Coaching Systemically

Five Ways of Thinking About Systems

Paul Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367404161
• eBook ISBN: 9781000353785
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Index: Psychology

This book provides an accessible and clear description of key theories of systemic coaching and how they can be applied to coaching practice.

Structured around five different ways of thinking about systems, the book provides coaches with a high-level overview of different systems theories and how those theories may be applied in practice. Readers are invited to consider each of the five different ways of thinking through the lens of philosophy, purpose and practice: Which theories most resonate for you? How do these systemic perspectives shape your purpose for coaching, and how do they show up in the way that you coach? With examples and case material throughout, Coaching Systemically aligns coaching with the realities and challenges of organisations operating in an ever more complex world.

Readers will walk away from the book with a clearer understanding of what it means to coach 'systemically' and new ideas as to how they can translate insights into practice. Coaching Systemically will be key reading for coaches in practice and in training, consultants and anyone interesting in systemic approaches.

1
You as coach

Some coaches have a prescribed methodology and approach that they have used for years, and that they have no intention of changing. Other coaches describe their practice as eclectic. If you ask them which models and frameworks they prefer, they will say – all of them. Some of these coaches understand lots of frameworks, but not necessarily in depth. Then there are the coaches who are continually exploring their craft, always eager to learn something new and work out how to put it into practice. For these coaches, being eclectic means something specific. These coaches have explored several approaches in depth. They can tell you which approaches really resonate with them and why.

If you believe that coaches need to access new ways of thinking in order to be most useful to the people we support, then you are likely excited at the prospect of exploring different approaches to systems thinking. You are used to challenging the way you think. To challenge the way that you think begins with an understanding of how you think now. So, in this chapter, I invite you to create some foundations upon which to build your exploration of what it means to be systemic. I will borrow an existing framework for this journey – the 3Ps framework detailed by Peter Jackson and Tatiana Bachkirova.¹ Peter and Tatiana write about the 3Ps in the context of coaching supervision, but the model applies equally well to coaching. In this chapter, I invite you to define your 3Ps. Creating the model is the beginning of our journey. The process of constructing the model should generate multiple insights as to how you currently coach and to your future development. Developing your 3Ps is not intended as a one-off exercise. I would encourage you to revisit it on a regular basis in service of nurturing your development.

In this book, the 3Ps stand for Philosophy, Purpose and Practice, and we will work through each P in building here a simple 3P model. You may want to use the worksheet in the Appendix to work through the rest of this chapter.

Philosophy

By philosophy we mean the ideas and theories that underpin your practice. Different coaches like different theories and have different experiences and beliefs. For example, Ann really likes theories of adult development because they have helped her build better relationships with her kids. George doesn’t like theories of adult development because someone once assessed him, and it felt like they were putting him in a box. He isn’t about to inflict the same misery on his clients. To understand our personal philosophy of coaching, we need to ask ourselves a series of questions.

What theories, models and frameworks especially appeal to you?

In answering this question, you are being asked to list the theories, models and frameworks that have made such an impression on you that they form the basis of your thinking much of the time. You are not being asked to write down every theory or model you have ever been exposed to. If the list is still long, pick the two, three or four that you hold most dear. You don’t need to limit yourself to coaching-specific theories; there may be more general leadership theories, or theories from other disciplines that form a foundation for your practice.

Susan reflects on her coaching and identifies three theories/models that particularly resonate for her. She lists:

1. Solutions-focussed approaches
2. Cognitive-behavioural models
3. Models of listening

That was the easy bit. Now ask yourself:

Why do these particular theories, models and frameworks appeal to you?

Do you know why the particular models and theories appeal to you? Even if you are a new coach, just finished your training, you were probably introduced to at least half a dozen approaches in your training. Which did you like best? And why?

Susan goes through her list one evening, exploring the question with a colleague. By the end of the evening she decides:

She likes solution-focussed approaches because they reflect her approach to life. She believes in thinking ahead, working out what to do next and not mulling too deeply on the past. She was like that as a child, she thinks, inspired by her mother, who was always there with a hug and an encouraging word as to her capacity to get things done. Her clients like the solution-focus too. Some talk critically about their experiences working with other coaches with whom it felt like being on a psychiatrist’s couch. Susan believes in being boundaried, pragmatic and optimistic.

Susan likes cognitive-behavioural models. The idea that thoughts drive emotions drive behaviours is nice and simple. The framework enables her to help her coachees manage their emotions without delving too deeply into where those emotions may be coming from. Most clients find the idea of ‘challenging the thought’ a useful one and report immediate improvements in their ability to manage anxiety, frustration and anger. Susan reflects on her upbringing. Her parents didn’t display much emotion and didn’t encourage it in their children. She thinks her father’s upbringing may have been quite traumatic, but no one talks about it. Susan believes people should talk about their feelings, in the right context, and finds cognitive-behavioural tools a useful way into the right level of conversation.

Susan thinks listening is important. For her there is more to listening than listening ‘harder’ or listening more ‘actively’. She recognises within herself a tendency to move quickly to action, sometimes at the expense of asking questions to make sure she has really understood her clients’ context. She reflects on her childhood and how hard it felt as a child to get her parents’ attention. And she reflects on her corporate career and recognises how only a few leaders she worked with had this almost magical capacity to understand where she was coming from. They gave her their complete attention and refused to be distracted. She is determined to build the same presence into her coaching.

In answering these questions, Susan is bumping up against some fundamental aspects of self. For example, a propensity for action and getting things done. A desire to work with emotion, albeit without immersing herself too deeply into her emotions or others’ emotions. A desire to be respectful and respected, and a belief that people need to sometimes slow down and notice each other when interacting.

Purpose

Our philosophy in life drives our purpose. Becoming more aware of the philosophies underlying our practice can help us become more purposeful. Many of us can be a little vague as to the reasons we coach. Some people say things like ‘making a difference’ without thinking more deeply about the nature of that difference.

Susan reflects on the answers she came up with under Philosophy. She evidently sees herself as someone high-energy and positive in outlook. When working in corporate, she found herself constantly encouraging those around her to better manage the barrage of demands being made upon their time. The general busy-ness of the business world squashes some people. Her purpose as a coach, she realises, is to help people keep their head above water, to stay happy and productive. People who keep moving forward don’t sink. She helps people work through issues quickly, to prioritise and to focus their energies on making things happen. The more individuals she touches in an organisation, the more effective and efficient that organisation is likely to be.

Some people prefer to start with Purpose instead of Philosophy. The logic is that the theories, tools and frameworks you like are determined by your purpose as a coach.

Practice

Our Philosophy and Purpose underpin how we Practice. If I like solutions-focussed approaches and am driven to move people forward, then you may see me encouraging my coaches to come up with goals quickly, for example. In asking you about your Practice, quite simply, we are asking – what would the proverbial fly on the wall see if it followed you through a coaching assignment? How do you set up a coaching assignment? What actually happens in the coaching room? This would include your approach to taking a briefing, your strategy for engaging other stakeholders in the organ-isation, how you agree with a client whether the assignment has been successful or not, how you open a session, any tools and models you make use of, how you end an assignment, etc.

Susan likes the GROW model, even though she hears it criticised as being overly simplistic. Starting the conversation by talking about goals is consistent with her solutions-focussed approach. Of course, she doesn’t always start by talking goals – not if the client is determined to talk about the current reality first. Nor does she use the model in a rigidly linear way, and she is quite flexible as to the level of the goal. Sometimes goals can be very specific, other times they can be broad and more a description of an overarching purpose. But she will always encourage her clients to stay focussed on outcomes and finds that the GROW model helps her in that regard.

In taking an initial briefing from an organisation, she is used to clients spending a lot of time talking about a potential coachee’s shortcomings and what needs to be fixed. When this happens, she always tries to shift the client into thinking about a solution, about what success would look like. She asks them what role they might play in helping the coachee to be successful.

Susan makes full use of a customised version of a cognitive-behavioural approach. She has her own spreadsheet which invites coachees to consider how thoughts lead to emotions lead to behaviours when triggered by a particular issue. On the second half of the spreadsheet, the coachee is encouraged to challenge the thought and to come up with a few specific experiments to think and act differently.

Susan makes sure her coachees always come up with actions at the end of every session. She sends them an email a week before every session to remind them to complete their actions, and she starts every session by asking the coachee what they did to complete their actions.

Once you have completed your 3Ps, the next question to ask yourself is, does it all hang together? Susan’s model appears to be coherent. If, on the other hand, she had cited narrative coaching in her Philosophy, with an emphasis on exploring the past and letting intentions emerge, then the Practice she described might have looked odd.

The 3Ps and being systemic

John, Anne and Sean are three coaches. John calls himself a systemic coach. Working with coachees, he always makes a point of asking himself ‘who else is involved here?’ When coachees talk about feeling anxious or worried, he always explores what or who is triggering that anxiety, rather than assume the coachee is naturally anxious. An example is the case of Mark, who finally worked out that his anxiety was triggered by his boss, who reminded him of an old colleague, who reminded him of his mother, who always smacked his hand when he was slow to explain his misdemeanours. As a consequence of their discussion, Mark made special efforts to manage his emotions when in the presence of his line manager and always tried to see her point of view, even when she was criticising him. To John, being systemic includes exploring someone’s upbringing and the impact of other people from the past.

Anne also calls herself a systemic coach, but upon listening to John’s story in group supervision, she doesn’t think her approach and John’s approach have much in common. When John told the story of Mark, Anne found herself wondering about the culture of the organisation, the history of that culture and how that culture was being perpetuated. The prevailing culture, it seemed to Anne, was having an impact not just on Mark, but on everyone else in the story as well. If she was John, she would encourage Mark to understand more deeply the dynamics of that culture and work out ways to disrupt it. Understanding your family of origin may be useful sometimes, but to be systemic also means looking at other factors in the system now, and how those factors are impacting the scenario being described by the coachee.

Sean also thinks of himself as a systemic coach. John’s perspective, it seems to him, whilst systemic in the sense that it acknowledges the impact of family systems, is overly individualistic. Anne is thinking more holistically, but she seems overly inclined to assume that A + B leads to C. For example, she said that Mark should talk to the CEO about starting a piece of work on culture change. Her description of a culture change programme sounded quite linear and top down to him, unlikely to have the desired impact. Anne’s version of systemic would be better if she started thinking more about power dynamics.

John, Anne and Sean are all systemic coaches, but their versions of systemic are all different. We could simply choose which version we like best, but in this book, we invite you to define your personal version of systemic, exploring the wisdom of all three approaches.

Your mission (should you choose to accept it)

You may be asking yourself – why should I spend time on this exercise? I coach intuitively and I am eclectic – I draw on all sorts of models and theories. Why do I need to write it all down? My answer would be to challenge yourself. Really, how self-aware is your coaching self? To what extent do you understand the lens through which you relate to your clients? To what extent do you know why you say the things that you say, and why you stay quiet when you stay quiet? To what extent do you understand the role you play in shaping your client’s intentions?

You may not feel inclined to write an essay on the 3Ps. In that case, just write a few notes under each heading, whatever it takes to begin articulating – who are you as a coach? Clarity helps you to identify blind spots, ways of thinking and coaching that have escaped your attention. Clarity helps you understand the extent to which you have fully leveraged those philosophies you already subscribe to. And clarity will help you make sense of these different ways of thinking about systems.

In the last few years I have come across many coaches who say they identify with complexity theories, for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 You as coach
• 2 First order linear thinking
• 3 First order non-linear thinking
• 4 Second order thinking
• 5 Complexity
• 6 Meta-systemic
• 7 Becoming more systemic
• Parting comments
• Appendix – 3Ps worksheet
• Index