By Kate McGuire
Should coaches be raising wider systemic issues such as business ethics or environmental concerns in coaching conversations if not raised by clients?
This was one of the questions asked by Professor Peter Hawkins and Eve Turner in their session on Systemic coaching: Delivering value beyond the individual.
Hawkins suggested coaching should shift its focus from solving today’s problems towards building 21st century leadership to solve the huge challenges facing future generations of humanity. Coaches should start coaching conversations by asking, “what is the work your world needs us to do together?” He challenged those in the room to consider how 100,000 people could benefit from their attendance at the workshop, and how they could increase the positive ripple effect from working with individuals.
Turner described bringing additional stakeholders into her work, literally as in the case of inviting members of the public into a room of BBC executives or metaphorically by having an empty chair in the coaching room and inviting clients to identify who else needed to be considered.
Hawkins and Turner believe the real challenge in organisations is moving from IQ and EQ to We-Q, building on the Japanese concept of win-win-win. Connections and relations are getting more complicated and coaches should pay attention to locating issues in connections.
They also suggested coaches need to start listening systemically as well as empathically, to the levels of nested systems present inside each issue and person. They challenged coaches to identify one wider systemic level they could bring into their coaching work, to grow the human capacity to deal with the world of tomorrow.
- Turner and Hawkins will be delivering a Coaching at Work masterclass on Systemic coaching: Delivering value beyond the individual, at the BPS London Offices on 25 March 2020