Keeping late hours and sleep deprivation resulted in his efficiency being reduced and needing more time to perform the tasks at hand. Given his earlier track record, his bosses (three of them, since this is a matrixed organisation) initially overlooked his slip-ups, but two consecutive delays resulted in the loss of one remunerative project and a levy of penalty on another. This did not go down well at all with Hari’s bosses. At around this time Hari needed to take time off to be with his wife for the delivery of his son, which aggravated an already precarious situation, specially since it was the end of the quarter in which the maximum business was normally booked.
Upon his return to his home with his new born son, things did not improve at all and both work and marital fronts continued to head south. Things reached a nadir when he worked through a week-end and his wife, in frustration, moved to her parents home with their little son. I worked with Hari using the following approaches and tools:
- Patient listening – allowing a catharsis of pent up emotions.
- Probing questions – enabling Hari to reflect of half formed thoughts and statements he made.
- Delayering – by allowing Hari to think back into his recent past to try and identify the commencement of his problems and also triggers that started the downslide.
- Wheel of Life – to help Hari clarify for himself his priorities for goal-setting and to allow him to plan so that his life would be closer to his definition of balance.
- Perceptual Positioning – to help Hari understand his and his wife’s perspectives of his marital life and thereafter determine an appropriate approach.
- Visualisation – to enable Hari to look forward into the future and visualise for himself what his future looks like.
- Commitment to action – encouraging Hari to outline and document, with a time line, steps that he had decided to take to restore his professional and marital relationships.
Verbatim comments made by Hari during and after the Coaching Sessions