ABSTRACT

In the business environment, the coach needs to become aware of and manage their own responses to questions of diversity, before they can begin to coach a client on similar issues. This chapter focuses on raising the business coach's awareness of these crucial diversity issues, both within themselves and within their individual and organizational clients. It introduces the subject of diversity and power relations, looking at how assumptions limit individuals and groups. Power relations not only have deep roots in our cultural matrix—our shared ways of doing things, of making sense of the world—but they can often also inform our personal views, choices, and actions. Equality and power are in many ways related. Power creates its own self-justifying worldview. This often becomes an unexamined rationalization for the dominant group's power.