The Systemic Value of Coaching

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make

Jane Goodall

We all live in systems – a family, a school, a university, a company, an organization. We are born into a system, and we belong to many other systems during our life.

Humans are systemic by nature. We are all interlinked. Everything we do is linked to another element, it in turn linked to another or even several systems… Everything is interconnected and interdependent.

In other words, whatever we do every second of our lives, has an impact on someone or something else.

Peter Hawkins, an expert in systemic coaching in the UK, evokes in his various books that yes, coaching can have a positive impact on the individual or on the team being coached. That is to say:

  1. New Outputs: competencies, capabilities, and capacities
  2. New Outcomes: what the coachee does differently – engaging teams, managing meetings, organizing their work

    But coaching can also create:

  3. Value: a systemic value benefiting not only the coachee but bringing true value to the coachee’s system: the team, the organization, and all stake holders for that matter, including customers, suppliers, investors, employees.1 (Not to mention family and friends too!).

And the good news is that this same value creation could also impact our ecological environment. Since the planet and all who live on it are part of our system too.

1 Peter Hawkins, Systémique Coaching