Coaching in Organizations
Before Coaching the Leader, Check the System
Not every leadership problem is an individual problem
Core question
Before choosing coaching as the intervention, what systemic factors should be examined alongside the leader’s behaviour?
In brief
Before labelling a leader as indecisive, unconfident or poor at delegation, examine authority, work design and the behaviour the system rewards. Coaching is stronger when individual agency and systemic constraints are diagnosed together.
01
Is decisiveness really the problem?
Imagine an organization asks for coaching for one of its managers.
The initial diagnosis sounds clear:
“They need to be more decisive.”
At first, that seems reasonable. Perhaps the manager takes too long to make decisions, seeks too much reassurance, or avoids difficult disagreement.
But look more closely at the context and the picture may change.
Important decisions are repeatedly reopened higher up. Priorities shift. Information arrives late. The manager is accountable for results without having control over all the conditions that shape those results.
At that point, my question changes:
Is decisiveness really the problem?
Or is part of the behavior we want to change being produced or reinforced by the same system that now expects the manager to change?
That is one of the distinctions that matters to me in organizational coaching:
We work with the leader, but we do not separate the leader from the system around them.
02
A system problem can easily be translated into an individual trait
Organizations often describe development needs in familiar language:
“They need to be more strategic.”
“They need to delegate more.”
“They lack confidence.”
“They need to take more ownership.”
Any of those descriptions may be accurate.
But my experience across HR leadership and coaching has taught me to ask one more question before accepting the diagnosis:
What in this manager’s environment is reinforcing the very behavior we want to change?
In my professional work, the quality of a development intervention is often tied to factors such as clarity of the business problem, evidence, decision rights, organizational readiness, and ownership of execution. That has become a practical rule for me: before choosing an individual intervention, examine the system’s contribution too.
Organizational-behavior research points in the same direction. Gary Johns describes context as the situational opportunities and constraints that influence both the occurrence and meaning of organizational behavior.
Before we call something an individual gap, it is worth asking what role the system plays in creating it.
03
Where does the organizational sponsor fit?
When the organization pays for coaching, a sponsor is also part of the engagement.
The sponsor has a legitimate interest in why the organization is investing and what observable change the work is intended to support. That is not the same as having access to the content of coaching sessions.
The current ICF Code of Ethics requires clear agreement before coaching begins on roles, responsibilities, confidentiality, and how information will be exchanged among the client, sponsor, and other involved parties.
Organizational coaching starts with the contract, not the first session covers multi-party contracting and confidentiality in more depth. The point relevant here is narrower:
If the sponsor’s brief is simply “fix this person,” the problem has probably not been defined well enough yet.
04
Before saying “this manager needs to change”
These questions are worth pausing on:
What observable behavior is actually creating the problem?
What business outcome is that behavior affecting?
How much authority does the leader have to behave differently?
How does the current system reinforce the existing behavior?
What is the organization willing to change or support alongside the leader?
And then:
Where, specifically, can coaching add value?
Coaching should not become a way for an organization to hand a design, authority, or leadership problem to one person and say: “work on yourself.”
Sometimes the leader needs to work on themselves. Sometimes the organization needs to work on the system. In many real situations, both are necessary.
Research sources
Questions to carry forward
- 01What observable behavior is actually creating the problem, and what business outcome does it affect?
- 02How much authority does the leader have to behave differently, and how does the system reinforce the current pattern?
- 03Where, specifically, can coaching add value — and what must the organization change or support alongside the leader?