in the daily grind of running a business.

However, according to top North East leadership coach Paula McCormack, it is key to getting to the root of you company’s flaws and failings and could help unlock the true potential of your workforce.

Over a career spanning 20 years, taking in her experiences as an NLP, hypnotherapy and emotional intelligence practitioner, Ms McCormack - who runs her own leadership and development training company in Newcastle - has developed a unique strand of business and life coaching called The Adaptive.

Bdaily caught up with Ms McCormack to experience a new way of looking at the modern workplace.

BD: Could you give me an insight into your coaching approach?

PM: Energy and the way that any human being spends it can be either masculine or feminine. This has nothing to do with your gender, but masculine energy is about action and logic, where as feminine energy is about creativeness and nurturing. Any organisation is predominantly masculine or feminine, so if you are the opposite, you will find things difficult in that organisation and we need to balance that.

And what are the common challenges do you come across in the workplace?

We live our lives by the roles that we lead - we are associative beings. I’m helping people to understand that there’s a lot more to them than the roles they play. When I work with a leader they are often very ensconced in their role and they forget about who they really are.

You work with social enterprises and private sector companies – is there a difference in the difficulties their staff face?

When you meet a leader from the social housing sector they will talk to you about doing good and helping. They will be politically aware of what the Government is doing whereas, with a leader of a commercial business, I get a very different conversation. However, just because social housing is non-profit making for the most part, it doesn’t mean that its workers don’t need to be commercially astute.

And what about entrepreneurs?

In terms of masculine energy, entrepreneurs are very energetic, high impact and fast paced. With them they don’t give themselves the space to think things through. They often don’t check out with themselves that they are doing what they wanted to do originally when they set out on their own. They have ions of ideas and race all over the place. They set things up but they are not good finishers.

And SMEs?

They are generally run by somebody who has decided that they want a different lifestyle but no-one’s told them how to run a business - and often running a business isn’t exactly what they wanted to do in the first place.

What’s the secret to tackling stress in the workplace?

Stress has a physiological affect on the body a huge amount of work is about mind body connection. If the mind is panicked or stressed or over working or dialogue is at a rate of knots, it has a physical effect on the body. That’s the anxiousness that we feel. I teach people to set aside a space and time to relax their body down internally. 95% of the things we do are programmes that we already have running. The other 5% is the dialogue that runs in our head. So it’s about trying to achieve a balance.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .