Bronwen's client lines up the sugar sachets on the café table before she's had a sip of her coffee.
"That's my team," she says. Six sachets in a row, one turned sideways. "That one never answers emails. And this is me." She lays a wooden stirrer at the far end, a hand's width from the rest.
It's the fourth of eight sessions, in a café near the corniche in Ras Al Khaimah. The client came to coaching for what she calls her patience problem. She snaps in meetings, she says, then spends the evening apologising by message. For three sessions they've worked on her: what she notices just before she snaps, and what she'd rather do instead.
Bronwen looks at the stirrer, then at the gap. "Who stood in that space before you?"
The client goes quiet. Her predecessor left after two years, it turns out. So did the one before that. According to the team, both were impatient.
Bronwen and the client are both composites. Neither of them had looked at the gap until a stirrer marked it.
What is systemic coaching?
Systemic coaching treats the client as part of the systems they live and work in: a team, an organisation, a family. It asks how a pattern is held between people as well as inside one person, and what the client's behaviour does for the people around them. The client is still the one in the room, and still chooses.
It isn't a credential, and it isn't owned by one school. It's a way of looking, and many coaches use it beside other approaches. We've described four of them in our guide to the approaches a new coach meets. What a systemic view adds is a wider frame, so the coach notices the people who aren't at the table.
If you're working out which training would help you see a client's wider world as well as the client, you can put that question to an RS Method Master Practitioner on a free call. It's about whether our programmes suit what you want to do, and the apply page estimates "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes". Ask us for the call. Or read on.
How can a pattern belong to the system, not only to the person?
Because people adjust to each other, and the adjustments last longer than the people.
Take Bronwen's client. Two leaders in a row, in the same role, were called impatient. That could be a coincidence. It could also mean the role comes with something attached: a team that answers slowly, a manager above who wants speed, a gap someone has to absorb. Whoever sits at the end of the row may be absorbing it. The snapping is still hers, and it still costs her. It may also be doing a job for the team.
Families work in similar ways. Someone becomes the one who keeps the peace, or the one who's always late, or the one who carries the worry, and the part keeps them long after the reason has gone. Organisations do it too. In our experience, a department can keep a reputation for being "difficult" long after every person in it has changed.
None of this moves responsibility away from the client. It widens the frame, so the client can see what she's part of and choose her own part with more freedom. In our experience, a systemic coach asks questions like these:
- Who else is involved in this, even if they're never mentioned?
- Who would notice first if it changed, and how would they react?
- What happened to the last person in this role?
- What does the pattern make easier for everyone else?
What does systemic coaching borrow, and where does it stop?
In our experience, it borrows mostly from two places. From systems thinking, it takes the idea that a team or an organisation behaves as a whole, with patterns no single member chose. From systemic family therapy, it borrows attention to roles, to what passes between people, and to the context around a problem.
Systemic family therapy is a clinical discipline with its own training and its own standards, and it deserves to be named with respect. Coaches borrow some of its ways of looking. They don't borrow its clinical work. A coach working systemically doesn't treat a family, diagnose a relationship, or take a side in a family's conflict.
That makes the scope line important. If a client describes harm at home, conflict that frightens them, or distress that doesn't ease, that belongs with a doctor, a family therapist or another qualified professional, and it falls to the coach to say so with care. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
In organisations the edge is different. When a company pays, the sponsor is part of the system too, and what leaves the room has to be agreed by everyone in advance. Our guide to organizational coaching sets out that three-way agreement.
What does a coach need to work systemically?
A few capacities, and the last one is easy to miss.
Curiosity about people who aren't present. The colleague who left, the founder who retired, the parent on the phone every evening. A systemic coach asks about them without blaming them.
Several points of view at once. The client's account is real. So, probably, is the team's. A coach who picks a side has stopped seeing the system.
Contracts with more than one party in mind. Who else is affected, and who else expects something, before the first session starts.
Knowing your own place in the system. The moment you're hired, you're part of it. Teams and families tend to hand the coach a role, and a coach who takes it without noticing ends up playing a part in the pattern.
Bronwen knows this one well. Friends call her the understudy. In every team she joins she ends up covering the role nobody took: the note-taker, the peacemaker, the one who answers the email everyone else is ignoring. People like her for it, and it has made her very easy to work with.
The understudy followed her into coaching. Faced with the sideways sachet, her first thought in session five was to offer to play the silent colleague, so her client could practise the email. It was a kind idea. It also put Bronwen in the gap, which was exactly where the client needed to look.
What this work goes after is the readiness itself, the pull that treats any empty place as hers to fill. As that comes away, a gap in a client's system can stay empty long enough for the client to see it. That's the point of the work, though no one can say in advance whether it will happen for her.
Bronwen's pull toward the gap is the kind of thing RSCI wants a trainee to see in herself early, because the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Knowing that about herself, a coach can leave a client's system as she found it, for the client to read.
Your own place in other people's systems is good material for a conversation with an RS Method Master Practitioner. It costs nothing, and they can also tell you whether RSCI suits the way you want to work. Reserve the conversation.
How do you map a client's system in a session?
Try a table map. It takes about thirty minutes, and any small objects will do: coins, sachets, paper clips.
Before you use it: as coaching exercises go, this one is light, and it isn't therapy or medical care. It leaves any treatment, medication or support a client has exactly as it is, and a client in recovery keeps their programme and their people. Use it for work and everyday roles. If a client starts to place someone who harms them, set the objects aside and follow the scope line above.
- Ask the client to place an object for themselves. Anywhere on the table. Don't suggest a spot.
- Ask for one object for each person or group involved. Let the client set the distances. Resist tidying them.
- Ask who's missing. Someone who left, someone senior, a customer, someone at home. Add an object for each one the client names.
- Ask what each object would say about the pattern. One sentence each, in that person's words, not the client's.
- Ask what the client's part does for the rest. "If you stopped, what would the others have to do instead?"
- Invite the client to move one object, and only one. Notice what they move, and what they leave where it is.
- Agree one small experiment for the coming week. Something in the client's own conduct, never in anyone else's.
Afterwards, notice where you'd have put an object for yourself. That's useful information about your own part in the session.
Where does the RS Method meet systemic coaching?
A systemic coach looks at what happens between people. The RS Method, the method RSCI trains, works with what a person carries into those relationships. The two meet in the client. Here's how our training describes the work.
- Subtraction comes first. The Method page describes two movements, and of the first it says: "The first movement is subtractive." What a client has carried from one team to the next, or from home into work, is what comes away first.
- Then recognition. Of the second movement, the page says: "What surfaces in the client is not new." Once an old role has come away, the client can find their own way of standing in the team.
- An ICF route inside both programmes. Each programme carries ICF-accredited education. RS Method Coach has Level 1, with the ACC in view; RS Method Complete has Level 2, with the ACC or the PCC in view. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
One client or a whole team, a coach's work rests on the same line. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Erin Kurt, from the RS Method's stories: "My business literally tripled within 6 months."
You can read how RSCI describes Unbecome and Remember on our method page.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Is there a gap in your own working life that you were always quick to fill? If one comes to mind, The Method is where RSCI sets out the two movements its training is built on.