TOOLBOX IV: Systemic Skills in Coaching
The Systemic Dimensions of Coaching

Different Coaching Contexts

To get a  first understanding of different systemic approaches in organizational or personal life coaching, it is useful to perceive the main fields in which coaching can be practiced as a profession.  In as much as coaching comes from sports, the professions includes the same main application fields. 

First imagine a coach accompanying a high level sports champion in an individual quest, such as in tennis, archery or golf, and then imagine another coach accompanying  a team of players, such as in basket-ball, soccer or rugby. Both these coaches are in the same profession, but the scope of their professional fields are radically different.  The first coach accompanies the development of a sole person’s sports competency while the second is accompanying that of a team.  It is obvious that these two coaches are focused on very different types of coaching fields and need to have very different and complementary frames of reference.
 
In organizations and on a private level, the same difference of fields also explain very different types of coach competencies.  Some organizational coaches are much more focused on individuals, such as CEOs, executives, managers, experts, etc. while others a focused on collective systems such as teams, networks, groups, organizations, etc. In private life, some coaches specialize on personal or individual processes, and others are more focused on working with couples, families, groups and other collective systems.  To be complete, let us also underline that numerous coaches have developed competencies to work in both these dimensions.

Beware: In the coaching world, some executive coaches have declared that team coaching or organizational coaching “doesn’t exist”.  This could well confirm their consciousness that the field calls for a completely different skill set, in which they lack competencies. We could also imagine that some of the competencies necessary for individual coaching could be ignored by coaches who have always specialized in team coaching.  

At any rate, it is useful to explore the fundamental differences between those two coaching fields, individual or team.  The first coach who accompanies an individual client is focused on developing a person’s performance as it could be measured by the evolution of personal results. The second coach accompanies a team so as to help it develop its collective competencies and performance, as measured by the evolution of the team’s collective results.  

Consequently, we could imagine that a team calls on a coach to develop its collective competencies and results, and that simultaneously, each of the team members call on other coaches, each to develop their individual performances.

Beware:  Indeed, it this type of situation, it is often advised not to call on the same coach to work both levels: individual and team. The coach could find himself or herself in a double bind, working to help achieve both personal and collective goals and ambitions.

In sports much like in organizations, it seems obvious that if personal performance results from the development of personal competencies, collective performance is more often the result of better transversal collaboration between the individual competencies of the team members. A basketball team will be a middle and long term winner if its members totally cooperate in implementing a collective strategy which would make an optimal use of all complementary individual competencies.  This would be much more successful that if each of the team members made solitary efforts to make the best use of their individual strengths. In short, if personal performance rests on developing individual strengths, team performance rests on interfacing individual strengths.

The same is true in organizations.  The development of professional interfaces between the members of a team increases collective results.  This may sometimes happen at the expense of temporarily limiting the individual performance of some of the team members. Much like in team sports, success depends more on team member capacity to pass each other the ball in an opportune way than on individual or solitary capacity to play brilliantly, each member solely on counting personal competencies.  

Beware: We would like to underline that when coaches are concerned with professional interfaces,  the focus is not on the quality of relationships but on the quality of collaboration centered on a defined achievement.  Consequently , team coaching work focused on developing collective results cannot be limited to coaching the quality of relationships between team members. Team coaching is also if not principally concerned with increasing of added value that can be developed through higher quality interfacing of operational processes. This is the focus that can best improve sustainable collective results.

Although the two fields are complementary, this could explain that the object of individual coaching is quite different from that of team, family, organizational or system coaching.  The object of individual coaching is focused on the development of personal performance while the object of team coaching is focused on the development of performing operational interfaces between the members of a structured system.  That is why team coaching is more readily defined as a “systemic” approach.  Indeed, it is in team coaching that a systemic approach can powerfully help develop added value, at the service both to the team coach and to the collective client.  

Beware:  One can observe that a large number of organizations extensively call on coaches to ensure the development of individual competencies and performance.  This the case for coaches who focus on developing performance of CEOs, leaders, experts, managers and individuals.  These same organizations often almost systematically avoid calling on team coaches to develop collective interfacing competencies and performance.  Within these organizations, the culture may be quite resistant to facing team issues, or may be privileging high profile personal success.

In some organizations, coaches that claim to work on team coaching actually work on developing individual performance in a collective or team setting.  This is what could be called “group coaching” focused on individual development, but is not centered on the development of the performance of the team as a “structured system”. Group coaching can achieve reasonable results, but these will not increase the “system” added value potentially gained from more performing professional interfaces.  

In organizational contexts, another more complex field concerns “organizational coaching”.  This type of coaching concerns the development of the added value potentially gained  from the interfaces between teams. This accompanying process concerns an ensemble of teams or a team of teams and the development of their performance as measured by their collective results.

This coaching competency is often displayed when accompanying an executive team enlarged with personnel originating from other levels or teams within the same organization. Such a coaching process could become systemic if it is focused on the development of performance of operational interfaces in a system who’s complexity is superior to the one displayed by the executive team.

To propose a comprehensive model base on increasing complexity, we can imagine that if the simplest type of coaching “field” is when dealing with individual clients, one would then move to coaching pairs such as couples or business partners, then to coaching first-level systems such as teams and families, and then to coaching complex systems such as larger professional, social and political organizations.

Both Individual and Team or System Coaching Can be Systemic.

It would be an error to conclude that systemic coaching only applies to systems., or that individual coaching cannot be systemic.  The object of team coaching or system coaching is surely different from the object of individual coaching, but that could lead us to hasty conclusions if one confuses a systemic approach with working with systems.  Both in their frames of reference and in their skill set, both individual and system coaching are much more alike than one can first imagine, and both can very powerfully gain in effectiveness by integrating systemic thinking and systemic tools.

For example, to train, develop and succeed, individual sports champions never progressed very far on their own.  In fact, individual success often rests on occasional lucky opportunities, that are often very short-lived. The development of real sustainable performance more often rests on a much longer “systemic” learning process.  Champions are developed in champion contexts where they can measure up to partners who are at least as good if not better than them.  Even when in competition, a winner’s success often rests less on personal dynamics than on excellent interface management with the opponent as well as with the larger sportive environment. Coaching for individual success must consequently be also resolutely be centered on the development of performance interfacing with the client environment.  

This reality is far from the short-sighted comments that would have the coaching “phenomenon” be another proof that modern society is focused on solitary, and fundamentally egotistical, competitive development based on a “me first” philosophy of life.  Whatever may think those who underline examples of apparently individual performance, most successes are the result of collective commitment and concerted action.  These are implemented by a large professional, personal, family and social environment which support champions, although staying out of the spotlights.  

In organizations much like in sports, the fact that one has competitors (etymologically the word comes from “petitioning together”) permits each of the partners in a field or on a market to surpass themselves, while being stimulated by the others.  In professional contexts, if a large number of people wish to develop their personal results, they will do better and go farther when they collaborate with their environment and peers than when they attempt to do it on their own or against others.  

Beware: In organizations, calling on an individual coach can nonetheless be an important indicator that the concerned clients may have difficulties in truly and productively collaborating with partners in their environment.

In numerous cases of individual coaching, a great amount of work is primarily centered on developing iclient capacity to develop excellent interfacing competencies to help them succeed much better with others than they would on their own. This is not only a question of philosophy, but also the best way to ensure sustainable success.

Consequently, to be effective in its goal to really accompany individual clients in the development of their personal performance, coaching is essentially centered on client capacity to cooperate, network, support the development of peers, etc, to obtain support in return.  Obviously, when a client has understood the importance of collective interfacing to ensure personal success, there is a much higher chance that they will be ready to initiate a team coaching process.  

To conclude, it is important for all coaches to consider that a “systemic” approach focused on helping clients develop performing operational interfacing is just as important in individual as it is in team coaching.  For a coach, a “systems approach” is a frame of reference which permits the development of both individual and collective clients by increasing their competencies in performance interfacing to benefit from the added value potentially available in their environment.

The Systemic Context of Individual Coaching

Each client in individual coaching has continual interactions with their personal and professional entourage.  All these client interactions with environmental “systems” and people exert continual pressure on client beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. 

The positive influences from private and professional environments support client successes as much as negative influences can inhibit or limit growth.  Consequently, when a clients succeed with ease, or when on the contrary, when their efforts meet little or no success, all these results can as much be attributed to the quality of their interactions with their environments as to the intrinsic competencies of each client.

Furthermore, if individual clients wishes to grow, change, or transform personal or professional behaviors, these modifications will automatically affect their environments which will be automatically obliged to adapt.  Consequently, it is useful to consider that the “proverbial” resistance to change  often attributed to individuals can just as much be originating from the interactions these individuals daily entertain with their environments.

To take a simple rather common example concerning a client’s wish to develop better time management in a professional context.  It is highly probable that the client’s time management difficulties are indicators of a more general organizational culture within which time management is also a major issue.  In the same fashion, most people a intimately linked to systems of which they reproduce positive and limiting processes, behaviors, belief systems, habits, etc. 

To pretend accompanying the evolution of one element of a system, for instance an individual client, without having that system react defensively to maintain its coherence, is often illusionary.  This may explain why  successful individual coaching processes often lead to clients seriously considering severing ties with the systems within which they had until then been satisfied to work or live.

With this frame of reference in mind, it is useful for a a coach to perceive each individual client and all of their interfaces with their environments as so many coherent systems.  Accompanying individual client change automatically means accompanying change effects on client environments, and therefore accompanying system changes.

The Client as System "Emissaries"

A systemic coach can perceive all clients as “emissaries” of both their personal and professional environments.  Indeed, if one takes into account all the interactions between a client and each of the social, professional and personal systems in which they participate, work and live, it is possible to imagine that the change motivation displayed by any one client is in fact as much his or her own as that of the surrounding systems.   

Although unaware, clients can be considered to be assuming the responsibility for change or motivation for growth in the place of their personal and professional environments. Let us stress that this “emissary” quality is probably more or less present for all clients, and not only those that are designated “scapegoats” in the case of “prescribed” coaching within triangular contracts.

• CEOs or chief executives who designate themselves as clients and call on coaches for support are also assuming the responsibility for growth and change for their executive teams if not for their whole organizations.  The yearn for change and equivalent resistance to change are in fact subconsciously “delegated” to the individual client by their environmental systems.
• Parents and spouses who are motivated to initiate individual coaching processes subconsciously carry the hope and fear of growth and resolution for their couples if not for their whole families.

Considering their active capacity to take responsibility, one could often imagine that those clients are precisely the ones who in their personal and professional environment probably least need support or coaching.  Consequently, in all individual coaching situations, the collective motivation for change can be considered subconsciously delegated to the designated or self-designated client.  Through the individual coaching process, the client becomes responsible to activate the less active and absent systems’ motivation for change and evolution.

Paradoxically, as soon as an individual client accepts to become his or her surrounding system’s « emissary », these systems can immediately consider that they are not responsible for any support to facilitate the expected progress or evolution.  
Consequently, a systemic coaching approach would include strategies and techniques to :

• Position motivation for change and resistance originating both from clients and from all significant environmental systems to which clients belong.
• Limit or circumvent all potential resistance behaviors which could originate both from client from client environment.
• Mobilize all positive and supportive energy in the environment to consolidate client actions.

Consequently, with a systemic frame of reference, a coach could consider that all clients are in fact “designated” by their environments. In the most obvious cases, they are formally designated and named in triangular contracts. In all other situations, clients are unconsciously wielding a collective motivation for change or scenario for transformation that they mistakenly take for only their own.

Before introducing systemic “tools”, it is useful to underline that a systemic approach rests much more on a particular frame of reference than on the use of any specific technique tool or exercise. All coaching tools can therefore potentially be systemic tools if the frame of reference of the coach is systemic.   More specifically all tools and skills which help map out and work with the client environment or the constellation within which the client lives and works can be useful for a systemic approach. 

Some paradoxical questioning skills and other and mind bending tools have already been presented in other articles on this website and will not be repeated here.
If most of the tools presented below can be used as is or adapted for telephone coaching, a good number were developed in individual or collective face-to-face situations.

Drawings

A picture is worth a thousand words.  When working with predominantly visual clients, a paperboard or large paper and some markers can both help create spectacular client awareness and facilitate rapid decisions for change and performance.  After asking clients if they are willing to experiment a clarifying approach, and obtaining permission to proceed, a coach can simply ask:

_"To grasp the situation with all the actors you are mentioning, could you draw the situation as you perceive it ?  And don’t hesitate to comment whatever you are drawing.”

Without much more formality, getting clients to elaborate a simple graph, analogical image or symbolic drawing will often help reveal numerous key elements of their « systemic » constellations.  Once a first visual ensemble is completed by clients possibly including all the principal actors involved in their issue (including positioning themselves on the drawing), interactions revealed by arrows, and boundaries or other physical elements, the coach can ask if the client is done. When clients is satisfied with their production, the coach can ask them to relinquish the markers, take some distance and comment and react to the picture.

After that, the coach can then ask questions to help clients progressively enlarge their perception of their drawn projection.

• What can be the significance for some people being positioned towards the top of the page, towards the bottom, far apart, close together, grouped, solitary, inside or outside boundaries, etc?
• Why some relationships are close, distant, one way (as revealed by arrows), light, heavy, solid, non-existent, etc.. 
• Who has been forgotten, what are the different qualities that appear, what is revealed by the colors, the scratches, straight lines and curves, etc.  

All this work needs to be carried out at reasonable distance without clients changing or adding anything to the original drawing.  The next piece of work consists in accompanying clients in the expression of the changes that they would care to apply first on the drawing, then with corresponding concrete action plans in their real day to day environment.  Obviously, the type and amount of questions the coach could ask are very intimately linked to the exposed situation, to the agreed objective of the work and to the coach’s intuitions.

• How to develop better protection, get closer, more distant, and from whom? 
• How to create more productive interfaces, center all the actors on a common goal, get the constellation on a successful path ?
• What new actors could be brought in, which ones need to be excluded, which could be important supporters, which need to be watched, and how ?
• What would an ideal drawing look like, or the one of the future, or the solution ?
• etc.

Again, not all these illustrative questions need to be asked.  A choice limited to the most pertinent ones need to be followed by careful listening to the clients comments and silences.

The Empty Chair

During coaching work concerning the relationship or the interfaces with an absent actor, and after obtaining client acceptance, the coach can propose that they address that person directly as if he or she were present, by addressing an appropriately placed empty chair. 

_"This person is sitting here. You can formulate what you want to say right away".

To preserve coaching integrity, we recommend that coaches never take the absent actor’s position on the empty chair nor play their role but rather stay just outside of the client’s scene and scenario.  The coach could, however, ask the client to change seats and respond for the absentee, or to feel the situation in that person’s place. A dialogue could then take place between the client and the absentee, giving life to a consequent relationship or interface, as it is perceived by the client.

It is sometimes useful to suggest the client get up and choose a third position, maybe standing, to observe the other two they had occupied, and comment the relationship and possible operational interfaces between themselves and the absentee.  

The empty chair technique is particularly recommended when clients need to practice a specific dialogue with an absentee whom is perceived as difficult to face or to address.

This technique originates from Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy.  It is widely used in a number of help professions.  Beyond helping clients gain awareness by visualizing and living a projected relationship,  a coaching approach will follow up with quality questions centered on possible client solutions, with the client practicing behavioral options and with co-conception of action plans that will ensure that the client will be satisfied and motivated to implement future changes.

The Empty Chairs

Several mobile empty chairs in a relatively spacious room will permit the same visualization of interactions between numerous influent actors participating in a client relational constellation. On each empty chair, a piece of paper with the name of each actor (plus an empty chair for the client) will help the client and coach keep track of who’s who in sometimes complex situations.

A first phase consists in placing each of the absentee actor in their chairs, taking into account relative distances and orientations. The following work consists in:

• Asking clients to take distance from the visible constellation and to comment it without changing any of the chair positions.
• Asking clients questions on the relationships between the absentee actors and with themselves (empty chair), on each person’s relative positions, orientation, and symbolic relationship to other physical characteristics of the room (rug, furniture, doors, windows, corners, etc.)
• Asking clients to focus on their issue or objective and on the possible options and actions to come to a satisfactory result or achievement.

The same type of exercise can be used to elaborate a living “sociogram” when all the actors of a team or system are present in the coaching process.  Typically, the coach can ask one of the team members, for instance the most recent arrival in the team, to position all the other team members in the room. Each is silently led to a representative place and eased into a relevant posture by the volunteer who is simultaneously commenting the work to all the others.

Coach questions are then put to each of the actors in turn, focused on elements of performance and on changes that could be implemented in the constellation to ensure better results. The client comments are later translated by the team into concrete action plans with precise deadlines.

Recursive Questions

With or without the above spatial  and visual techniques proposed above, “circular” questioning, or the art of asking recursive questions is an integral part of the systemic coaching skill set.  Originally, this type of questioning comes from family therapy.  In this context they are asked in a collective environment, family or team, right in the midst of the accompanied system.  However, this type of question can also be put to an individual client.  By using client words and expressions, recursive questions concern client perceptions of interactions between significant actors within the client constellation.

Examples: 

• What does Dan do in meetings when Diane and John argue “for ever” over priorities and deadlines?
• When your two sons are fighting, and you try to put a stop to it, what does you husband do?
• When “heated” discussions take place to explain the origin of your department’s problems, who are the first persons attempt to bring the team to discuss future solutions and action plans?  
• Can you give me the decreasing order of your team members’ commitment level  as it is revealed in your monthly meetings?
• Imagine that you whole team starts to focus on ways to reduce expenses, who are the members who will be most resistant to that change? 

Note again that these same recursive or “circular” questions can be asked in a team coaching or other “system” coaching situation when all the members are present.

Note also that the formulation of recursive questions calls for all the linguistic subtleties already covered in the article on coaching questions (Toolbox II) on this website.  They can concern the perception of a past situation, an optional future action, an ideal situation, establishing a list in a decreasing or increasing order or importance, etc.