CMI Unit 717 Assignment Help — Advanced Coaching and Mentoring

CMI Unit 717, Advanced Coaching and Mentoring, is the Level 7 unit that moves beyond coaching methodology into the theoretical foundations of why coaching works, when it works, and what it means for organisations to embed a coaching culture at strategic level. Written as a strategic paper at Critically Analyse depth, it requires engagement with Hawkins and Smith’s systemic coaching framework, Bachkirova, Cox and Clutterbuck’s mapping of coaching approaches, Cavanagh’s complex adaptive systems application to coaching, and Grant’s evidence-based coaching research. The central academic debate is between individual coaching models (GROW, CLEAR, structured, individual-focused, skills-based) and systemic coaching (coaching the individual in their organisational and social system context). Senior leaders, executive coaches, and director-level practitioners who also hold executive or non-executive coaching responsibilities find this unit the most intellectually demanding of the Level 7 coaching pathway. If you need expert support with Unit 717, message us on WhatsApp.

What CMI Unit 717 Covers

Unit 717 addresses advanced coaching and mentoring as a strategic organisational capability, not an individual practitioner skill. The learning outcomes require understanding advanced theoretical frameworks for coaching and mentoring, systemic approaches to coaching in organisations, and how to develop a strategic coaching and mentoring culture. At Level 7, this means Critically Analysing what makes coaching effective (Grant’s evidence base), the theoretical differences between coaching approaches (Bachkirova et al.), the systemic dimension that individual approaches miss (Hawkins & Smith; Cavanagh), and what an organisational coaching architecture actually requires.

Hawkins and Smith (2013) — Systemic Coaching

Peter Hawkins and Nick Smith’s Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision, Skills and Development (2nd edn, Open University Press, 2013) provides the foundational text for systemic coaching, the approach that coaches the individual in their full systemic context rather than focusing exclusively on the individual’s internal development.

Hawkins’ central argument: individual coaching that focuses on the coachee’s attitudes, beliefs, behaviours, and goals, without attending to the systemic context in which the coachee operates (their team, their organisation, their sector, the wider social system), misses the most important determinants of the coachee’s performance and development. A director who is coached on their personal leadership style while the system they operate in (dysfunctional board dynamics, unclear strategic mandate, inadequate resource for their goals) remains unchanged will develop as an individual while continuing to underperform in their system context.

Hawkins and Smith’s CLEAR model (Contracting, Listening, Exploring, Action, Review) is positioned as a systemic coaching structure, it includes Contracting as the foundational stage because systemic coaching requires explicit agreement about the boundaries of the coaching work, the stakeholders who have an interest in the coachee’s development, and the organisational outcomes the coaching is intended to serve. This contracting goes well beyond the individual GROW model’s goal-setting stage.

The distinction between performance coaching, development coaching, and transformational coaching is analytically significant at Level 7. Performance coaching addresses specific performance gaps in a defined role, the most bounded form. Development coaching addresses longer-term capability development, wider in scope. Transformational coaching addresses the coachee’s fundamental assumptions, identity, and the way they make meaning, the most systemic in scope, because transformation at the individual level requires attention to the systemic context within which the individual’s identity and assumptions were formed.

For NHS leaders, the systemic dimension is particularly relevant: NHS executive coaches who work with directors on personal leadership development while the NHS system context (workforce crisis, financial pressure, moral injury, regulatory scrutiny) remains unaddressed are providing transformational coaching in a non-transformational system environment. Hawkins’ systemic framework requires the coach and coachee to explicitly engage with the systemic forces that constrain individual development, not as context to acknowledge and set aside, but as part of the coaching content.

Bachkirova, Cox and Clutterbuck (2014) — Mapping Coaching Approaches

Tatiana Bachkirova, Elaine Cox, and David Clutterbuck’s The Complete Handbook of Coaching (2nd edn, Sage, 2014) provides the most comprehensive mapping of the theoretical diversity of coaching approaches available to practitioners and researchers.

Bachkirova et al. identify multiple distinct coaching approaches, each grounded in a different theoretical tradition: cognitive-behavioural coaching (CBT-informed; challenging unhelpful thought patterns and developing more productive cognitive frameworks); psychodynamic coaching (depth psychology-informed; attending to unconscious processes, transference, and the emotional underpinnings of professional behaviour); person-centred coaching (Rogers-informed; creating the conditions of unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence that enable the coachee’s self-actualisation); solution-focused coaching (de Shazer and Berg-informed; focusing on what works rather than what is broken, building on strengths rather than addressing deficits); existential coaching (Yalom and May-informed; engaging with questions of meaning, freedom, responsibility, and mortality as they shape professional life); and narrative coaching (White and Epston-informed; exploring the stories the coachee tells about themselves and constructing alternative narratives that serve their development).

The analytically significant contribution at Level 7: Bachkirova et al.’s mapping reveals that coaching is not a single methodology, it is a field of practice that contains theoretically incompatible approaches operating under the same label. An executive coach trained in cognitive-behavioural techniques is doing something fundamentally different from a psychodynamically-oriented coach, despite both calling themselves “executive coaches.” The common factors model (drawn from psychotherapy research) provides one explanatory framework for the empirical finding that different approaches achieve comparable outcomes: it may be the quality of the coaching relationship, rather than the specific theoretical approach, that determines coaching effectiveness.

This common factors claim is contested in coaching research. Grant (2006) argues that specific cognitive and behavioural coaching techniques have identifiable effects beyond relationship quality. Bachkirova et al.’s mapping enables the Level 7 analysis: does the evidence support approach-specific effects, or does the common factors model explain coaching effectiveness more parsimoniously?

Cavanagh (2006) — Complex Adaptive Systems

Michael Cavanagh’s 2006 chapter in Evidence-Based Coaching Handbook (Stober and Grant, eds, Wiley), ‘Coaching from a Systemic Perspective: A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach’, introduces complexity theory to coaching practice.

Cavanagh’s central argument: organisations are complex adaptive systems (CAS), non-linear systems in which small interventions can produce large and unpredictable outcomes (butterfly effects), large interventions can produce no change (system homeostasis), and the system’s own self-organising capacity is the primary driver of stability and change. Traditional coaching models (GROW, CLEAR, cognitive-behavioural) are linear: they assume that changing specific behaviours or beliefs in a coachee will produce predictable changes in the coachee’s performance and the organisational system around them.

CAS-informed coaching challenges this assumption: coaching an individual director may produce no visible system change if the system’s homeostatic forces (organisational culture, power dynamics, incentive structures) are more powerful than the individual’s changed behaviour. Alternatively, a small coaching intervention at the right system leverage point may produce disproportionate system change, because the individual occupies a position of structural influence in the system’s dynamics.

The practical implication at Level 7: strategic coaching programmes that focus exclusively on individual leaders as the unit of change may systematically miss the system-level leverage points that produce organisational transformation. CAS-informed coaching requires the coach to attend to the wider system, identify leverage points, and design coaching interventions that work with the system’s self-organising capacity rather than against it. For NHS executive coaching programmes, this means assessing not just the individual leader’s development needs but the systemic patterns of the leadership team, the board, and the ICS as the relevant system context.

Grant (2006) — Evidence-Based Coaching

Anthony Grant’s 2006 chapter in Evidence-Based Coaching Handbook (Stober and Grant, eds, Wiley), ‘A Personal Perspective on Professional Coaching and the Development of Coaching Psychology’, provides the primary text for evidence-based coaching: the proposition that coaching practice should be grounded in, and continuously developed through, empirical research rather than practitioner intuition or theoretical preference.

Grant’s contribution at Level 7: he establishes the empirical case for coaching effectiveness in general (meta-analyses demonstrate that coaching produces significant improvements in goal attainment, wellbeing, performance, and organisational outcomes across multiple contexts) while also identifying the limitations of the evidence base. The effectiveness evidence is strong at the aggregate level but weak at the modality level, most research demonstrates that coaching works, but does not demonstrate which approach works best for which coachee in which context. This is the common factors problem: if different approaches produce similar outcomes, and if the coaching relationship is the common factor, then the evidence base does not support the preference of one theoretical approach over another.

For Level 7 critical analysis: Grant’s evidence-based framework creates an ethical obligation on coaching practitioners and programme commissioners to design and evaluate coaching interventions based on empirical outcome data, not theoretical preference or practitioner familiarity. NHS coaching programmes that commission a particular coaching approach (cognitive-behavioural, systemic, solution-focused) on the basis of the programme commissioner’s theoretical preference, rather than evidence of its effectiveness in the specific NHS population and context, are not meeting the evidence-based standard.

The Central Academic Debate: Individual Models vs Systemic Coaching

The central academic debate in Unit 717 is between individual coaching models (GROW, cognitive-behavioural, solution-focused, structured, bounded, individual-focused, evidence-based in aggregate) and systemic coaching (Hawkins & Smith, coaching the individual in their system context; Cavanagh, CAS-informed coaching that attends to non-linear system dynamics).

Bachkirova et al.’s common factors argument cuts across both positions: if coaching effectiveness is primarily driven by relationship quality rather than theoretical approach, then neither individual models nor systemic approaches have a strong theoretical claim to superiority based on outcomes evidence. Grant’s evidence-based framework adds the measurement obligation: both individual and systemic approaches should be evaluated against empirical outcomes, not theoretical elegance.

The Level 7 distinction from Unit 507 (Level 5): Unit 507 addresses the delivery of coaching and mentoring using frameworks like GROW at Evaluate depth, assessing the strengths and limitations of the framework for the specific coaching context. Unit 717 requires Critically Analysing the theoretical foundations of what makes coaching work, engaging with the debate between individual and systemic approaches, and producing an original synthesis on what a strategic coaching and mentoring architecture should look like for a specific organisational context.

The original synthesis: individual coaching models (GROW, CLEAR, CBT-informed) provide the practitioner structure that makes coaching accessible, measurable, and scalable in organisational contexts, necessary conditions for any coaching culture. Systemic coaching (Hawkins & Smith; Cavanagh) provides the theoretical framework for understanding why individual coaching alone is insufficient for organisational-level change, and what the coaching architecture must address beyond individual sessions. Evidence-based evaluation (Grant) provides the measurement obligation that prevents coaching from becoming an expensive benefit rather than a strategic capability investment. The strategic coaching and mentoring architecture that all three require: individual coaching grounded in evidence-based practice, team coaching as the bridge between individual development and system change, and organisational coaching culture development as the strategic objective that moves coaching from a discretionary benefit to an embedded capability.

Pass / Merit / Distinction

Pass: GROW model at strategic level; Hawkins CLEAR model introduced; coaching vs mentoring distinction applied; coaching approaches taxonomy referenced; strategic paper format maintained.

Merit: Hawkins’ systemic vs individual coaching distinction drawn and applied to the specific context; Bachkirova et al.’s approach taxonomy applied to evaluate coaching programme design; Grant’s evidence-based framework applied; Cavanagh’s CAS approach introduced.

Distinction, worked example: “Hawkins and Smith (2013) establish that individual coaching models, however skilfully applied, systematically miss the systemic context that is the primary determinant of organisational-level change: a director who develops personal leadership capability through individual coaching will continue to be constrained by dysfunctional board dynamics, inadequate resource, and unclear strategic mandate if the coaching work does not attend to these systemic factors. Cavanagh (2006) extends this argument through complex adaptive systems theory: NHS organisations are non-linear systems in which individual coaching interventions may produce no visible change (system homeostasis absorbs individual change) or disproportionate change (if the individual occupies a leverage point in the system’s self-organising dynamics), an unpredictability that linear individual coaching models cannot account for. Bachkirova, Cox and Clutterbuck’s (2014) approach mapping reveals that NHS coaching programme commissioners typically select a coaching approach based on familiarity (most NHS executive coaches use GROW or CBT-informed models) rather than evidence of approach-specific effectiveness for NHS executive populations in high-stakes, morally complex leadership contexts. Grant (2006) provides the measurement obligation: common factors evidence means that approach selection should not be the primary governance question for NHS coaching programmes; outcome measurement, coach quality, and programme design are the variables with stronger empirical support. The synthesis position is that a strategic coaching and mentoring architecture for an NHS Trust requires: individual evidence-based coaching for personal leadership development (Grant’s standard); team coaching to address the group-level systemic dynamics that individual coaching cannot reach (Hawkins & Smith); systemic coaching supervision that attends to the NHS system context, workforce crisis, moral injury, ICS complexity, as coaching content rather than background noise (Hawkins & Smith; Cavanagh); and outcome measurement frameworks that evaluate coaching programme effectiveness at individual, team, and system levels.”

Strategic Paper Format for Unit 717

Common Questions About CMI Unit 717

How is Unit 717 different from Unit 507 (Delivering Coaching and Mentoring) at Level 5? Unit 507 at Level 5 addresses the delivery of coaching and mentoring, applying frameworks like GROW, understanding the coaching vs mentoring distinction, identifying when coaching is appropriate, and evaluating the frameworks’ effectiveness in a specific delivery context. The command verb is Evaluate, and the level of analysis is practical application. Unit 717 at Level 7 addresses the theoretical foundations of coaching, what makes coaching effective, what theoretical approaches exist and what their different assumptions are, why individual coaching is insufficient for organisational change, and what a strategic coaching culture architecture requires. The command verb is Critically Analyse, and the level of analysis is theoretical engagement with the academic debate. A student who writes Unit 717 as a Level 5 delivery framework paper will receive a Pass at best.

What is systemic coaching and why is it different from the coaching I am familiar with? Most coaching practitioners are trained in individual coaching models, GROW (Whitmore, 2009), CLEAR (Hawkins), cognitive-behavioural coaching, or solution-focused approaches. These models focus on the individual coachee: their goals, their beliefs, their behaviours, their development. Systemic coaching (Hawkins & Smith, 2013) attends to the coachee’s full systemic context, their team, their organisation, their sector, and the wider social system, as part of the coaching content, not background context to acknowledge and set aside. A director who is stressed because their board is dysfunctional, their mandate is unclear, and their resources are inadequate is not primarily a personal resilience problem to be addressed through individual coaching, they are a system problem, and systemic coaching attends to the system. At Level 7, the analytical contribution is to evaluate when individual coaching is appropriate and when systemic coaching (team coaching, organisational development, executive supervision) is required.

What does “complex adaptive systems” mean in the coaching context, and do I need to understand complexity theory? Cavanagh (2006) applies complexity theory to coaching practice. The key concepts that matter for Unit 717 are: non-linearity (small interventions can produce large outcomes, and vice versa, linear assumptions about coaching impact are unreliable); self-organisation (systems have their own organising dynamics that coaching must work with, not against); emergence (system behaviour emerges from interactions, not from individual components, you cannot predict system change by understanding individual change in isolation); and sensitivity to initial conditions (where in the system the coaching intervention occurs matters more than the specific content of the intervention). You do not need to understand complexity theory in mathematical or scientific depth, you need to understand its implications for coaching programme design: specifically, that individual coaching in complex adaptive organisations cannot be expected to produce reliable linear organisational change, and that the design of coaching programmes should account for the systemic, non-linear context in which coaching interventions occur.

What is the common factors model in coaching research, and how does it affect the choice of coaching approach? The common factors model (originally from psychotherapy research, particularly Wampold, 2001) proposes that the effectiveness of psychological interventions is primarily determined by factors common to all approaches, the quality of the therapeutic/coaching relationship, the therapist/coach’s empathy and positive regard, the client’s expectation of change, rather than by the specific techniques or theoretical approaches of different models. Applied to coaching research, the common factors argument suggests that the quality of the coaching relationship and the coach’s skill in building that relationship matters more than whether the coach uses GROW, CBT, psychodynamic, or solution-focused approaches. At Level 7, this creates a theoretically interesting challenge: if the evidence supports the common factors model over approach-specific effects, then coaching programme commissioners should focus on coach quality and relationship-building capability rather than theoretical approach selection as the primary governance criterion for programme design.

How many sources do I need for Unit 717 and what is the best balance between coaching-specific sources and broader management theory? Unit 717 requires fifteen to twenty sources at origin. The four primary sources (Hawkins & Smith 2013, Bachkirova et al. 2014, Cavanagh 2006, Grant 2006) provide the theoretical core. Supporting sources should include: Whitmore (2009) Coaching for Performance 4th edn for GROW model comparison; Clutterbuck (2004) Everyone Needs a Mentor 4th edn CIPD for mentoring distinction; Edmondson (1999) on psychological safety (connects to team coaching context from Unit 716); NHS coaching-specific sources including NHS Leadership Academy coaching frameworks; NHS Staff Survey coaching culture indicators; Grant’s subsequent meta-analyses in Consulting Psychology Journal and International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring; and Passmore and Fillery-Travis (2011) Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice review of coaching effectiveness research. The fifteen to twenty source requirement is met by combining primary theoretical sources with empirical coaching research and NHS policy context sources.

The CIPD’s CPD resources provide evidence on strategic professional development at director and executive level, directly relevant to the Critically Analyse engagement required in this CMI Level 7 unit.

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