Getting in, getting on, getting out, getting over it. An exploration into the inner work of an executive team coach

The aim of this thesis is to improve the professional practice of executive team coaching by paying greater attention to the inner work required to resource coaches from within. Particular emphasis is given to where an executive team coach might encounter significant difficulties and struggle to recover from challenging assignments. The existing theory has neglected to account for the potential to learn from these experiences, a shortcoming this thesis addresses.

This thesis asks what inner work is necessary to improve the quality and range of interventions as an executive team coach in the specific context of working with top management teams in large, multi-national organisations.

Utilising a pragmatic action research approach, this first person inquiry draws from practice vignettes, autoethnography, five-factor analysis, personal reflection, and literature to explore the research question. I show that resourcing from within is central to the ability to work systemically with ethical dilemmas and power in organisations.

The significance of this thesis is that it informs our understanding of team coaching at the most senior levels of an organisation. It concludes that resourcing from within involves considerable inner work on one’s system of origin and offers several practical methods to begin to explore this.