Coaching for balance: the benefit of adopting a systemic approach to raise performance and counter burnout.

Dr Magdalena Bak-Maier’s session introduces the Grid as a creative and systemic approach to coaching work-life balance. It invites participants to explore an empirical model with four key areas: the personal, the professional, self-care, and career, within their particular context. Conflicts between these areas impact balance, productivity and burnout, and on a wider scale, society as a whole.

Coaches are well-positioned to creatively explore this perspective with leaders as change-makers, clients and improve their own leadership and practice.

Coaching the Grid Session Objectives

By the end of the Grid session, participants will be able to:

• Explain the Grid framework to their clients and bring to light the hidden forces that often impact productivity and wellbeing and lead to burnout.
• Use it to explore the impact of specific choices, conflicts and imbalances on the person and the various systems: self, workplace, family and society.
• Expand their tool kit with an approach that lends itself to embodied ways of working.

Read more in Magdalena’s blog on the Grid at the Columbia University Coaching Conference.

Implication for coaching practice

Even before the COVID pandemic, many people battled a silent but formidable enemy: burnout. Burnout presents a real and serious threat to individual and collective wellbeing, workplace productivity, and our society. In many cases, the ultimate result of uncorrected imbalance is isolation and suffering for the individual and all the systems they are part of. Coaches can play a key role in catalyzing positive change.

While the burnout phenomenon has sparked a growing interest in resilience and mental fitness training as a means of equipping individuals to manage better, a systemic framework for work-life balance gives rise to a powerful coaching intervention tool.

Equipping coaches with the concept, language, and practices that can create conversations about how balance can be cultivated in practical terms, and being able to raise awareness of the costs of imbalance offers us all the possibility of a healthier individual, workplace, and a more compassionate and balanced world.

Workplace productivity and burnout prevention represent a major area where advancing coaching frontiers can translate into powerful impacts for all systems. Practical tools like this help coaches and their clients transform themselves, each other and the world.

Register for the event here.