Cranlana’s Director of Partnerships and Engagement, Catherine Woo, shares the unexpected lessons she gained from a organisational coaching certification with the Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL).
You’re in a meeting when it drops: your organisation is moving ahead with an initiative which you believe will harm a vulnerable stakeholder group.
Your stomach churns.
You know you should speak, but you hesitate.
Around the table, no one else volunteers an opinion. Or maybe the conversation has already moved on. You wonder:
Why didn’t anyone else speak up?
Will speaking up derail my position?
Will I be seen as naïve about commercial realities?
Can one voice really make a difference?
The ethical stakes are clear. What’s missing isn’t knowledge. It’s the capacity to act when the personal and professional costs feel high.
This space between knowing and doing is where so much of the work of ethical leadership lives. And it’s what I’ve been thinking about lately, particularly as my own understanding of leadership – its value, meaning and practice – evolves.
For much of my career, I saw leadership as being about holding the answers – being the person others turned to for clarity. And sometimes that’s right. Sometimes leadership is finding the signal when there’s only noise.
But lately, I’ve come to see that good leadership is less about being the hero with all the answers and more about creating the conditions for everyone to thrive.
That shift crystallised recently when I undertook my organisational coaching certification with our partner, the Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL). I discovered that coaching doesn’t impart answers. It creates space for reflection and insight to emerge from the counterpart (the one being coached) rather than the coach, building the clarity and courage to translate knowledge into action.
Coaching has so much to offer ethical practice. If ethics isn’t merely a set of rules to obey but an ongoing practice of deliberation and action, then we need tools that help us engage with ethical questions as live, dynamic concerns. Coaching offers exactly that. It doesn’t prescribe what’s right but rather helps us build the capacity to grapple with what’s right and how to do it.
Ethics as noun, ethics as a verb
We often treat ethics as a noun – a fixed quality that people either possess or don’t. You’re ethical or you’re not; you have a moral compass or you don’t. But that framing is flawed.
Many ethical failures aren’t knowledge failures. They’re failures of discernment, courage, culture or action. It’s not that someone didn’t know something was wrong; they knew it but something got in the way.
Video: Catherine Woo and IECL’s Charity Becker host a webinar on Coaching for Ethical Practice.
So what might happen if we were to treat ethics as a verb instead?
Not as something we have, but something we do, through enacting the continuous practices of inquiry, reflection and giving voice to our values.
Creating conditions for practice
Coaching begins from a simple premise: the gold is with the counterpart.
People generate their own insights when given the right conditions.
The coach’s role isn’t to impart advice but to create space – asking questions that surface new perspectives, maintaining productive tension and holding individuals accountable to doing the work.
What emerges in that space is often unexpected: someone articulates something they didn’t know they knew or identifies a first step that suddenly feels possible. The shift of a leader into coaching mode – from providing solutions to enabling reflection and agency – is powerful.
And in the context of ethics, that shift matters. It means treating ethics as something we actively discern and do rather than something we passively are told and possess.
The Performance Equation
Sir John Whitmore, a pioneer in performance coaching, gives us this formula:
Performance = Potential – Interference.
Source: Coaching for Performance, originally published 1992.
When people fail to act on what they know is right, the problem often isn’t lack of capability. It’s the interferences – fear, power dynamics, competing commitments, organisational pressures, prevailing norms– that create friction between intention and action.
Let’s return to you, the leader in that meeting. Whitmore’s framing helps us ask, what’s actually getting in the way of you speaking up?
- Is it fear of professional consequences?
- A belief that the system won’t change?
- A sense of being alone in one’s concern?
Each form of interference requires a different kind of inquiry.
A coaching conversation might reveal that the interference is a story you’re telling yourself– about risk, futility or isolation.
Once surfaced, that story could shift and make space for alternatives. You might discover allies who share your unease, or realise you have more influence than you assumed or that asking thoughtful questions reframes the terrain entirely. Inquiry itself becomes an act of agency – a way of seeing and shaping the situation anew. Once visible, interference becomes addressable in ways we couldn’t have predicted.
Ethics-as-verb asks us to notice those moments of slippage between intention and action and to try again.
When we stumble, we interrogate the interference: fear, assumptions, norms. We experiment, reflect and act. Loop it. Over time, those small experiments compound. What was abstract and aspirational becomes lived, rehearsed and embodied.
And perhaps this is what makes the coaching approach distinctive. It meets people where ethical leadership actually happens – not in the theoretical realm of principles and codes but in the cut and thrust of competing priorities, complexity and sleepless nights.
It doesn’t assume we’re immediately equipped with what we need to perform. Rather, it helps us develop the capacity to figure out what performance means to us, to remove interferences and to reclaim our own agency.
Small acts, big shifts
Lately, the two questions I’ve been returning to on those moments when you knew what the right thing to do was but struggled to do it, are:
- What got in the way?
- And what is one small act, maybe the smallest act, I can do this week to start to move the dial?
Photo credit: Izzy Gibson c/o Unsplash
Ethics, like coaching, may be less about arriving at the right answer and more about cultivating the experimental capacity to question, uncover and act.
We have partnered with IECL to help more Cranlana alumni explore the space between knowing and doing.
To find out more about their programs and access 10% off IECL’s organisational coaching certification, visit their website:
