Coaching or organisational development: which fits?

A new mandate, difficult conversations or reflection on one's own options for action can be starting points for management coaching. Goals and confidentiality are clarified in the assignment.

The higher the position, the rarer it is to find people with whom sensitive topics can be discussed without risk. Coaching provides a protected, confidential space with an experienced sparring partner for this. Two capabilities are at the centre. Self-reflection means observing oneself from a helicopter perspective within the social fabric of one's own organisation: what do I trigger in those around me, and what does it trigger in me? One's own range of behaviour is a manager's most important instrument.

The second capability is dealing confidently with one's own limits. Those who assess their own abilities realistically act neither out of overestimation nor out of underestimation and surround themselves with people who compensate for their own gaps. Knowing one's personal stress limit helps in coping with stressful situations outside the comfort zone as well. If a manager is deeply unsettled in their sense of competence, their actions are no longer geared to the matter at hand. They then serve to restore their own self-image.

Recurring upward delegation, unclear responsibilities or conflicts at an interface can be connected with organisational design. In that case it is worth looking at roles, decisions and expectations together.

Those who view an organisation as a machine look for the cause of problems in individual people. When something goes wrong, people are then usually to blame, and people are considered the main lever for improvement. From a systemic point of view, the starting points often lie elsewhere: in an organisation's established frames of observation and evaluation and in the communication routines through which information is condensed into decisions.

The reverse attribution is just as convenient. Leadership is a joint creative process. What is possible and what is impossible always arise together with others. This attitude rules out blaming undesirable developments on the organisation or the employees. A manager remains an essential part of the whole. Both views therefore belong at the beginning of any clarification.

A manager can expand their options for action and at the same time need their mandate to be clarified. Coaching and organisational development can be combined if assignments, responsibilities and confidentiality are clearly distinguished.

Planning often reveals a tendency towards either-or. Either the organisation is seen as the problem, or the qualification of individuals appears to be the answer. Some tasks require both. It must then be clarified which capabilities those involved need for the organisational task and which conditions the organisation must create so that what has been learned personally becomes effective.

In transformations, this particularly concerns leadership. Leadership tasks must be clearly defined and distributed across the hierarchical levels. This often reaches deep into managers' previous understanding of their tasks. Offerings such as mentoring or coaching then support self-leadership while roles and forms of cooperation are reorganised. Sometimes organisational work sets the pace, sometimes personal development.

Describe a specific situation, the people involved and previous attempts at a solution. A first working question can be derived from this. A robust assessment needs the perspectives of the relevant people involved and can become more precise along the way.

A coaching engagement begins with contracting. It clarifies four questions. What is the specific occasion? What is the concern, and what is to be achieved? What contribution do those involved expect from the coach and from the manager themselves? How are the results to be observed and evaluated? The more precisely it is established how the manager's success will be measured, the more specifically the relevant topics can be worked on.

In regular reflection sessions, the extent to which the agreed expectations have been met is reviewed. The aim is to develop one's own capacity for reflection further, discover blind spots and work out alternative courses of action that expand one's own radius of action. If it turns out that an obstacle lies in the framework and not in one's own actions, it belongs in an organisational assignment.

Coaching considers the personal leadership task in the context of the organisation. A coach can discuss expectations, risks and alternative courses of action with a manager. However, if several people regularly fail because of the same unclear mandates or contradictory goals, there is also an organisational question. Clarifying the assignment therefore includes examining specific situations: who can decide, who must be involved and which rules actually apply?

Coaching can expand one's own actions within this framework. Organisational development changes the framework itself, for example roles, communication channels and decision routines. In some assignments both forms are combined. The boundary is not drawn by the job titles of those involved, but by the cause and the level of change.