From Coaching Individuals to Coaching Systems: A Shift for Lasting Change

Have you ever worked with a coach for personal growth? Coaching has long been a powerful tool for personal transformation, and while beneficial, coaching focuses on personal development—helping leaders refine their skills, increase self-awareness, and reach professional goals. While valuable, this approach risks being too isolated from the larger systems individuals operate in.

Systems coaching goes beyond individual coaching by considering the broader networks we operate in. The most pressing challenges groups and teams face—managing change, culture shifts, remaining competitive, strategic thinking—demand a shift in how we think about coaching. Systems coaching shifts the focus from individual growth to the larger systems in which leaders operate. Rather than seeing coaching as a one-on-one intervention, it emphasizes how leadership behaviors, decisions, and relationships influence entire teams, organizations, and even external stakeholders. This post explores how coaching can create impact that extends far beyond the one-on-one coaching relationship.

Systems coaching challenges the idea that if we support one leader’s growth, the organization will change. Instead, it considers how leaders interact with their teams, stakeholders, and broader organizational culture.

What is Systems Coaching, and Why Does it Matter?

Systems coaching expands coaching from an individual conversation to a collective experience that ripples across organizations and communities. It focuses on:

1. Relational Thinking – Looking at how leaders engage with teams, stakeholders, and the larger system they operate in.
2. Multi-Stakeholder Awareness – Acknowledging that decisions impact more than just the leader or their immediate team.
3. Future-Fit Leadership – Helping organizations adapt to rapid change, not just through individuals, but through collective intelligence and collaboration.
4. Sustainable Change – Moving away from quick fixes toward long-term transformation that considers the ethical and ecological dimensions of leadership.

Steps to Embracing Systems Coaching

Shifting to a systems coaching model requires intentionality and a broader perspective. Below are three key steps to integrating systems coaching using this approach:

1. Recognize the Interconnectedness of Leadership Decisions. Systems coaching asks us to examine the impact of leadership decisions across teams, organizations, and communities. This shift transforms the impacts of individual coaching to transformations across systems. Ask yourself:
   • How does the leader’s growth affect their team and organizational culture?
   • How do leadership decisions impact not only internal teams but external stakeholders or even the broader community?
   • What long-term consequences does this coaching intervention have?
2. Cultivate a Coaching Culture at All Levels. Systems coaching thrives when embedded into daily activities. Making coaching a daily norm empowers teams to navigate complexity, change, and drive long-term impact. Consider how:
   • Team members coach each other through structured peer coaching, creating a culture of shared learning and resilience.
   • Leaders are trained to coach their direct reports while considering broader implications of their leadership.
   • Coaching becomes part of ongoing learning that integrates sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility.
3. Measure the Impact of Systems Coaching. To track the effects of systems coaching, you can track the tangible benefits through the different levels of your organization. Key questions to assess progress include:
   • Are teams becoming more collaborative and innovative?
   • Are leaders making decisions that benefit not just the company but also communities, customers, and the environment?
   • Is coaching fostering long-term sustainability in leadership and organizational development?

Coaching as a Strategy for Lasting Impact

At its core, systems coaching asks us to rethink what coaching is really for. Is it just about making individuals more effective? Or is it about shaping organizations to be more resilient, collaborative, and innovative?

If your organization is looking to navigate complexity, systems coaching is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. How is your organization thinking about coaching? Are you still focused on individual growth, or are you ready to embrace systems impact? Let’s start the conversation.

Further Exploration

Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC )

Learn about Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC), a groundbreaking accredited training program for coaching teams, families & organizations

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Systemic Coaching

Hawkins and Turner argue that coaching needs to step up to deliver value to all the stakeholders of the coachee, including those they lead, colleagues, investors, customers, partners, their local community and also the wider ecology. Systemic Coaching contains key chapters on how to contract in various settings, how to work relationally and dialogically, how to expand our own and others’ ecological awareness, how to get greater value from supervision, work with systemic ethics and expand our impact. While illustrating why a new model of coaching is necessary, Hawkins and Turner also provide the tools and approaches that coaches and clients need to deliver this greater impact, accompanied by real-life case examples and interviews from the authors and other leading coaches and leaders globally. Systemic Coaching will be an invaluable resource for coaches in practice and in training, mentors, coach supervisors, consultants in leadership development and HR and L&D professionals and leaders.

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The Fifth Discipline

MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES IN PRINT • “One of the seminal management books of the past seventy-five years.”—Harvard Business Review This revised edition of the bestselling classic is based on fifteen years of experience in putting Peter Senge’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas of the Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning blocks that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations, in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create the results they truly desire. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will: • Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them• Bridge teamwork into macrocreativity• Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets• Teach you to see the forest and the trees• End the struggle between work and personal time This updated edition contains more than one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies such as BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, and Saudi Aramco and organizations such as Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank.

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The Coaching Habit

Coaching is an essential skill for leaders. But for most busy, overworked managers, coaching employees is done badly, or not at all. They're just too busy, and it's too hard to change.But what if managers could coach their people in 10 minutes or less?In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact.Coaching is an art and it's far easier said than done. It takes courage to ask a question rather than offer up advice, provide an answer, or unleash a solution. Giving another person the opportunity to find their own way, make their own mistakes, and create their own wisdom is both brave and vulnerable. It can also mean unlearning our ''fix it'' habits. In this practical and inspiring book, Michael shares seven transformative questions that can make a difference in how we lead and support. And, he guides us through the tricky part - how to take this new information and turn it into habits and a daily practice.-Brené Brown, author of Rising Strong and Daring GreatlyDrawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how---by saying less and asking more--you can develop coaching methods that produce great results. - Get straight to the point in any conversation with The Kickstart Question- Stay on track during any interaction with The AWE Question - Save hours of time for yourself with The Lazy Question, and hours of time for others with The Strategic Question- Get to the heart of any interpersonal or external challenge with The Focus Question and The Foundation Question - Finally, ensure others find your coaching as beneficial as you do with The Learning QuestionA fresh, innovative take on the traditional how-to manual, the book combines insider information with research based in neuroscience and behavioural economics, together with interactive training tools to turn practical advice into practiced habits. Dynamic question-and-answer sections help identify old habits and kick-start new behaviour, making sure you get the most out of all seven chapters. Witty and conversational, The Coaching Habit takes your work--and your workplace--from good to great.

Google Books