Systemic Coaching: Delivering Value Beyond the Individual by Peter Hawkins and Eve Turner
Born out of the world of counseling, psychotherapy, etc., executive coaching has traditionally focused on improving the performance and wellbeing of the individual leader. Hawkins and Turner urge us to widen our view of who potentially benefits from a coaching engagement to include the leader’s stakeholders, the sponsoring organization and even the wider ecosystem. The authors cover Contracting, Chemistry Interviews, Shadowing, Supervision and Measurement (although it turns out the more systemic the coaching, the harder it is to accurately evaluate the returns). Some may question the author’s hard sell that coaches should emphasize the topic of climate change with their clients. Should coaches really be advocating for societal (or any) causes, no matter how critical or noble? And why global warming and not public health, education, or guns? Don’t these also impact the leader’s wider system? This disconnect aside, the book offers an invaluable trove of research, tools and approaches that reflect that development happens not just within the client or his/her relationship with their coach, but also in dynamic engagement with the larger world they are part of.
HIGHLIGHT(S): Systemic coaching, by ensuring each coaching session is focused on delivering value to the leader, the people they lead and the organization, avoids becoming too client-centric and enacting the “drama triangle” where coachee plays the victim, the organization and others the persecutors and the coach the rescuer.
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