How Is Integral Coaching Different?
The business world contains a spectrum of enterprises with diverse motivations or drives for doing business. They operate in a marketplace still strongly following Milton Friedman’s dictum that the sole responsibility of business is to maximize profits for shareholders (Friedman, 1962, p. 133): “there is one and only one social responsibility of business . to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Friedman presents an elegant principle, which, at the same time, is brutal in its disconnection from a sense of stewardship or care, except care for maximizing profit for owners. Taken to its logical end, this principle despoils the social and ecological commons, consumes free market forces through ever-increasing concentration of wealth (and market power), while eroding its own defining principle of maximizing individual liberty and minimizing coercion. We have seen this in the collapse of financial organizations “too big to fail” due to highly reckless and speculative investments. Now those huge firms that absorbed the failed firms are even bigger than those “too big to fail” and have be given nearly a trillion dollars to use as they see fit.
Fortunately, many companies have chosen to lead their businesses in an opposite direction from that championed by Friedman. And they are doing so from an enlightened self-interest, creating a business philosophy that is socially and environmentally responsible while also concerned with profitability. Far from being weakened by these additional dimensions of care, their businesses prosper. They call themselves socially responsible, green, or triple bottom line businesses and include a growing presence in the Fortune 100 and 500. Their agenda is to be good business people while also being good corporate citizens in the world.
In a parallel sense, what I’m proposing in this article is that leadership coaching benefits too from being socially and environmentally responsible. (To get the logic of this, imagine the opposite proposition: “Leadership coaching should not be concerned with social and environmental responsibility.” Or, “Leadership coaching should be non-judgmental regarding social and environmental health and wellbeing.”)
Social and environmental responsibility, we are beginning to see more clearly, are interdependent with and ultimately inseparable from financial ventures that are sustainable. This kind of coaching cultivates a profoundly different way of seeing our relationships with each other, how we work and live, and how we live within nature.
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