A note on naming: the leader at the centre of this series has not been named in the preceding three-part essay. I name her Layla here, a pseudonym, as the organisational complexity this essay attends to requires a more located presence than “the leader” can carry.

This essay re-enters the engagement with Layla — the leader whose biography, interior life, and development were traced across the three preceding parts of this series — not through the individual lens that organised those essays, but through an organisational one. It attends to what became visible when the coaching moved from the leader alone into the room with her team, and what that revealed about the broader system she operated in.

The postmodern position holds that meaning, identity, and behaviour are never produced in isolation. They are always already situated — shaped by the discourses, structures, power relations, and cultural norms of the systems within which people live and work (Gergen, 1991). The three-part series showed the role of biography in how a leader is situated. I now turn the lens to how she is constituted by the organisational context she inhabits: by what it permits and forecloses, by what it rewards and silences, by the assumptions it has normalised so thoroughly they are no longer experienced as assumptions. This is why individual coaching, however sophisticated, remains partial without accounting for the system.

What I was already noticing: The organisational architecture

Six months after the individual coaching concluded, Layla asked me to work with her leadership team — to build psychological safety, create conditions for honest conversation, and support her in setting her vision as a new leader.

By that point I had developed substantive understanding of her biography, inner workings, the internalised relational template enacted across stakeholder relationships, and how these connected to leadership competencies. But I had also been noticing patterns that resisted individual-level explanation. A cultural reflex had become visible: influence appeared to move through proximity to seniority rather than through role, showing up as the dropping of senior names to get things done. A dual reporting structure of Layla accountable to both regional and functional leadership had created competing expectations and ambiguous authorities. Her manager had sought to use the coaching relationship to convey feedback he had not given her directly. The contracting process, involving HR and Learning & Development, placed heightened visibility on Layla and the work. These dynamics gave me important data about the system’s political and social texture and raised a question I had begun asking myself: whether her changes to delegation, strategic perspective, the capacity to see and articulate “the forest among the trees” had a place to land in this organisation’s architecture? That suspicion became legible only in the room and it was beyond her immediate leader’s support for her development.

The team intervention: what the room revealed

The session was a structured two-day development for a ten-member team. I entered it with a tentative frame, making space for open tension (Iyer, 2020): attending simultaneously to the stated agenda and to what was organising the group beneath it.

Layla’s descriptions of her team were not inaccurate. But they were filtered through her own interior — her difficulty with self-authorisation, her anxiety about strategic adequacy, her irritation with a particular team member, her micro-management. In the room, the dynamics looked less centered on her and more reflective of systemic patterns. The predecessor’s culture was still organising the group: through shared assumptions about how leadership operated, through his name appearing often to validate a previous way of working, through how authority was distributed independently of her. Being present to all this “data” from the session, started to give me greater visibility of the soil into which Layla’s coaching focus would need to land.

What the room made visible: discoveries about the organisation

Several patterns came into focus, each casting the individual coaching in a different light.

Talent strategy and juniorisation. Several team members were operating significantly beyond their current experience, framed internally as stretch. It was Layla’s former manager, checking in informally after the intervention, who named it “juniorisation”: the organisation had been deliberately recruiting younger, less experienced talent. What had appeared as individual stretch was a strategy with consequences that moved through the whole system.

Juniorisation as the structural driver of micro-management. Micro-management here was not a leadership pathology. It was a situated response to talent that required closer oversight. What became visible was Layla pulling her role downward, absorbing the softer leadership dimensions of her direct reports’ roles, managing what they were not yet equipped to hold. Beyond personal biography, her micro-management was situated rather than just dispositional.

Getting things done as the primary cultural logic. The organisation’s centre of gravity was execution: speed, decisiveness, delivery. Leadership development was supported through encouraging development and not necessarily as part of day to day leadership roles, to build the next generation of talent

Name dropping as the social infrastructure of authority. Influence moving through proximity to seniority was not a political maneuver. It was how things got done in a system where formal authority was ambiguous and the predecessor’s cultural imprint had not yet been replaced.

The unexpected territory: organisation development. The intervention did not remain within its stated brief. A robust conversation emerged with HR and Learning & Development in debriefing: development not embedded in structures, leadership competencies absent from role expectations, the gap managed invisibly through individuals like Layla. What began as a team intervention became a conversation about the organisation itself. That was not planned. It was where the room led.

What observation surfaced that conversation could not

Most of what I have described was not information Layla gave me. She did not identify micro-management as a cultural norm, the talent strategy as producing systemic anxiety, or the developmental investment as disconnected from organisational structures.

Either these conditions were so thoroughly normalised that she could not perceive the contrast between the system she operated within and the leadership we were discussing in our sessions, or this was yet another manifestation of her struggle to hold the bigger picture, to step back from the immediate and perceive the “forest among the trees”. The individual coaching had attended to this pattern. The team intervention showed it operating at scale, in the very context she had never quite been able to name. After this intervention, I had a few individual sessions with Layla and integrated this more complex understanding of her and the system, into strategies going forward.

Throughout this engagement I found myself doing what Lather (1991) describes as working with and against: operating within the frameworks that structured the work while pressing against their limits. The “forest among the trees” was not only Layla’s developmental edge; it was mine too - the team intervention was the moment I finally saw the system I had been working inside all along.

Zooming in, zooming out

Individual coaching is an act of zooming in toward a particular history, meaning-making, and interior. Zooming out contextualised it, placing what had appeared as personal pattern within a larger architecture of organisational culture, talent strategy, and structural incentive. Action research offers a methodological frame for holding this movement: between first-person inquiry into one’s own practice, second-person inquiry into the relational, and third-person inquiry into the systemic. This three-person frame has become a backbone of my praxis.

The deeper point is not methodological but epistemological. From a postmodern position, change is never simply individual, it is situated in dominant discourses, structures, and power relations that constitute the context in which a person acts. What this engagement made visible was not the limits of coaching relative to systemic intervention, but the limits of any account of change that locates transformation primarily in the individual. Identity, behaviour, and development are produced socially and structurally.

The next two essays attend to the theoretical influences present throughout this engagement and to how I arrived at them, not as a retrospective account of ideas applied to practice, but as to how I encountered my own development in the process. In that sense, this entire series has enacted an action-reflection cycle: each engagement with the work folding back into thinking, each theoretical frame sharpening what the engagement made visible. The movement between bridging the world of ideas and the world of practice is central to how I build praxis.

References

Gergen, K. J. (1991). The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. Basic Books. Lather, P. (1991). Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern. Routledge

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. More about my practice at www.kavithaiyer.com

This is the third and final part of this essay. Part One introduced the engagement and what was observable in the room before anything more substantive became available. Part Two attended to the biographical material that surfaced beneath the presenting goals and what it required of me as a practitioner. This part follows the engagement into the moment the presenting frame gave way, what was discovered beneath it, and what eventually shifted by reframing the developmental agenda.

Where the frame broke

Several sessions into the engagement, the leader described an experience she could not fully account for. In her leadership team meetings, she was struggling to provide clear direction and inspire the team. With a particular team member — one brought in by her predecessor — she found herself losing emotional regulation. She was reprimanding him in front of the group in ways she recognised as disproportionate and professionally costly. She was aware of what was happening and, yet, could not explain it.

I was struck by the specificity of this encounter; it was not a generalised leadership difficulty. It was a response within the relationship with a particular team member , producing a distinct pattern: the emotional dysregulation, the inability to hold authority or inspiration in the room with any settled quality. Conventional explanations — confidence, role clarity, transition anxiety — were partially valid but insufficient. The questions I held were: why this person, and what did this encounter carry?

Rather than moving toward interpretation, I held those questions and let the material unfold. What emerged over time was an implicit comparison. This team member appeared to embody, in the leader’s experience of him, the predecessor’s authority — decisive, technically assured, a bigger personality. She was measuring herself against an internalised standard, both real and constructed, and finding herself wanting. When we could talk about this unspoken comparison with her predecessor, I asked what made her available to such comparison rather than being in denial of it. This question was not immediately answered. Much later, it became a coaching question she often referred to. Remaining with her internal process of discovery, in timing, form and content, allowed each theme to illuminate something critical to her agency in making meaning of her behaviors.

The emergence of grief and fear

As these themes were engaged more directly, something emerged that did not belong in the initial framing: loss. The shift away from technical and functional authority was not only a strategic transition. It involved relinquishing the mode through which she had known herself as competent for two decades. This was not a skills gap that training could close. It was an experience of identity in suspension — no longer the professional she had been, not yet the one the role required.

Her difficulty providing direction, her emotional outbursts with this particular team member, and her continued focus on operational detail became intelligible in this light. These were not behavioural deficits. They were responses to disorientation and loss that had no organisational container. The early impression of passivity was also reinterpreted. It reflected exhaustion rather than disengagement. She was holding together a professional identity that was fragmenting, in a context that could neither recognise nor support that process. In such conditions, the coaching became the only space where the experience could be named.

Over time, a further layer emerged: her fear. When she reduced her functional involvement and stepped back from operational detail, she encountered an unfamiliar feeling of a lot of time in her hands. This did not feel like freedom. It felt like exposure. The detail had structured her time, protected her from engaging with strategic demands that felt uncertain, and given her a reliable sense of competence. Its absence revealed both anxiety and a potential lack of skills in areas the role was now asking of her.

What shifted, and how

Change was gradual and non-linear — consistent with a postmodern understanding of development as situated, emergent, and resistant to predetermined sequence. Periods of greater clarity were followed by returns to reliance on direction from me and renewed retreat into operational detail. There was no single turning point.

What altered over time was not confidence in a conventional sense. The earlier passivity gave way to a more active engagement with difficulty — an increasing capacity to remain in uncertain situations rather than micro-managing. The emotional outbursts became less frequent and less intense. Her relationship to the particular team member shifted: not resolved, but less charged, less organised around the implicit comparison that had been driving it. She also developed a more realistic view of herself and her internal struggles with the new role, including which aspects were genuinely about her skills and competencies, beyond an identity attached to functional expertise.

This engagement highlighted my role in not resolving the initial presenting issue but in sustaining interpretive openness long enough for the problem itself to reorganise across levels of understanding, primarily driven by the leader’s agency.

What these three parts demonstrate, and what they leave open

Across the three parts of this account, the individual lens has revealed something that no presenting problem and no competency framework would have surfaced unaided. Discovering the leader’s developmental areas required a sustained attentiveness that could not have been planned in advance. It was a word (“gravitas”) that had no location, a pattern of passivity that read as exhaustion, formative experiences that organised the present, a specific relational disruption with a team member that could not be explained by any single frame, an unacknowledged grief and fear — none of these were sufficient on their own. Together, in dynamic tension with each other, they began to constitute something closer to the truth of what was happening.

It also required of me, as a practitioner, to honour the humanity and the agency of the person in the room. To notice when the presenting frame was not adequate to her actual developmental needs. And to pivot — to find, with her, language that fit better than the language she arrived with. The sense of misfit I felt was data. It pointed to the organisation’s relationship to development. To the limits of the word gravitas as a coaching goal. And to the importance of linking her development back to the specific demands of her role. That twin focus — on the person and on the role — was crucial in moving her from self-awareness to meaningful, self-directed change.

A note on what this account does not capture

These essays have attended to what was most analytically visible: the leader’s interior experience, my attentiveness as a practitioner, and the meaning that accumulated between us over time. But the fuller complexity of the engagement is considerably larger. Two important dimensions are largely absent:

The craft of the sessions themselves. The account does not capture the clinical and relational texture of the work: the interpretive decisions, including the use of silence as a containing intervention; the questions that functioned as reframes; or the long stretches of apparently circular work that constituted the necessary conditions for later movement. What has been offered here is the meaning that emerged from the work. The “how” of the work — its craft, its judgement, and the moment-by-moment navigation of the engagement — remains largely below the surface.

The theoretical coherence beneath the practice. Also unspoken is how the theoretical traditions that informed this engagement — postmodern epistemology, scientific approaches to change, psychoanalytic thinking, and action research — were held together not as an eclectic mix but as a coherent and intentional epistemological stance. That coherence has shaped my craft. I will account for it — how I came to it and the iterative cycle of action and reflection that constitutes the methodological backbone of practice-based inquiry — in the essays that follow.

The essays in this series have thus far focused on the individual: the leader’s experience and how her biographical residues shaped her leadership behaviours. The next essay shifts to the organisational context. It examines the leader within her team and attends to what this reveals about the organisation’s culture, structures, and constraints. This broader lens surfaces dynamics that an individual account alone cannot access and offers, yet again, a reminder of the situated nature of leadership within a much broader system.

This is the second of three parts. Part One introduced the engagement, the presenting frame, and what was observable in the room before anything more substantive became available. This part follows the engagement into the biographical material that began to surface beneath the presenting goals, what that required of the practitioner, and how it led to a fundamental reframing of the development agenda.

What the biography carried

Within the first few sessions, something shifted in register. The leader began to speak about a pattern she had recognised across multiple contexts: a constant state of heightened alertness, an attentiveness to what might be about to go wrong, followed by a rapid impulse to move into fixing mode before failure could arrive. She traced this, without prompting, to early life - to her biological roots, family life in which she had assumed practical and emotional responsibility at a very young age. She spoke of it in a matter-of-fact way, that was itself telling, as if this were simply how things had been and how they still were, rather than something that had shaped her in ways worth examining. I suddenly felt I saw the person behind the role in her descriptions of the small town she grew up in, her humble beginnings, her parents struggles and her physically challenged sister.

The interpretive pull at this point was strong and legible: a formative experience of early, unwanted responsibility had produced a pattern of anticipating failure and moving quickly to fix. This was now being enacted in her leadership in a role that actively needed something else. It was an accurate account and in some way, felt complete. And yet I was cautious of that completeness, not because the reading was wrong, but because it was too tidy, and because the woman in the room was not primarily asking to be understood in that way.

My early impressions from the previous sessions against this emerging biographical material was accreting in not very visible ways. The passivity I had observed read now as something more like exhaustion; the exhaustion of being in a state of anticipatory vigilance for a very long time. I wondered if the coaching might represent, at some level, both a demand to do more and a permission to finally put something down, neither of which she knew how to respond to yet. The movement toward detail and control, similarly, was not simply a cognitive preference. I also considered other possibilities including is she carried guilt for her success, what hopes were pinned upon her, at a very young age etc. Against her biography, it became visible as a long-serving protective pattern: if she could manage the detail, she could prevent the failure; if she could stay in technical control, she could not be exposed as inadequate. This had served her extraordinarily well for decades. It had also made the transition now required of her genuinely threatening — not to her career, but to her sense of who she was.

What the biography asked of the practitioner

I was very moved in the way she narrated her history. There was a simplicity and a dignity in how she carried her life, no self-pity, no dramatisation, no bid for sympathy, that touched something in me that went beyond my role and analytical capabilities. At one level, it was simply a human moment, a moment that reminded me of how we all carry the residues of our biography as we go about our lives. She had built a professional life of real substance from beginnings that had asked a great deal of her before she was ready to give it. That deserved to be acknowledged, and not only as a skilled response. It deserved to be honoured, as one person recognising the weight another has carried without complaint. I noticed a simplicity about her, that perhaps was not acknowledged as a strength and, more importantly, as an authentic part of herself

I said something of this to her, not in an elaborate way, but directly and simply: that what she was describing spoke of considerable resilience, and that I was struck by the quietness with which she held it. Something shifted slightly in the room: a minor relaxation in her bearing, as if she had been given permission to be a person rather than only a leader working on her development goals.

At the same time, I was aware of something in myself that was harder to name: a sense of mismatch between the person in front of me and the developmental frame, around gravitas, presence, strategic confidence, being applied to her. The implicit assumption of that frame was that she needed to become something more than she currently was.

Sitting with her and her history, I was struck by a different feeling entirely: of a round peg being pressed insistently into a square hole, not because she was inadequate to the role, but because the developmental language available to describe what she needed bore so little resemblance to the actual texture of her difficulty. She did not need to acquire something new so much as she needed to lay something down. The gap was not a skills gap. The frame was not wrong, but it was too small for what it was trying to contain.

Reframing the development agenda

That recognition made it necessary, midway through the engagement, to return to the development goals established at the outset and rebuild them from the inside out. Gravitas, the word the leader had internalised as “good leadership” without fully owning, had by this point begun to reveal its actual content. What it was pointing toward, now, was not a quality of presence that could be acquired or performed, but something more interior: a settled relationship with her own authority, a confidence in her perspective that did not depend on the validation of others or the technical mastery that had previously been her source of certainty.

It was, at its root, a question of self-authorisation. My doctoral inquiry, situated within a feminist psychoanalytic frame, defined self-authorisation in leadership as a particular quality of natural confidence that comes from being at home in oneself (Iyer, 2020): an authority that is not performed, not derived from title or hierarchical position, not dependent on the validation of others, but that arises from a settled and genuine relationship with who one actually is. Nothing forced. A naturally commanding presence that belongs to the person rather than to the role. In this engagement, the leader did not yet have access to it — not because she lacked capability, but because the conditions of her transition had temporarily severed her from the ground it requires.

In place of gravitas, we began to work with three areas that were now genuinely her own: strategic thinking and the capacity to operate at a longer time horizon than her technical expertise had required; planning and decision-making in conditions of ambiguity, without the anchor of operational certainty; and inspirational leadership, the capacity to lead people toward something rather than managing the detail of how the work got done. These were not new goals. This was a reframing of what was in the presenting agenda from the beginning. But grounded in her actual experience and in the specific transition she was navigating, they became more accessible to work with.

This was also the moment to bring the biographical work back into direct contact with the leadership and organisational agenda — not as a departure from the coaching goals but as it’s necessary foundation. The biographical detour, as it might appear, was not a digression. It was the work itself: the ground without which the reframing of strategic thinking, planning in ambiguity, and inspirational leadership would not have happened. Biography is not context but essential to the content and process of coaching and its transformational potential. It is this postmodern and interpretive position that underpins this three-part series - that the interior life of the leader is not background to the developmental work but constitutive of it.

This conviction, that biographical understanding is not peripheral to coaching outcomes but integral to them, is one shared across psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to leadership development. The theoretical frame that informs this attentiveness, and the specific body of thought I draw from in my own practice, will be the subject of a dedicated essay.

Part three follows and attends to the moment the frame gave way, what was discovered beneath it, how the development agenda was rebuilt, and what eventually shifted.

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© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com

The coaching engagement described in this series has been anonymised. Identifying details including the organisation, sector, role, and individual characteristics have been altered to protect confidentiality.

This is the fifth essay in a series that has, until now, moved largely at the level of the conceptual. The earlier essays established an epistemological architecture: what coaching is, where it lives theoretically, what the contemporary landscape asks of it, and whether the field is currently built for that demand. This essay marks the turn into the situated. It moves from the ground on which the work stands to the texture of the work itself, into the room, into the relationship, and into the particular.

What follows is an account of a single coaching engagement, presented across three parts published in close sequence. The first part attends to what arrived at the beginning: a presenting frame and early impressions in the room before anything more substantive became available. The second part follows the engagement into what the biography carried, what it required of the practitioner, and how it led to a fundamental reframing of the development agenda. The third part attends to the moment the frame gave way entirely, what was discovered beneath, and what eventually shifted.

This material will also be revisited in later essays through different lenses: what was happening in the relational field between coach and leader, what the systemic and organisational conditions were asking of both of us, and what the engagement required of me as a practitioner in my own interior movement. The same vignette will become progressively more complex as each new lens brings forward what the others leave in the background. This is not a structural device. It is itself a demonstration of what open tension (Iyer, 2020) makes possible: the capacity to remain with a situation long enough for its fuller complexity to emerge, rather than settling too early on what it means.

The account is entered here through three simultaneous intentions. The first is to demonstrate practice: to show what serious developmental coaching looks like across the arc of an extended assignment, rather than in the compressed snapshots that most coaching writing offers. The second is to show complexity: that what presents at the beginning of a coaching engagement is rarely what the work turns out to be about, and that the practitioner’s capacity to remain with the gap between the presenting frame and the deeper reality gradually becoming visible is not incidental to the work but constitutive of its quality. The third is to demonstrate multi-layered meaning-making: the process by which individual, relational, and systemic understandings do not replace one another but accrete, each adding to rather than superseding what came before.

A note on context: an organisation new to coaching

The earlier essays in this series argued that coaching is most consequential when it is embedded within a genuine organisational commitment to development: commissioned with serious questions about what a leader actually needs, held within a framework of accountability, and connected to the organisation’s broader learning and development strategy. That architecture matters. It shapes what the leader can bring, what the coaching can reach, and what the work can ultimately produce.

This engagement existed without most of that architecture. The organisation was new to coaching. It had not yet developed the internal language, the feedback culture, or the organisational learning strategy that would allow coaching to be integrated into how it thought about growing its people. A previous engagement within the same organisation had shown me where the edges of useful challenge lay, what the system could hold and what it would deflect, and how much of the work would need to be carried by the space between coach and leader alone. For this engagement, the sponsoring manager did not attend the tripartite meeting for any meaningful contracting or support for the leader seeking the coaching. What the coaching was for, what it was connected to, and what the organisation would do with the outcomes, remained unexamined.

What this meant in practice was not simply an absence of support. It meant that the coaching was entering a system whose assumptions about performance, adequacy, and leadership remained largely unarticulated, shaping the work quietly from within without either party being able to name them.

This is postmodern thinking made visible in practice. The conditions of a coaching engagement are never neutral; they are always already constructing what is possible within it. The account that follows is as much an illustration of that idea as it is a story about one leader’s development.

A word without a location

In the chemistry meeting, the leader offered a single word as her primary coaching goal: gravitas. She wanted to develop gravitas. It was a term I had heard before in this kind of conversation, a word that carries significant weight in the language of senior leadership and that organisations deploy with confidence, as if its meaning were self-evident. I probed for specificity: what would gravitas look like for her, in the particular contexts she was navigating? What would be different if she had it? When did she feel its absence most acutely? The probing was genuine and sustained, but the answers remained elusive, not because she was being evasive but because she could not, at this stage, locate what the word was pointing toward in her own experience. Gravitas was what others had told her she needed. It was the organisation’s diagnosis of a gap, translated into a term that both parties had agreed to without either fully understanding what it meant for her specifically.

I noted this without yet knowing what to do with it. The word was real in the sense that it carried emotional weight, she clearly felt its absence as something significant, but it was not yet available as a working concept. It would need to be earned through the engagement, not assumed at its outset. I held the word lightly, as a placeholder for something that would eventually need to be translated into language that was genuinely her own.

What I noticed in the room

Before anything more substantive became available, something else was present, visible not in what the leader said but in how she was in the sessions. She arrived to each session like a perfect student, contained rather than engaged, low in energy and something I experienced in her presence that the conversation had not yet reached. She was compliant with the coaching process in a way that was, paradoxically, somewhat difficult to work with: she answered questions thoughtfully and was reflective and articulate, but there was a quality of going through the motions, of performing the role of coachee rather than being genuinely in inquiry. She did not take notes. She did not report back on experiments between sessions. We spent a significant portion of our early meetings getting an overview of what was happening in her role, her team, and her organisation, and while that material was real and relevant, I had little sense of how she was carrying what we discussed into action, or whether the sessions were landing anywhere beyond the room itself.

Two early impressions formed and held themselves in tension with each other. The first was the word passive. Not passive in the sense of resistant or disengaged, she was clearly investing in the conversation, but passive in the sense of waiting: waiting to be changed, waiting for the coaching to produce something, waiting for clarity to arrive rather than actively generating it. The second impression was that detail and control appeared to function as a way of managing difficulty. When the conversation touched on something hard, on the anxiety about the transition, on the dynamics in her team, on the question of what her expanded role actually required, there was a reliable movement toward the specific, the technical, the manageable. She would shift from the experiential to the operational, from the felt to the functional. It was subtle and not conscious, but it was consistent and also showed in her enthusiasm to the “how” and “what” coaching questions versus the “why” questions.

I did not name either of these observations to her directly, and not only because it was too early. I held them as data about something I did not yet understand, as indications of a pattern whose meaning was not yet available and that required more of the engagement before it could be named with any accuracy. This is what I mean by open tension as a practitioner stance: not simply that I withheld premature conclusions, but that I actively maintained the question rather than closing it. These early impressions became part of what I was attending to across sessions, returning to them as the work developed, allowing them to mean more as more became visible. At this stage, I did not know if my interpretations qualified as assumptions, observations or reliable data through a repeated pattern. All were possibilities.

Part Two follows shortly. It attends to what the biography carried, and what it required of the practitioner to sit with it honestly.

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© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com

The first three essays in this series have moved across three registers. The first introduced open tension (Iyer, 2020) — the disciplined practice of remaining with what is not yet known, as both an epistemological stance and a quality of coaching presence. The second situated coaching within a postmodern understanding of change: not as a vehicle for self-awareness, but as a site of meaning-making at the interface of the materially real and the socially constructed, where identity, biography, and systemic forces are held simultaneously. The third turned outward — to the contemporary landscape in which this work takes place: a world reshaped by technological disruption, generational shift, and an intensified engagement with questions of identity, power, and difference.

Taken together, these threads raise a question that can no longer be deferred: if this is the world leaders now inhabit, and if development unfolds in the ways described, is coaching, as it is currently practised, equal to that demand?

Before answering, it is worth pausing on a question that sits closer to home. What, exactly, is coaching, what authorises it to work at the depth it claims, and how does it differ from simply talking to a friend? In a largely unregulated field with wide variation in practice, these are not hostile questions. They are the questions a serious profession must ask of itself. Coaching earns its legitimacy not through credentialling alone, but through the integrity and rigour of its practice — through theoretical grounding, ethical seriousness, and a willingness to account for what it does and how it does it.

The Expanding Demands on Practice

For practitioners, the implications of the current moment are not incremental. The work is no longer confined to helping leaders perform better within stable roles. It increasingly involves accompanying people through experiences that are more fundamentally disorienting: the loss of a professional identity, the pressure to reinvent mid-career, the erosion of expertise under technological change.

To work at this level requires the capacity to hold open tension; to remain with what is still forming rather than reaching prematurely for resolution. It also requires a degree of honesty about the limits of one’s own understanding: moments when the practitioner is being asked to accompany processes they themselves have not fully metabolised, like the impact of AI.

At the same time, practitioners face a subtler risk. In response to this complexity, coaching can drift toward an over-identification with interiority — privileging affective experience, existential reflection, and broader life questions in ways that, at times, become decoupled from the concrete realities leaders are navigating. This is not always a sign of depth. It can function, unconsciously, as a form of avoidance: a retreat from the materially consequential terrain of organisational life (performance, structure, power, accountability) into domains that feel more expansive, and therefore more meaningful. It may also carry an implicit assumption that to go “deeper” is to move away from the organisational, rather than to engage it more rigorously.

The demand of the current moment is not a choice between the psychological and the practical. It is the capacity to hold them together.

On the Limits of Artificial Intelligence

Any serious account of this terrain must engage with artificial intelligence. AI now offers leaders a range of capabilities that were, until recently, the domain of coaches and consultants: it can synthesise 360-degree feedback, identify patterns across behavioural data, generate coherent development plans, and provide structured prompts for reflection. At the level of tools, techniques, and even reasonably sophisticated sense-making, its utility is real and growing.

But its limits are not merely technical. At the level of work that matters most - where leaders confront questions of identity, meaning, and change. What is required here is not better analysis or more refined recommendations. It is the presence of another human being who can remain with them in uncertainty, who can register what is not being said, and who can engage the relational and unconscious dimensions of the process as they unfold. This remains irreducibly human.

Is Coaching Built for This?

If this is what the moment demands, a sharper question follows: is most coaching built for it?

Much of what organisations commission remains closer to performance consulting: goal-focused, time-bounded, outcome-driven. It serves a purpose, but it is insufficient for the depth now required. Leaders navigating identity shifts and systemic complexity need more than structured goals. They need practitioners who have undertaken their own interior work, and spaces capable of holding difficulty without prematurely resolving it.

This has implications across levels. Organisations must ask not only what outcomes they want, but what development actually requires. Practitioners must look beyond method to the question of what they can genuinely hold. Leaders must be willing to enter processes that do not simply increase competence, but deepen self-encounter.

There is, however, a further tension that practitioners must now contend with more explicitly.

Coaching has often been positioned and, at times, protected as private, confidential, and therefore largely opaque to the organisational systems in which it takes place. While confidentiality is essential, the unintended consequence is that coaching can become experienced as mysterious, even suspect: a space where something happens, but where neither its process nor its contribution is clearly understood.

In the current landscape, this position is increasingly difficult to sustain.

What is required is not the exposure of the coaching conversation, but a more explicit articulation of its grounding — how the work engages both the realities leaders inhabit and the psychological processes through which those realities are lived and shaped. Coaching must be able to take its place within organisational life not by relinquishing its depth, but by demonstrating its relevance to the very arenas in which decisions, authority, and value are negotiated.

This, too, is a form of open tension: holding the privacy necessary for genuine psychological work alongside a commitment to making the practice sufficiently visible, rigorous, and accountable to earn its place.

An Unfinished Field

The field of leadership development is itself still becoming. Its most important work lies not in refining frameworks alone, but in the quality of inquiry practitioners are willing to sustain into what this work genuinely requires.

For those in practice, the bar is higher than it has been before. Not simply to accompany others through uncertainty, but to remain in inquiry about one’s own positioning within it; one’s assumptions, retreats, and claims to depth.

We are, in different ways, working within the same conditions we ask leaders to navigate. The question is whether we are willing to do so with enough rigour and honesty for that work to be of use beyond ourselves.

That is the provocation. And the invitation.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com

In my first post on this Substack, I wrote about open tension (Iyer, 2020) — the disciplined practice of remaining with what is not yet known, of resisting the pull toward premature resolution when something significant is still in the process of becoming. I framed it as an epistemological stance, as much as a coaching practice: a recognition that the most consequential things rarely arrive through the directed, goal-oriented mind, but sideways, in the gaps, when the pressure to perform understanding has momentarily eased.

What I want to do in this piece is step back from the coaching room and ask a larger question: what kind of world is producing this need? Because open tension is not merely a useful stance for coaches or a developmental edge for leaders. It is, increasingly, the only honest response to the environment in which leadership is now required to operate.

The past five years have fundamentally altered that environment. The COVID-19 pandemic did not simply disrupt organisational life — it exposed its underlying assumptions. Remote and hybrid work dissolved the boundaries between the professional and the personal in ways that have not fully reversed. Collective grief, burnout, and a widespread reassessment of priorities reshaped what people expect from work and from those who lead them.

Simultaneously, the geopolitical environment has become markedly less stable: the return of large-scale conflict to Europe, accelerating fractures in the multilateral order, supply chain vulnerabilities, and the rapid and disorienting rise of artificial intelligence have together produced a quality of uncertainty that is not cyclical but structural. This is not a temporary turbulence from which organisations will emerge into calmer waters. It is the new condition of leadership — one that requires, above all, the capacity to hold open tension: to remain present and functional in a world that will not resolve itself on demand.

Into this environment comes a new generation of leaders — more psychologically literate than their predecessors, more explicit in their advocacy for mental health, and more pluralistic in their understanding of what success means. They bring with them a different relationship between work, identity, and meaning — one in which the personal and the professional are less compartmentalised. Their arrival does not simply add a new demographic to the leadership pipeline. It changes what leadership development must address, what organisations must be prepared to hold, and what it means to lead well at all.

A World of Irresolvable Tensions

Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report — drawing on surveys of nearly 10,000 business and HR leaders across 93 countries — offers a striking cartography of the pressures currently bearing down on leadership. Its central argument is that leaders today are navigating eight fundamental tensions to be held: between stability and agility, automation and augmentation, outcome and output, empowerment and control, potential and predictability, personalisation and standardisation, human value and technological value, and the growing gap between the experience organisations need and the experience their workforces possess. The report calls this condition turning tensions into triumphs — and its primary recommendation is that leaders stop searching for the resolution that eliminates the tension and develop instead the capacity to hold both sides of it simultaneously, moving between them with judgement and with care.

I want to be precise about what Deloitte is and is not arguing here. The report’s framing is structural and organisational: these tensions arise from the pace of technological change, the pressures of a boundaryless competitive environment, and the misalignment between what organisations demand and what their people can sustain. Its proposed remedies are, accordingly, largely systemic — redesigning work, reinventing the role of managers, rethinking the employee value proposition for an AI-powered world.

I would argue that beneath these structural explanations lies something less visible, and something that the structural interventions alone cannot reach. The capacity to hold irresolvable tension — to resist the pull toward premature resolution, to remain productive in the absence of certainty — is not primarily a skill that can be installed through a better organisational design or a revised competency framework. It is the fruit of interior development: the slow, often uncomfortable work of a leader coming to know themselves well enough to recognise their own defensive patterns, their characteristic ways of reaching for resolution when what the situation actually requires is continued inquiry. This is what open tension names, and what Deloitte’s eight tensions implicitly demand of every leader navigating them. The external tensions are real. But they land in people, not in systems — and it is in people that they must ultimately be metabolised.

The Complexity We Carry

Leaders do not arrive at their organisations as role-players who leave their humanity at the door. They come with complex inner lives: a mixture of conscious and unconscious thoughts, mundane and profound preoccupations, aspirations and hopes held alongside fears and anxieties. They come with loved ones, with histories, with formative experiences that shaped their particular way of seeing and responding to the world. The existential questions that leaders find themselves asking while going about the task of leadership — Who am I in this role? Who do I wish to be? Why do I do things the way I do? — are not separate from the work. They are woven into it, and they will find their way to the surface whether or not we create space for them. The question is not whether a leader will encounter this territory. It is whether they will encounter it consciously, with some capacity for reflection — or whether they will be moved by it without knowing they are being moved at all. This inner complexity meets an equally complex organisational life. Leaders navigate webs of competing agendas, power dynamics, and unspoken relational tensions, all within institutions that are themselves undergoing rapid and uncertain transformation.

What Change Actually Looks Like — and What It Now Demands

Understanding change at this level means letting go of the linear model — the comfortable fiction that development moves from a defined point of departure to a predictable point of arrival. A postmodern understanding of change resists this. It holds that transformation is not sequential but recursive, not uniform but radically subjective, shaped at every turn by the particular biography, context, and meaning-making of the individual moving through it. Change, in this framing, is not something that happens to a person according to a programme. It is something they construct, often messily, in the process of living through disruption and making sense of what it asks of them. This is precisely the terrain in which open tension becomes not a luxury of reflective practice but a necessity of effective leadership: the capacity to stay present in the recursive, non-linear movement of genuine change, rather than forcing it prematurely into a shape that is legible but false.

What makes this particularly acute in the present moment is that the change in question is no longer confined to a leader’s interior development or their organisation’s transformation. It is biographical.

Technological disruption — and artificial intelligence in particular — is reshaping entire industries, eliminating roles that once represented clear career destinations, and compressing the timelines within which professional identities must be renegotiated. Leaders who built their authority over decades in a particular domain are finding that domain itself in flux. The question is no longer only how do I lead well in this role? but increasingly what is this role becoming, and do I still recognise myself in it? Career pivots that once belonged to the early or mid stages of professional life are now arriving in the senior years — and arriving not as freely chosen reinventions but as necessities, often unwelcome, rarely accompanied by adequate preparation.

For many leaders, this is among the most destabilising experiences of their working lives: the loss not just of a job or a title but of a professional identity that took years to construct. A postmodern understanding of change does not soften this. What it offers instead is a different relationship to the disruption itself — one that holds identity as always provisional, always in formation, and therefore always capable of being reconstructed, rather than permanently lost.

The Contemporary Landscape: Four Emerging Dimensions

The complexity of leadership today is shaped by a set of interrelated shifts that have fundamentally altered organisational life. Four, in particular, stand out:

1. Work, Identity, and Meaning
Work is no longer just functional; it is increasingly tied to identity and values. Leaders are now expected to engage credibly with questions of purpose and meaning—not as abstractions, but as lived organisational realities. The relationship between work and personal life has been permanently renegotiated. Leaders are now required to manage varied expectations around flexibility, presence, and well-being—often without clear or stable norms.

2. Multi-Generational Workforce
Leaders must navigate differing expectations around authority, loyalty, feedback, and ambition across generations. This is not merely a management task, but a developmental demand requiring reflection on one’s own assumptions about work and success.

3. Neurodiversity
A growing recognition that people think, process, and relate differently challenges standardised notions of leadership. Organisations that fail to account for this risk both exclusion and the loss of significant capability.

4. Identity, Power, and Difference
Dynamics of race, gender, class, culture, and sexuality continue to shape leadership access and experience. Without critical self-awareness in this domain, leaders risk reproducing blind spots that affect culture and decision-making.

Taken together, these shifts do not simply add complexity. They change the nature of leadership itself — from problem-solving to sense-making, from control to interpretation, from certainty to navigation. In my next post, I will speak to what this means to those who accompany leaders through this terrain — coaches, educators, facilitators, and practitioners of all kinds — the implications are significant, and they are expanding.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution.

Where Does the Work of Coaching Live?

This piece is the first in a series exploring how coaching is understood, situated, and held in mind within contemporary organisational life. Across these essays, I will examine not only how we locate the work of coaching, but also the less comfortable questions that sit alongside it: the ambiguities of an unregulated field, the variability in standards of practice, and the suspicion with which coaching is sometimes viewed. Taken together, the series is an invitation to engage more seriously with coaching as a discipline—its conceptual foundations, its ethical responsibilities, and the conditions under which it can justifiably claim to work at depth in the lives of leaders and organisations.

Much of the coaching industry still locates its work in the domain of self-awareness. The premise is familiar: if leaders understand themselves better, they will behave differently; if they behave differently, outcomes will improve. Insight, in this formulation, is both the method and the goal.

There is truth in this. But it is, at best, partial.

If we situate coaching more carefully within the broader literature on change, a more complex picture emerges. Leaders are not simply decision-makers or role-holders; they are agents of change within systems that are themselves dynamic, contested, and meaning-laden. Organisational change, despite its language of strategy and execution, does not occur independently of the people who must enact it. It is carried, resisted, interpreted, and reshaped through them.

Which is to say: change in organisations is inseparable from change in the individuals who inhabit them.

At the same time, it would be naïve to ignore the very real, often non-negotiable conditions within which these individuals operate. Leaders are accountable to bottom lines, performance metrics, shareholder expectations, and timelines that do not easily accommodate ambiguity. They work within organisational structures that distribute authority unevenly, within hierarchies that shape what can be said and by whom, and within cultures that reward certain behaviours while constraining others. These features can feel fixed, even immovable — not as interpretations, but as concrete realities that exert pressure on action.

From a more positivist organisational lens, these structures are often treated as objective facts: the reporting line exists, the budget is finite, the target must be met. And in many ways, they are. Coaching that ignores this risks becoming detached from the lived realities of leadership — offering reflection without traction.

Yet even here, the interpretivist perspective adds something essential. While structures and constraints are real, how they are understood, enacted, and navigated is not singular. Two leaders in the same system will experience and respond to it differently, shaped by their histories, identities, and meaning-making patterns. What appears as a fixed constraint at one level is, at another, mediated through perception, relationship, and interpretation.

An interpretivist approach assumes that reality is not simply discovered but interpreted — that meaning is constructed through human experience, interaction, and context rather than existing as a single objective truth.

Coaching, therefore, lives in the interface between these worlds: the materially real and the socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). It does not deny the existence of organisational constraints, but neither does it accept them as fully determining. Instead, it creates a space in which leaders can examine both the system they are in and the way they are in that system — where they may be constrained, where they may be colluding, and where there may be more room for movement than initially assumed.

This is where coaching does its most serious work. Not at the level of surface behaviour alone, but at the level where meaning is made — where a leader’s history, identity, assumptions, and relational patterns intersect with the demands of their role. And it is precisely here that a more integrated understanding of change becomes necessary.

From a postmodern perspective (Gergen, 1991), change is not a linear movement from one stable state to another. Nor is there a single, objective account of what change should look like. Instead, individuals continuously interpret their experience through frameworks shaped by culture, language, and prior relationships. What feels “true,” “necessary,” or even “possible” is constructed within these frameworks.

This is what is meant by a social constructionist view (Berger & Luckmann, 1966): that our realities — including our identities as leaders — are co-created in interaction with others and with the systems we inhabit.

Coaching, then, cannot be understood as a process of uncovering a fixed “true self,” nor as the straightforward application of tools to close a skills gap. It is better understood as a site of meaning-making — a space in which the taken-for-granted can be examined, loosened, and, at times, re-authored.

But this alone is not sufficient.

One of the limitations of purely interpretivist approaches is that they can overemphasise narrative at the expense of the deeper psychological and systemic forces that also shape behaviour. Leaders do not only construct their realities in the present; they are also shaped by histories that operate partly outside awareness, and by organisational systems that exert pressures independent of intention.

This is why an integrated approach matters.

In my own practice, this integration takes the form of holding multiple lenses simultaneously — not as a set of techniques to be applied, but as a discipline of attention. At one level, the work attends to a leader’s aspirations and intentions for change. At another, it stays close to the less visible dynamics that may be organising resistance to that change. And at a third, it situates the individual within the wider organisational system — its roles, expectations, and patterns of authority.

At the same time, this way of working does not remain abstract. It must meet the organisational demand for clarity, movement, and results. In practice, this means drawing on tools and frameworks — from across different traditions and disciplines — not as ends in themselves, but as provisional structures that help make the work usable. They offer language where there is confusion, structure where there is overwhelm, and points of entry into conversations that might otherwise remain too diffuse to engage. But they are always held lightly, in service of the inquiry rather than as substitutes for it.

Held together, these perspectives prevent the work from collapsing into any single, overly simplified account. They allow coach and client to remain with a more complex truth: that the leader has agency, and that they are shaped by forces beyond their immediate awareness; that change is both possible and difficult; that behaviour is both chosen and patterned; that organisations are both rational systems and emotional fields.

This, in many ways, is where the work of coaching lives: in the tension between these perspectives. This is yet another way that open-tension (that appears in my first post) plays out.

It does not live solely in insight, though insight matters. Nor does it live only in action plans, though action is necessary. It lives in the ongoing negotiation between what a leader intends, what they are able to see, what they are organised to defend against, and what their context will allow or resist.

To work at this level is to accept that change is rarely clean or linear. It involves periods of uncertainty, where previous ways of making sense no longer hold, but new ones have not yet stabilised. It requires a tolerance for ambiguity — from both coach and client — and a willingness to remain with questions that do not have immediate answers.

It also requires something of the coach that is often under-emphasised in competency frameworks: the capacity to use oneself as an instrument of the work. Not in a performative sense, but as a disciplined attentiveness to one’s own responses, assumptions, and interpretations in the moment. In an interpretivist paradigm, the coach is not outside the system they are observing. They are part of it.

This is where action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2001; Schön, 1983) becomes more than a methodology and begins to function as a way of practising. The iterative cycles of action and reflection are not confined to formal research; they are lived in each coaching engagement. Hypotheses are formed, tested, revised. Understanding emerges in the interplay between experience and reflection, between what is intended and what actually unfolds.

To locate coaching here — within the complexity of human change — is to move beyond the idea that it is simply a supportive conversation or a set of techniques. It is to recognise it as a practice that engages with identity, meaning, and systems simultaneously.

And it is to take seriously the responsibility that comes with that.

Because if leaders are indeed agents of change, then the work of coaching is not peripheral to organisational life. It sits close to its centre — in the difficult, often invisible process through which individuals come to see, and perhaps loosen, the patterns that shape how they lead, relate, and act.

The question, then, is not only what coaching does.

It is where we are willing to locate its work — and how much of that complexity we are prepared to hold. This is critical in recognising possibilities for new ways of being and acting in the world.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution.

There is a moment in coaching that I have come to recognise — and to trust — even though it feels, every time, uncomfortable.

It arrives when I realise I do not know what is happening. Not in the sense of lacking information, but in a deeper sense: the map I brought into the room no longer corresponds to the territory. Something is present that I cannot yet name. The client is speaking, and I am listening, and somewhere beneath the level of what is being said, something else is moving — something I am still grappling with, not yet given form or language.

The temptation, in that moment, is to reach for resolution. To produce a reflection, an observation, an intervention — something that restores the sense of being in command of the work. To close the gap between what I understand and what is actually happening.

Twenty-five years of practice have taught me that this is precisely the moment to resist that temptation.

What I am describing is what I have come to call open tension — a concept that emerged from my doctoral inquiry into what genuine transformation in leaders and organisations actually requires. The term is deliberate. Tension because the state is active, not passive — it is not simply waiting, but a disciplined holding. And the tension is also my own: the anxiety that lives inside what feels ambiguous and unknown, held rather than discharged. Open because it resists premature closure — the resolution of ambiguity before ambiguity has done its work.

Open tension is not theorised as a problem awaiting resolution but as an intrinsically creative condition — the very threshold through which genuine transformation must pass, and within which new meaning, new agency, and new possibility become available.

It is an epistemological stance as much as a practice. It rests on a recognition that I think is one of the most important things I know about change: the most significant things — in a life, in a coaching relationship, in a leader’s development — rarely arrive through the directed, goal-oriented mind. They arrive sideways. In the gaps. When the pressure to perform understanding has momentarily eased.

Since the doctoral work, the concept has grown beyond the creative possibilities of not-knowing into something more encompassing — a way of holding the contradictions that are genuinely present in the territory where this work is done. Between the science of human change and the art of being present to it. Between the concrete rigour of assessment data and the sedimentary layers of personal history that quietly shape the present. Between the positivist demand for validity, reliability, and measurement, and the recognition that matters of leadership presence, confidence, and authority exceed what can be diagnosed or captured, often residing instead in the accumulated residues of lived experience. Between the certainty that frameworks are useful and the knowledge that they are never the whole truth.

Open tension is not the resolution of these contradictions. It is the discipline — and I would say the integrity — of remaining honest about all of them at once.

I want to be concrete about what this means in practice, because it would be easy to hear not-knowing as an abstraction, or worse, as a form of deliberate vagueness. It is neither.

The coaching work I am describing happens in organisations with strategic priorities and budget cycles. It is commissioned with specific outcomes in mind. It arrives accompanied by 360 reports, by leadership diagnostics, by competency frameworks, by coaching proposals that describe — in the language organisations understand — what the engagement is for and what it will produce. There are development goals agreed at contracting, progress reviews at the midpoint, and measurable outcomes expected at the close.

I work within all of this. I take it seriously. The data in a 360 is real. The competency gap identified in a leadership assessment is often accurate. The development goal agreed at the outset is a genuine beginning. None of it is irrelevant.

What open tension holds is something that cannot be captured by any of these instruments — the person inhabiting the leader, the biography shaping the pattern, something beneath the presenting issue that is doing the actual organising. The not-knowing I am describing is not the absence of data. It is the willingness to remain genuinely open to what the data cannot yet reach: what is happening in the room between us, what is moving beneath the surface of the stated agenda, what the client does not yet know about themselves and will not discover if the coaching stays at the level of the framework.

Senior leaders are not, as a rule, trained for this kind of not-knowing. Their organisations reward decisiveness, direction, the confident management of complexity. The development they most need is almost never about acquiring more of these capabilities. It is about developing the capacity to sit with what they do not yet understand about themselves — to resist the pull toward the explanation that closes things down before the more difficult, more accurate explanation has had time to arrive.

The same is true for coaches. The professional development of coaching has produced an abundance of frameworks and methodologies — all of which serve the goal of helping coaches feel competent and in command of the work. What is rarer, and what I think distinguishes the coaches doing the deepest work, is the capacity to put the framework down. To enter the room with genuine openness to what is actually there, rather than what the framework predicts should be there.

Open tension is not a technique. It is a disciplined willingness to remain with ambiguity — to inhabit the generative space of not-knowing — and to resist the pull toward premature resolution. What it requires, above all, is integrity — in the relationship, in the inquiry, and in the willingness to stay with what is genuinely difficult.

This is what this Substack is about.

Two streams — one for coaches, on the craft and depth of serious practice; one for leaders, on the inner life of leadership and what genuine change actually asks of a person. Both written from inside the work, in the hope that it inspires your own thinking about how you lead or how your coaching craft is informed.

I am glad you are here.

Kavitha Iyer is an executive coach, doctoral scholar, and Lead Coach at INSEAD. She is the founder of Crésca Consulting

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution.