When the Problem Isn't the Leader

“She needs to become more strategic.”

“He needs to improve his executive presence.”

“They need to collaborate more effectively across the organization.”

These are the kinds of statements that frequently initiate an executive coaching engagement. Someone has identified a gap between how a leader is currently operating and what the organization needs from them, and an executive coach is brought in to help close it.

Sometimes, that diagnosis is exactly right.

Sometimes, it isn't.

Organizations have a tendency to individualize problems. It makes sense: an individual is easier to change than a system. You can give someone feedback, send them to a program, assign them a coach, set development goals and measure progress.

But before deciding that the leader needs to change, it's worth asking a different question:

What if the environment is contributing to (or even creating) the behaviour we're trying to fix?

See the leader in context

Consider the leader who has been told they need to become more strategic.

Perhaps they do. Or perhaps their calendar is consumed by operational issues because decision rights are unclear and everything escalates upward. Maybe they have been given accountability for an outcome without the authority or resources required to achieve it. Maybe the executive team hasn't made the decisions that would allow them to stop firefighting and look further ahead.

Or consider the leader who isn't collaborating effectively.

Perhaps they need to build stronger relationships across the organization. But perhaps their incentives reward the performance of their own function at the expense of enterprise outcomes. Maybe accountabilities overlap. Maybe two senior leaders have each been told they own the same decision. Maybe different parts of the organization are working from different priority lists based on different assumptions about what matters most.

You can coach someone to navigate those conditions more effectively.

But you can't understand what needs to change without seeing those conditions too.

The system is always in the room

Executive coaching necessarily focuses on an individual. But good executive coaching cannot focus only on the individual.

Leaders operate within systems: structures, incentives, reporting relationships, decision-making processes, cultural norms, power dynamics and expectations, both stated and unstated.

Those systems shape behaviour. And because we tend to notice the behaviour before we notice the conditions producing it, it's easy to misdiagnose an organizational problem as an individual one.

The challenge is to see both clearly: the leader and the environment in which that leader is operating. (Note - and one way to help decide which executive coach to hire is to ask them what steps they take to understand the context in which the leader has to function. Without a process to understand that the coaching can’t possibly address the right things).

If a leader is reluctant to make decisions, we should be curious about what happens when people make decisions in that organization.

If a leader isn't delegating, we should look at their behaviour, certainly. But we should also ask whether the organization routinely holds leaders accountable for outcomes they don't fully control.

If someone avoids conflict, perhaps that's an individual pattern worth exploring. But it also matters whether disagreement is genuinely welcome or merely claimed to be.

Context doesn't absolve leaders of responsibility for their behaviour.

It helps us understand it.

Coaching shouldn't help people ignore an ineffective or friction-filled system

There is a risk in treating every organizational problem as a development opportunity for the individual.

We can end up asking leaders to become increasingly skilled at accommodating conditions that the organization itself needs to address.

Be more resilient.

Influence more effectively.

Manage the ambiguity.

Build better relationships.

Communicate differently.

All of those may be useful capabilities. But at some point, the more appropriate step may be to clarify accountability, change an incentive, make a decision, redesign a role, address a difficult relationship or reconsider how work is structured.

That doesn't mean the organization is dysfunctional. Most aren't.

Organizations are complex systems filled with and run by (at least for now!) humans. Priorities change. Structures evolve. Responsibilities accumulate. Decisions made for perfectly sensible reasons in one part of the organization create unintended consequences somewhere else.

The issue isn't whether the system is good or bad. It’s whether it works. Whether it’s able to do what it’s supposed to do - ideally as smoothly as possible. And it's whether we're seeing clearly enough how it is affecting the people operating within it.

Diagnose before you develop

This is why the beginning of a coaching engagement matters so much.

The question isn't just:

“What does this leader need to get better at?”

It's also:

“What might we be missing about the situation in which this leader is operating?”

Sometimes the answer will still point squarely toward the individual. Leaders have blind spots. They develop habits that no longer serve them. They need to grow as the scope and complexity of their roles increase.

That's precisely what coaching is for.

But sometimes, when we step back a bit, we see something different: competing priorities, unclear authority, contradictory expectations, incentives that reward the wrong behaviour, or decisions that haven't been made.

Good coaching requires us to see those things too.

Because the goal isn't to find something about the leader to fix. It's to understand what's actually getting in the way of effectiveness, and choose the support accordingly.

Sometimes that's coaching.

Sometimes it's something else.

And knowing the difference begins with seeing the situation clearly.