By Chris Wahl

How does an Organization Development practitioner work to promote greater commitment, ability, or stronger support systems? Coaching. Coaching the leader, the informal leaders, team leaders, supervisors, heads of departments, and teams.

And how does a coach make sure the changes the leaders put in place have a chance of becoming part of the system? Organization Development. OD. Two cases will demonstrate.

Case 1: Coaching as OD. I was invited into the organization to "fix" the team. The charismatic leader of a small high tech firm asked me to "get the management team proactive." It quickly became clear that his charisma was overpowering the management team. I experienced it too. I had to work actively keep him from taking over our conversations during the contracting phase.

Research showed that there were structures in place that hindered communication among managers, and processes that were creating dysfunction. The team knew all this, but no one would tell the leader what they felt because his style was confrontational and controlling. They believed their leader would continue to make all the decisions, and they were resigned to doing everything his way.

Success for this management team would require more than helping them find their voice, both collectively and individually. The best way to change the situation was for the leader to act differently.

Enter coaching. In presenting assessment data to the leader, I framed the terms for success in this initiative to include coaching for him. He balked. In his opinion, he was fine; everyone else was wrong.

After a lengthy and honest conversation, he agreed to have me work both angles: with him and with the with the intended outcome being to create a different working relationship among all the players. With biweekly coaching, the leader learned to use every interaction as a mini laboratory, and he observed himself shutting down conversations, dominating, and growing angry when he didn’t get his way. These observations led him to create a new intention to become more of a listener, more spacious in his approach, and more hands off with his admittedly very talented group of senior managers. Eventually, the team found its collective voice, and individual team members learned ways to manage their interactions with the leader and with each other. The leader saw more possibilities for movement in his relationship with this team, and he learned that he was not always right.

In fact, he experienced his team’s innovative approaches to some of the challenges the company was facing. Everyone was now in the conversation. The leader reported feeling less isolated, more aware of how to bring out the best in others.

Case 2: OD as Coaching. Sometimes the system can affect the success of the coaching. An organization contacted me to "save" —through coaching —one of their key managers, who was floundering in a new leadership position. His new responsibilities required him to work collaboratively, instead of alone. He felt like he was crumbling under the strain of having to work the new way.

His belief system included such "givens" as:

1. to get something done right do it yourself;
2. never look like you don’t know;
3. asking for help makes you look weak;
4. you should be able to do it all without collaborating or showing your hand.

We had a lot of work to do. He was committed to success, and we agreed to a six-month coaching relationship, during which time I asked this leader to experiment with new behaviors and daily reflection to learn self and other awareness, and to develop competence in new ways of being.

He read; he wrote; he engaged in physical activity; he envisioned his success and became aware of his values. All of these activities stirred the pot and opened him to what was possible: becoming a better leader and learning productive ways to build and manage the team.

Enter OD. I wanted to find ways to help the client become a better team leader and team player. I suggested that I spend some time with the team, learning how they viewed things.

In conversations and team meetings, I learned that roles and responsibilities weren’t clear; priorities were indistinct, communication was stilted, the leader was caught between being a "fix-it" manager and a visionary. With this observational and conversational data, I was able to hold the mirror to the leader and help him create clear pathways for his developmental goals.

Learning about the team led to system work like inclusive strategic planning and team retreats. This OD work greatly informed the coaching. The work with the group offered a wider perspective— windows into the leader world that went beyond the leader’s own view.

And the bonus for the organization is that change really took place! The team created and followed through on an intention aligned with the organization’s values. The leader achieved clearer directives, more purposeful conversations, greater frequency of communication, and more personal ease in groups.

Coaching can be done successfully without engaging the system directly, and OD work need not require coaching. But these two cases highlight the value of using both coaching and organization development to help organizations create and sustain change efforts. The two disciplines do integrate well.

The initiator can be OD/systems work, or coaching work. In these two cases, the leaders created clear goals and committed to them, learned self and other awareness, and created a new conversation with themselves and their teams. When you get right down to it, change in any organization depends on the conversations that allow strength and possibilities to emerge. These are the fabric of coaching.