It’s a familiar picture: you’ve invested seriously in 1:1 coaching for your high-potential leaders, the feedback is glowing, people talk about breakthroughs, new self-awareness, better habits. On paper, it’s working.
And yet, a year on, the culture hasn’t shifted. The same tensions keep resurfacing between the same teams. The org-wide patterns you were hoping to change – silos, slow decision-making, a reluctance to have difficult conversations – are still very much there.
If you recognise this pattern, you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s likely that you’ve just run into a limitation that catches out even the most thoughtful HR and L&D leaders:
- Traditional coaching may change how a person shows up, without the patterns, incentives, and relationships they return to
- Systemic coaching looks at both the individual and the bigger picture, making it easier for cultural changes to happen alongside personal growth
Where might traditional coaching fall short?
Traditional coaching is powerful. It can genuinely change how someone shows up, how they communicate, how they lead, how they manage themselves under pressure. But once the session ends, that person walks back into exactly the same structures, incentives, and relationships that shaped the problem in the first place.
A leader can grow enormously and still hit the same walls, again and again, simply because the system around them hasn’t changed.
Take a manager who becomes noticeably more self-aware and communicative through coaching. She’s a better listener, is more open, she checks her assumptions. But the conflict in her team may not go away because it was never really about her communication style. It could be about unclear role boundaries between her team and another, or two departments being quietly incentivised to compete rather than collaborate. Personal development on its own may not change that. The pattern can belong to the system she’s part of.
What is systemic coaching?
This is where systemic coaching comes in. It’s 1:1 coaching with a focus on noticing and working with the complexity, relationships and systems around the individual, not just what they bring to the session.
Where traditional coaching asks how a person can change, systemic coaching asks questions about the patterns they’re part of and how they can learn to see and shift them. And, just as importantly, it asks who this coaching is really for. It puts the coachee’s stakeholders (their team, their manager, their family, their environment) at the heart of the work, not just their personal goals.
Systemic coaching offers a fresh take on one-on-one coaching, giving you the chance to dive deeper into how everything’s connected. And because stakeholders sit at the very centre of the work, the outcomes can go further too. It’s not just about developing one individual leader at a time but creating ripples of change across the systems they’re part of.
What does systemic coaching look like in practice?
A systemic coach works to expand a client’s awareness of their context, networks, and connections, and to help them see patterns and dynamics that might otherwise go unnoticed:
- Asking “who is the coaching for?” – keeping stakeholders central to the conversation, not just personal goals.
- Mapping stakeholders and connections – helping a client see who and what needs to be connected to solve a live issue.
- Joining the dots across systems – questions like: “What’s the connection between how I show up and the results I get?” “What’s happening outside the business that’s affecting what’s happening inside it?” “How is my wellbeing affecting my work, and vice versa?”
- Distinguishing what belongs to the system from what belongs to the individual – so a client stops carrying problems that were never theirs alone to solve.
- Working with “self as instrument” – the coach’s own noticing and reactions become data about the system the client is embedded in.
None of this requires some rare, innate gift. It’s a learnable skillset – listening at multiple levels, noticing what isn’t said, knowing when to support, challenge, or pause.
Worth noting: this systemic lens isn’t unique to 1:1 work – MurphyBishop Team Development brings the same lens to teams and organisations, helping them see how challenges are linked and surfacing multiple perspectives for fresh thinking. What’s different in each case is who the client is: an individual, or a team. Whichever the format, a single conversation can shift how a client shows up with their whole network of stakeholders, so even one small intervention can send ripples of change across teams and organisations.
Why does this matter for HR and L&D leaders?
Systemic coaching can contribute to desired outcomes such as culture change and leadership capability, complementing other development approaches.
Traditional coaching, however excellent, can sometimes create isolated pockets of improvement. Brilliant people, operating brilliantly, inside a system that hasn’t changed. Building systemic coaching capability can be a valuable approach among other strategies to address systemic challenges. It’s an investment in the resilience of the whole system, which can help create more lasting impact rather than quick fixes.
How can HR teams build systemic coaching capability internally?
You don’t need to overhaul your entire coaching offer overnight:
- Identify who’s ready. Which leaders or internal coaches already show curiosity about patterns and relationships, not just individual performance?
- Pilot with a small group. Bring systemic thinking into a handful of live 1:1 coaching relationships. Real, current challenges make the case better than a hypothetical pilot.
- Build the capability properly. It’s worth developing through accredited training rather than picking it up informally. Our ICF-accredited Diploma in Systemic Coaching and Advanced Diploma are designed exactly for this – going deeper than traditional coach training, with “self as instrument” at the heart of the philosophy.
Your next step
The goal was never a better-trained individual in isolation – it’s an individual who can also see, and work with, the system that’s been shaping them all along. Incorporating a systemic approach into your coaching repertoire can enhance understanding of broader contexts, complementing traditional coaching techniques.
If you’d like to explore what building this capability could look like in your organisation, take a look at what it’s really like to do our Diploma in Systemic Coaching or get in touch – we’d love to talk it through.
Frequently asked questions
Is systemic coaching the same as team coaching?
Not quite, though both use the same systemic lens – supporting people to see how challenges are linked and offering multiple perspectives for fresh thinking. Systemic coaching applies that lens 1:1, with an individual and their stakeholders in view; team coaching applies it directly to an intact team as the client (our MurphyBishop Team Development work). Many organisations use both.
Do we need to replace our 1:1 coaching programme?
No. Systemic coaching isn’t a different programme to bolt on – it’s a way of practising 1:1 coaching that goes deeper, so the same coaching relationships you already invest in become more powerful.
How long does it take to build systemic coaching capability internally?
It varies, but most organisations start with a pilot on one team over a few months before scaling further. Building deeper capability through accredited training, like our Diplomas, typically runs alongside this over a longer timeframe.
Who is systemic coaching for?
Experienced coaches, HR business partners, and L&D professionals who may already have a grounding in 1:1 coaching and want to work with far greater depth and awareness of the systems their clients sit within.
Keep the conversation going…
We share practical systemic coaching tips over on LinkedIn and Instagram – come and say hello.
