Joe DIllard
Coaching Director
A coach I know recently told me about a client, a newly promoted VP, who opened a session with a simple request: ‘Can you just help me handle my direct report? He’s undermining me in meetings.’ It’s the kind of ask that shows up in almost every coaching relationship, and it has an obvious next move. Help her figure out what to say. Practice a difficult conversation. Build confidence to hold her ground.
That coach did none of those things first. She’d learned, after years of coaching leaders through conflicts like this, that behavior which at first glance seems to be only about the person often isn’t. So instead, she asked a different question: since the promotion itself had just reconfigured the structure around the VP, what else had changed in the org chart in the last six months? It turned out the direct report had been passed over for the VP’s job, twice, and was now reporting to someone five years younger with less tenure. The ‘undermining’ wasn’t really about the VP’s communication style, and better communication skills alone were unlikely to resolve it. In fact, it was a predictable reaction to an unresolved structural wound, one that went well beyond anything happening in their meetings.
I tell this story because it’s what I mean when I say CFAR coaches take a systems approach, and it’s a phrase that gets used loosely in our field. Ask ten coaches what it means and you’ll get ten different answers. For some, it means ‘we consider the client’s team.’ For others, it means using a particular assessment or model. Sometimes it just means being generally curious about context. None of that is wrong, but it also doesn’t tell you much about what working with a systems-minded coach actually looks like, or why it might matter for you as a leader. What follows is a handful of ways I put this approach into practice as a coach.
The Person vs. the Role
The first place I put this into practice is in separating who someone is from what the seat they’re sitting in demands of them. A leader who seems overly controlling may simply be accountable for a team’s output without the authority to hire or let go of anyone on it, so they compensate by tightening their grip on how the work itself gets done, since that’s the one lever they have. One who seems indecisive may be missing the resources, budget, headcount, or backing they’d need to act on a decision once they make it, so delay starts to look safer than commitment. In each case, the behavior is a reasonable response to what the role actually allows, not necessarily evidence of who the leader is.
But roles aren’t only formal. Groups assign roles informally too, sometimes casting someone into a part, like ‘the bad guy,’ ‘the fixer,’ or ‘the one who always says no,’ simply because it’s easier to blame one person than to face the actual disagreement or unresolved conflict driving the tension. Once someone’s cast that way, the group starts relating to them accordingly, bracing for conflict from ‘the bad guy,’ routing every hard call to ‘the fixer,’ or never bothering to pitch new ideas to ‘the one who always says no,’ and that treatment often produces exactly the behavior everyone expected. People start acting the part, whether or not it fits who they actually are.
Not adequately considering the role they’ve been cast into, whether by the org chart or by the group around them, tends to treat the person as the problem to be fixed. When I take the time to separate the person from the role in my own practice, I usually find there’s much less to ‘fix’ than it first appeared, and a good deal more to renegotiate about the role itself.
Structure Before Style
The same instinct, look past the person before assuming something’s wrong with them, applies here too. What looks like a style or behavior problem is often a structure problem in disguise. It’s tempting, and often more comfortable, to work on how someone communicates: their tone, their presence, their delivery. But when someone is caught between two senior stakeholders with conflicting priorities, they often start pushing back, disengaging, or slow-walking things just to cope. That coping reads to everyone else as being difficult or checked out. The real problem is something everyone around them can feel but nobody wants to name, since naming it means confronting the senior stakeholders with conflicting priorities. So instead of touching style first, I try to diagnose the structure, and I’ll ask myself: Who else does this person answer to, directly or indirectly, and do those relationships pull in the same direction? And when a real decision needs to get made, is it actually clear whose call it is? That’s only the formal side of it, though. Structure is also informal: things like who really gets consulted or what actually gets rewarded, unwritten rules that can steer behavior just as much as any reporting line. Coaching someone’s delivery for months does little if the structure underneath them is driving what they say or how they behave.
The Coaching Relationship as a Window Into the System
The system doesn’t only live out there, in the coachee’s world. I watch for it right in the coaching room, too. What surfaces between a coach and a coachee, like testing boundaries, seeking excessive reassurance, subtle deference, or resistance to feedback, is frequently a small-scale rehearsal of dynamics happening in the coachee’s work life. A coachee who quietly defers to me on every decision may be doing the same thing with a domineering boss, letting someone else’s judgment override their own without ever raising an objection. Another who bristles at feedback or tests how far they can push a deadline with me may be picking up a habit their organization quietly rewards: treating input from someone else, a deadline, a piece of feedback, as something to push against by default. I stay alert to this in my own sessions, treating my own in-the-room experience as data about the system, a live example of a pattern they’re probably repeating outside the room, rather than simply something to manage in my relationship with them.
Combining Coaching and Consulting: A More Complete View of the System
At CFAR, coaching is frequently paired with a broader consulting engagement: a strategy shift, a culture change, a reorganization. What I learn from the consultants working alongside me gives me a richer, more accurate picture of the system a leader is operating inside, which sharpens the questions I bring into a coaching session. The reverse is true as well: patterns that surface across several leaders being coached at the same organization reveal something about how that organization really functions, insight I can pass back to the consulting team. That same exchange is important for a different reason too. Because I stay in touch with what the consulting team is seeing, I can gauge whether the organization will actually reinforce a change, not just whether the leader is making one. If a leader learns to delegate more but the system around them keeps rewarding heroics and punishing anyone who steps back, the change won’t hold, no matter how good the coaching was. It’s a question I keep coming back to with my own clients: will the system actually let this stick?
What ties all of this together is a core premise: people are shaped as much by the systems they sit inside as by their own habits and character, and the coach’s own experience in the room is part of the work too. Of course, sometimes it really is just about the person’s own habits or blind spots. But you don’t know that until you’ve actually looked at the system around them first. What all of it tends to do for the leaders I work with is the same thing: shift them from taking things personally to thinking strategically about the system they’re in.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you’ve ever felt cast into a role you didn’t choose, or found yourself absorbing tension that was never really about you, that’s often exactly where a systems-minded coach can help.
This piece touches on what a systems approach looks like when coaching and consulting are combined. Stay tuned for a future post that expands on how we apply a systems approach when coaching and consulting work together.