Understanding the domains of Individual and Team Coaching in relation to Systemic Coaching[1]
| Individual Domain | Team Domain |
|---|---|
| Traditional Coaching:
In organisations, these coaches help people think things through for themselves. Coaches see themselves as outside agents and don’t often engage with people other than their clients. Great listeners, empathisers. |
Level 1: Team Coaching
Sees the team as created by the individuals within it and focuses on the inter-relationships between the individuals and what the individuals want from the team. Consensus and harmony are highly valued. Individuals and inter-personal relationships are the centre of focus and there can be a confusion between individually coaching all the team members and team coaching. |
| Dialogic Coaching:
Coaches see themselves as part of the creation process, co-creating in a non-directive way, the insights, emerging intensions, options and interactions. Aware of their role in the process and how their presence inhibits or enables divergent thinking. |
Level 2: Coaching the team as a system:
Sees the team as a living system. Focuses on the team being more than the sum of its parts. Effective meetings, generative dialogue, and collaboration are highly valued, The team, dynamic is the centre of focus. This form of team coaching often happens in interventions, away-days, team-building and in team meetings (retros). |
| Systemic Coaching
Able to work with dialogue, and also patterns of dialogue, behaviour in an emerging and ever changing community / organisation. They take a view of the function of the organisation as a whole. They see levels of levels and cycles in cycles of which everything forms a part. |
Level 3: Systemic Team Coaching
Sees the team as existing to create value, with and for all its stakeholders. It focuses on who the team is there to serve and the future needs of the stakeholders have of them. ‘Future-back’ and ‘outside-in’ engagement are highly valued. The dynamics between the team and its wider systemic context us the new centre of focus. |
In the team domain, where do you see yourself operating at most in your current practice?
When coaching individuals, like leaders or other Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, you can take a systemic view and apply the principles of systemic coaching to be useful not just to the individual, but also to the teams and systems they operate in.
One way to do this is to see them with all the relationships, constructs and ideas about the systems they operate in, the roles they fulfill and interact with – and also, who they are being at work, at home, when they are alone, in their community etc. See all of this like a tail feather behind a peacock. It also helps to share observations, if the client allows, on patterns of thought, patterns of avoidance, resistance, patterns of behaviour, patterns of want, need, expectation and assumption. These observations can be useful to the client as they help themselves towards the things that will bring about their desired outcomes.
In the team domain, notice that beyond the existence of the team is the relationship with the larger system and the purpose for the team’s existence, the purpose for their relationships with entities outside themselves, and the dynamics they create in-between. With Systemic coaching, we focus on the present and future in a unique way. FUTURE-BACK refers to the team looking towards the future, ideal, desired, and expected state of the team and their level of value creation in the system. OUTSIDE-IN refers to all team-coaching being oriented towards how the outside relates to the functioning of the inside of the team. This means that all roles, processes, communication, rules, expectations, assumptions, and relationships inside and towards the outside of the team are set up, and always oriented such that it refers to the OUTSIDE. Basically, Client-centricity taken to the extreme.
[1] Whittington, J. (2020). Systemic coaching & constellations: the principles practices and application of individual teams and groups (3rd ed). Kogan Page
Turner, E., & Hawkins, P. (2020). Systems Coaching: Delivering Value beyond the individual. Routledge
Outside-in & Future-back is a powerful way to apporoach systems work as an Agile Coach. We tend to start inside out and from today’s problems to a future that might not exist.
