For the last 3 years, I have been running cohorts to train leaders in systemic leadership team coaching. The reason is simple. Individual coaching alone does not benefit organizations. The minds of leaders may shift with individual coaching. These leaders rarely shift the companies they work in. The company may as well have sent them on a holiday to Bali if they wanted to do a favor to these leaders.
This truth should be evident to HR and L&D professions, many of whom are quite satisfied with counting the number of leaders who have been coached each year. Have they or their CFOs or CEOs looked at ROI? They certainly would have for any other project or program they spend their money on.
If they had, they would never again waste their money on individual coaching.
Organizations do not grow and prosper because of a few stars. They grow and prosper because of team and group work that’s aligned to the company objectives. Stars, in contrast, are often toxic, propelled by their own ambitions, and leaving behind chaos when they reach their level of incompetence, which they all do. Stars do not want to be coached in a team. Their egos don’t allow this. I have lost assignments when I asked, ‘if you’re unwilling to be coached together, how can you lead a company together?’
Organizations have a duty to think, act and develop systemically by aligning corporate cultural and performance objectives with those of functional and cross-functional teams, along with individual leaders who work as part of the teams. They need to go beyond high-performing stars to high-performing teams. Company cultures must recognize the need for systemic teamwork. Without such a process companies will self-destruct in the shifting future.
Over these 3 years, we have seen a growing understanding of and interest in systemic coaching. This is fortunate, since the companies which embarked on this process were able to navigate the pandemic far better, with greater teamwork, emotional bonding, empathy, and resulting performance, despite working remotely. This is no accident. This is something we predicted and planned. As a result, we are offering more systemic leadership programs for teams and groups.
This year, we want to take a bigger step. We plan to invite only those leaders who are ready to launch a pilot systemic team coaching program in their organizations, even as they learn the foundational skills of systemic coaching. I will mentor this pilot program at no additional cost. This will be done through developing an organization-wide culture of involving multiple levels of stakeholders in scenario planning the future and designing flexible action plans that need no compass. We believe that this approach will develop more leaders with strategic as well as tactical skills to lead their companies into the future. A future that is bound to be extremely unpredictable.
Many coaching institutions are climbing the bandwagon with team coaching. Team coaching is of no value unless it’s systemic, aligning individuals with the organizations, using multiple lenses of past and future, internal and external. Coacharya has been the pioneer in this field for over 7 years. When we started our systemic programs with a few companies that were forward-thinking and willing. We now see a growing trend that’s heartening. We would like their leaders to be trained.
We are here to help, just an email away.
