My client had worked for nearly 30 years in senior leadership positions in the IT Services sector. She was struggling to find productive ways of working with her new CEO, whom she described as ‘completely opposite in management style’. Her coaching goals related to confidence, leadership team relationships and managing expectations.

Systemic coaching is an intervention that goes beyond being a conversation with an individual. It recognises that the individual is part of a wider living system. Leaders, teams, stakeholders, culture and the organisation’s ecological footprint all belong in systemic coaching.

Supervision is the practice that keeps coaches awake to this complexity and aligned with the deeper purpose of their work, and is an essential part of a systemic coach’s practice.

If you would like to understand your preferred coaching posture a little more deeply, and how you can mindfully select them for different client contexts, you might consider undertaking a Coaching Signatures Profile: a metaphor-rich visualisation of your coaching landscape and how it shifts between different clients. And until 31st July 2026, I have a special offer, which could save you £45.

Team coaching only works when you’re actually coaching a team. This post unpacks the crucial difference between a true team and a group, explores the systemic principles that make team coaching effective, and offers 10 practical tips for navigating beginnings, middles and endings. From contracting and diagnostics to boundaries, dynamics and shared learning.

Are you supervision curious? Perhaps you are a new coach, yet to engage in supervision. Or perhaps you are an established coach considering becoming a supervisor, or already training to be one. Perhaps you’re an established supervisor, maybe even training other coaches to be supervisors? Alongside my supervision practice, I’ve spent the past five years researching and writing about coaching supervision, and the resulting book – with contributions from 18 supervision practitioners -  will be out next month.

(*Coaching, Mentoring and Supervision)

This week, a client ended a longstanding working relationship with me. Or rather, we ended it together. I’m reflecting on supervision relationships here (they represent 90% of my work these days); however, I believe these ideas would relate to coaching and mentoring relationships, too.

When I began offering coaching supervision in 2020, I wondered how long each relationship might last. While there are significant benefits from a longstanding supervisory partnership, I could equally see how coaches might want to keep things fresh and switch supervisors from time to time.

Apologies for the rather long post this week, which celebrates the journey towards my upcoming book, The Coaching Supervision Casebook. I offer no apologies for the fun I had writing up the journey (with a little light-hearted editorial assistance from my artificially intelligent colleague).

Being nondirective has been drummed into us through our coach training – for some even more than others (I’m looking at you, ICF-trained coaches!)

Yet even ICF has now relented and included sharing knowledge as part of one of the markers for the PCC-level credential.

Myth: You will find your clients at the intersection of your coaching skills and your niche

Many coaches start out believing that their coaching skills will be enough to build a coaching business.

The ones who win clients sustainably have realised they need to niche. Niching is simply understanding who your ideal client is. Ideal clients have a problem where your coaching can help, and they are prepared to pay to be helped.

The EMCC Global Annual Conference in Zagreb (May 2026) invited attendees from 38 countries to go beyond the known: to back away from coaching as performing and simply be; to embrace a continuous journey of becoming, walking through a liminal space and embodying change; and to take responsibility for having an impact on the systems and people we serve.

Decks of colourful visualisation cards, metaphor sets, plastic figurines, Lego bricks, storytelling dice, ropes, masks, fidget toys, coloured pens and puzzles, even the occasional mysterious velvet pouch containing … what, exactly? The creative‑tools industry is booming. HR loves them. Coaches buy them. Clients politely admire them. But what are they actually doing in the coaching room?

If you have young children who come home from nursery, or primary school and let rip with challenging behaviour, it is probably because they have been trying to be good all day. Now that they feel safe at home, they can let their hair down.

Sound familiar?

Great coaches tend to engage with supervision. The benefits of supervision are sometimes lost on novice coaches. With coaching experience comes the realisation that supervision is an important aspect of ongoing development. As your coaching relationships grow, your appreciation of supervision will grow. Reflective practice becomes a regular practice. As you gain proficiency and start helping your clients systemically transform their personal and/or organisational lives, supervision becomes vital.

Last week, I hosted the first CORE (Coach Observation & Reciprocal Exchange) peer-to-peer practice space designed for coaches who want to stay sharp, reflective and connected to the heart of their craft. Fifteen coaches came along and enjoyed the opportunity to coach and observe others’ coaching in a safe and supportive space. ‘I was initially nervous, but this was brilliant’, said one recently qualified coach.

If there’s one topic that reliably divides coaches - quietly, politely and usually over coffee - it’s supervision. Not whether it matters (most agree it does), but how much is enough to sustain ethical, effective and continually developing practice.

Professional bodies offer guidance, but not much in the way of clarity. Coaches bring their own thoughts, fears and habits. And then there’s the reality of practice: time, money, energy and the stories we tell ourselves about what ‘good’ looks like.

So let’s take a clear-eyed look at what’s recommended, what’s actually happening in practice and what your own supervision pattern might be saying about your development.

Most of us move through our days surrounded by thoughts yet rarely stop to notice the shape of them. We analyse, we problem‑solve, we reflect, but we often treat thinking as something that happens in us rather than something we can step back and look at.

The idea of a thoughtscape offers a different way in. It invites us to imagine our thinking as a landscape - something with contours, textures, pathways and horizons. A place we can explore rather than a stream we’re swept along by.

If Mentor Coaching and Coaching Supervision both support coach development, why do they feel so different in practice? The answer lies in their underlying philosophies of learning.

Mentor Coaching, especially within the ICF credentialing pathway, is rooted in a Technological Schooling philosophy (see my previous article for an explanation of different philosophies of learning). It focuses on observable behaviours, measurable competencies and standardised assessment. Its purpose is to ensure consistency and quality control. There is nothing wrong with this, until we mistake it for a pathway to mastery.

Educational philosopher Robin Barrow (2007) draws a sharp distinction between schooling and learning. It’s a distinction that matters far more to coaches than we often realise.

Coaching isn’t just about asking great questions. It’s about choosing our interventions with intent.

In this month’s Choice magazine, I explore how a supervision-based framework can help coaches make more deliberate, catalytic choices in the moment.

If we want clients to be intentional, we need to model it first.

Last Friday, 6th March, around sixty coaching supervisors gathered in London for what was modestly billed as an ‘in-person’ EMCC UK event with Robin and Joan Shohet. In truth, it could easily have been called a supervision symposium. But the low-key framing was simply perfect. It created a space for connection, renewal and replenishment - exactly what many of us needed.

Among the many gifts from the session, one learning in particular has stayed with me: the invitation to notice love, fear, curiosity and judgment, and to treat them as data.