What is your system as a coach?

Systemic awareness is a basic requirement of an effective coach in a modern environment. Linear thinking often leads to temporary fixes that may be unsustainable and do more harm in the longer term. Some competency frameworks make things worse, by failing to give sufficient emphasis to the systems dimensions of coaching practice.

One of the simplest ways a coach can develop their systemic thinking capabilities is to start with themselves. What are the forces that shape the way you coach? Who are your stakeholders and what is the relationship between them? How could your system help you become a better coach? Or is it holding you back from doing so?

As you examine your systems with deep curiosity, you increasingly see how complex they are. In recent years, at conferences and in supervision, I have had hundreds of conversations with coaches about the tension between what their credentialling tells them they should do with clients and what they perceive their real-world clients need from them. The system here is one that encompasses two partially opposing but linked sets of needs – order and structure versus flexibility and instinct. The better we understand this system, the easier it is for us to find pragmatic compromises that work to the benefit of both ourselves and our clients.

Order and flexibility are polarities within the client’s systems, too. For example, the company’s needs from the coaching assignment typically relate to conformity within a set of expectations about what good leadership looks like; while the client’s needs may include maintaining and extending their individuality. Of course, the client’s systems and the coach’s systems overlap in this context, because both have responsibilities to the sponsor.

Other stakeholders in the coach’s systems include their peers, both as individuals and as representatives of professional bodies, the client network (for example, old clients who recommend them to their connections) and supervisors. Issues to consider include:

• What are their expectations of me?
• What are my expectations of them?
• What role do I play (consciously or unconsciously) in their systems?
• What are the connections between them? (How do they influence or depend on each other?)

Above all, what would enable you to draw more value from the system and create more value for the system?

Mapping your systems as a coach helps take your supervision sessions to another level. Assuming your supervisor is also systems literate, he or she can help you see linkages and possibilities you may have missed. As part of their systems, you have an even wider array of connections to enhance both your own development and that of your coaching practice.

©️David Clutterbuck, 2024