Towards coaching across divides to create alliances: an integral approach

This dissertation builds a meta-theoretical approach to creating alliances across differences in order to meet shared objectives. The research took place over two years (2003-2005) within an asset management company of 80 employees in South Africa. Managing diversity well is an organisational leadership capacity, crucially capable of transforming organisations in the direction of high-trust, high-performance environments. The research site was caught up in the challenges of transformation on several fronts, not least that of being in a country moving into a plural democracy from the restrictive rigours of apartheid and the impact of decades of institutionalised racism. The research places this South African client site in the context of global issues of diversity management and leadership mastery. This work introduces to the field of professional coaching and consulting sociological theories of the identity construction of groups including critical discourse theory, as well as integral theory and human development theory as the academic underpinning of a practical coaching model. Sociological perspectives of identity construction trace the different competing discourses or narratives that ‘brand’ our diverse identities. The growing multi-disciplinary field of Integral theory maintains the importance of regarding different knowledge systems as each holding truth value. The Integral approach contradicts the notion of competing perspectives among particular knowledge systems, preferring to see both-and connections rather than binary opposites - either-or ‘silo’ thinking. A selection of the literature is viewed through an integral lens to illustrate truthful but partial contributions to leadership development, diversity management and coaching. Case study examples demonstrate the practical application of a basic integral framework for coach and client to map and understand the multi-perspectival complexity inherent in individuals, groups and corporate entities. The coaching model uses Ken Wilber’s four-quadrant map of integral theory (AQAL) to ‘diagnose’ and map the competing discourses in organisations of individuals in a dynamic system.