Executive Coaching with
Backbone and Heart

A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges

Excerpt from
CHAPTER THREE
Systemic Thinking: Understanding Challenges of the                               Executive and Coach

It is important to attend to the system co-created between you and your client. Within interactional fields, people establish ways of relating that become like choreographed dance patterns over time. These patterns are either useful or counterproductive. Typical client - coach patterns include a wide variety of behaviors. Here is a sample of them (these first two are useful, the second two less effective):

  • Client seeks advice: coach fosters independent thinking.
  • Client seeks tough feedback: coach gives it.
  • Client vents: coach placates.
  • Client is continually late for appointments: coach tolerates it.

Every relationship develops a systemic "dance," and the coach-client relationship is no different. It is important to take an inventory and figure out the types of dances you develop with different kinds of clients. Can you name the typical patterns of interrelating that you and your clients develop over time? Are these patterns effective for your clients and your coaching?

Often, the very pattern developing between you and the executive is a living sample of the system your client is in with his own organization. Systems have a way of extending themselves out to their farthest boundaries, pulling anyone who comes close to them into their interactional vortex.

 

 

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