What Is Systemic Coaching?
Systemic coaching is an approach that sees the person being coached as part of wider systems: their team, organisation, stakeholders, family and culture. Instead of treating a challenge as purely individual, it explores the relationships, patterns and expectations around it. You still work one to one, but the questions widen from "what should I do?" to "what is this system asking of me, and where can I influence it?"
Most leadership problems are not entirely yours, and not entirely someone else's. They sit in the space between people, roles and expectations. Systemic coaching is designed for that space, which is why it often helps when individual effort alone has not shifted a stubborn situation.
Systemic coaching looks at the system around the person
Systemic coaching draws on systems thinking: the idea that behaviour is shaped by the structures and relationships it sits in, and that changing one part of a system affects the rest. A leader's behaviour makes sense within the system they lead in, even when it is not working for them.
So rather than asking only what you could do better, a systemic coach is curious about the forces around you: who expects what of you, what your role represents in the organisation, what patterns repeat regardless of who holds the job, and what the wider business needs from your part of it.
How systemic coaching differs from conventional individual coaching
Both are valuable, and many coaches move between them. The difference is in where they look for explanations and leverage.
| Conventional individual coaching | Systemic coaching | |
|---|---|---|
| Main focus | Your goals, thinking and behaviour | You in relation to the systems you belong to |
| Typical question | What do you want to do differently? | What is happening around you, and what is your part in it? |
| How problems are explained | Mostly through individual skills and mindset | Through relationships, roles, structures and history as well |
| Who is considered | Mainly you | You, plus stakeholders, team, organisation and wider context |
| Where change is sought | In your own behaviour | In your behaviour and in how you influence the system |
A systemic coach asks a different kind of question
You will recognise systemic coaching by its questions. They tend to widen the frame rather than narrow it:
- Who else has a stake in this situation, and what would each of them say is going on?
- What happened to the last three people who held your role?
- What is this conflict protecting, for you and for the team?
- If the organisation could speak, what would it be asking of you right now?
- Which loyalties, to a founder, a family, a former team, shape what you feel able to do?
- What is the smallest change in your position that could shift the whole pattern?
Every leader brings several systems into the coaching room
Even in one-to-one work, a systemic lens brings these systems into view: the team you lead, the leadership team you sit on, the wider organisation with its history and politics, the stakeholders outside it, and the personal systems of family and community that shape your expectations of yourself.
In the Gulf these overlaps are often strong. A leader in a family-owned business may be both a manager and a family member. An expatriate executive may be balancing headquarters' expectations with local relationships. A national leader in a talent programme may carry the hopes of many people beyond their own team. Seeing those systems clearly can explain why a sensible plan keeps stalling.
Individual systemic coaching is different from systemic team coaching
Systemic coaching with one person works with the individual and brings the wider system into the conversation. Systemic team coaching works with a whole team, together, on how it functions and delivers for its stakeholders. Peter Hawkins is one of the best-known figures in developing systemic team coaching.
The two can complement each other. If the challenge belongs to a whole team rather than to one leader, systemic team coaching is the right format, and what is team coaching explains the broader approach.
A hypothetical example of the systemic lens at work
Imagine the third head of strategy in four years at a growing regional group. Like her predecessors, she finds her proposals politely accepted and then quietly ignored. Conventional coaching might focus on her influencing skills.
A systemic approach would also ask why the role keeps failing. She might discover that the founder still makes strategic decisions informally, and that the role exists partly to give an impression of process. With that insight, her choices change: she works on her relationship with the founder directly and redefines the role's purpose with him, rather than polishing proposals that were never the problem.
When systemic coaching is a good fit
It helps most when a problem keeps returning despite your best efforts, when you are caught between competing expectations, or when you lead in a complex web of relationships such as a family business or a matrix organisation. I am certified in both systemic coaching and systemic team coaching, and I bring this lens into my one-to-one executive coaching whenever it serves the leader.
Rula Husseini is an Executive Leadership & Mindset Coach (ICF PCC) based in Manama, Bahrain, with 26+ years in leadership, HR and talent development and 4,500+ coaching hours. She coaches executives, emerging leaders and teams in Arabic and English, in person and online.
Credentials and training →Frequently asked questions
Do I need to bring my team to systemic coaching?
No. Individual systemic coaching is one to one. The system is brought into the conversation through questions, reflection and sometimes visual mapping, while the people in it stay outside the room. If the whole team needs to work together, team coaching is the better format.
Is systemic coaching the same as constellation work?
Not exactly. Some systemic coaches use constellation exercises, where objects or people represent parts of a system so relationships can be seen in a new way. They are one possible tool within systemic coaching, not the whole approach.
What kinds of challenges suit systemic coaching?
Recurring conflicts, roles that seem set up to fail, tensions between loyalties, leading in family businesses and matrix structures, and any situation where you have tried hard to change and the pattern has not moved.
Can systemic coaching be done online?
Yes. The questions and reflection work well online, and mapping exercises can be done on a shared screen or with objects on your desk. Many leaders across the GCC work this way.
Related
Systemic Team Coaching
Systemic team coaching for leadership teams: work on the team as one system, with its purpose, its relationships and the organisation it serves.
Systems Thinking
Systems thinking in leadership explained: where the idea came from, how leaders use it to stop recurring problems, an example and its limits.
What Is Team Coaching?
What team coaching is, how it works with a team as one system, the signs a team needs it and what a typical engagement includes, step by step.
One-to-One Executive Coaching in Bahrain and Online
How to Lead in a Matrix Organisation
How to lead in a matrix organisation: clarify decision rights, influence without authority, work with two bosses and keep your team focused.
Is a stubborn pattern bigger than you?
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