COACHING AND POLITICS

If you coach, you deal with politics. Especially if you coach groups and teams, politics is everywhere. Especially if you coach a political leader, the very context of your coaching now becomes political. Given this, what do you know about “politics?” How do you frame politics in your thinking and coaching? For that matter, what are we talking about when we use the terms politics or political? To answer these questions and many, many more, I’m beginning with this post to write a series on Coaching and Politics.

What is Politics?

Since most of the time there’s no better place to begin than at the beginning, let’s begin with the terminology. As we do this, we start with the word itself—politics, and that gives us polis, the original Greek term for city. A polis or city is a place where we live together, where we come together as a people, and as a community.