Introduction to Systemic Coaching

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This blog post is taken from our podcast on Systemic  Coaching which you can listen to here.

What is systemic coaching? 

In a nutshell, systemic coaching is an approach that focuses on understanding and working with the larger systems that influence people’s lives. Rather than focusing solely on our coachee as an individual and their internal architecture; their thoughts and feelings, systemic coaching is about recognising that there is a system at play. They are part of that system, and the system will be influencing them. It will also be having an impact on whatever is going on for them. In turn they will be influencing the system.

What systems are we talking about?

• It could be a family. There’s a form of therapy called the internal family systems, which would look at all of the dynamics that are going on within a family and any patterns that reoccur within it.
• Within organisations, there is a system at play. The NHS is a system. A system that has a huge impact on how individuals show up and how effective they can be.
• Wider cultural and societal influences also come into play with all sorts of things, from confidence to imposter syndrome to how we show up in the world.

There’s a model of psychology around social psychology called social constructivism; the idea that we are socially constructed. That we don’t end up as adults without there being some influence of society and families and cultural aspects of where we live. People have a different way of looking at the world because of those social structures. Systems are always at play.

Systemic coaching looks at the whole picture and the web of connections and interconnectedness rather than just the individual.

In the coaching room we would never really just focus in on the individual. There would always be some outside influences, to consider. People generally come into the coaching room talking about other people, or perhaps, why they don’t have work-life balance. There’s clearly a system at play in all of that.

The Impact of Coaching On Our Clients’ Systems

It’s always worth remembering that if you’re working with someone on their thoughts and beliefs, boundaries maybe, and they start to make changes, that can often have a ripple effect into the people and systems around them and their family dynamics. And on how they are treated as a result. When someone changes the usual dance, they change how people are used to interacting with them. That will have an impact, and sometimes that can cause issues. It should be positive for the person who’s making the change, but it can be challenging because they’re becoming a different version of themselves, which people aren’t used to.

In Transactional Analysis, we talk about changing the script if that script isn’t working for the individual in front of us. If they go back into whatever relationship they’re in and change the script, the other person has no idea what’s going on. That script has changed.

We do know that from our graduates, that they change as they go through our course. And they will take those changes back into their systems and change how they interact with them; their families, friends, work colleagues, and the wider system in the workplace.

Within an organisational context, Systemic Coaching is probably more likely to be understood and used because people generally need to work in teams. Individuals within those teams must get on, and the team need to be working with other teams, and within the larger system of the organisation.

If you think about a GP practice where perhaps, someone within the administration team is suddenly being disruptive in some way, that might impact the work that the administration team do. Then that has a wider impact on the doctors, the nurses, everyone else within the system. Then that has an impact on the patients and on the wider NHS. Those ripple effects can go far and wide.

The Systemic Approach can help coachees address issues beyond their individual, immediate issue and considering the larger forces that are affecting them. It might help them if we can look at it from the wider system perspective and take everything into account.

In the Gestalt Approach, we have the idea of field theory, that the individual has that interplay with their environment. They’re impacting the environment the environment’s impacting them, then the impacted version of them is impacting the environment, and the impacted environment is impacting them. It’s a constantly changing process.

If you think about someone coming to coaching that wants to look at their work-life balance, We can just think about their own behaviours and their own actions, how they’re thinking and feeling about it, or we might start to look at what the system is like that they’re working within, what their system is like at home. Really opening up the perspective can enable them to see why they are struggling with that balance. We might initially consider time management, or the setting of boundaries. That could be a very simple, but it’s interesting and more powerful and effective, to go deeper, exploring what’s really going on and what systems are at play.

• Is there a culture of presenteeism at work?
• Is staying late expected of them?
• Do they want to be at home?
• What is expected of them when they’re at home?

As coaches we probably do this type of work without understanding there’s an approach called systemic coaching; we might already look at what other influences there are and the consequences of them and on them.

How do we go about using a systemic approach, specifically, to help a coachee identify these patterns?

We want to ask good open questions and dig deeper, exploring things like:

• Who else is involved in this?
• What impact are they having?
• Who is influencing you in this situation?
• How the solutions that someone is coming up with to their problem, might be useful to other people within the system.
• How a coachee’s issues might also be impacting others’ in the organisation, or other system of which they’re a part.
• What within the system can help your coachee.
• What within the system can hinder them
• Drawing up an organisation chart, genogram or family system, and then mapping out the relationships and the patterns of behaviours that you see within that dynamic. Asking questions like: what’s your relationship with those people? What do you want that relationship to look like?

By allowing the coachee this space to explore the situation more deeply we can explore assumptions that are being made, and what can be useful to them. You’re really giving them the opportunity to uncover some insights and do some new thinking that perhaps they wouldn’t have done otherwise.

The Key Takeaway

Coaching is never just about the individual.

Even if they’re not working in an organisation, there will be a family, there will be a social structure that they’re part of, friends, and social groups. There’s always going to be a system at play, which is going to be having an impact on how they view the world. Just recognising that is key. Being willing to explore it and not just take the surface level of what the coachee is saying and actually looking at what’s behind it.

Change is more likely to stick when we take into account all of those systems that can influence someone’s behaviour and who you influence in turn.

It could be as simple as a behaviour change that someone wants to make. Maybe their diet or their exercise regime. If the family or where they live or work is not conducive to them making that change, then it can be really problematic.

We hope this brief overview of systemic coaching gives you food for thought, as a coach and as an individual.

Both our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma  and our Transformational Coaching Diploma for Lifestyle Medicine explore many ways that we can open up our coachees’ thinking and view new perspective. Take a look and get in touch if you have any questions about either.