Team Coaching
Why Team Coaching is Worth the Investment
As someone managing groups of people in an organisation, you may find yourself wrestling with yourself - you can see your team’s potential and yet you notice that multiple tensions are limiting them. Miscommunications slow things down, the left-hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, experts aren’t collaborating, or tense relationships undermine progress. All of that takes a real toll - on culture, staff morale, and your organisation’s bottom-line results.
What If…
What if you could intervene early - to have your people collaborating healthily, putting relationships on track, and head off dysfunctions before they derail strategic priorities? That’s what team coaching aims to accomplish.
What Team Coaching Actually Does
Team coaching brings together a team coach and your team for structured sessions - to surface and tackle the exact issues causing pain points and process breakdowns below the surface. Through consistent meetings that can range from 6 to 24 months, a coach guides members in building trust, engaging in healthy debate, gaining alignment, and implementing real operational changes.
Its aim is to inspire and empower teams to create sustainable change. It brings team members together to build trust and find better ways of working that help them realise their collective potential. Through collaboration with a coach, teams can improve how they think and operate within their broader environment. The goal is to facilitate lasting development so teams can continue to evolve and thrive.
ICF definition - “Due to the desire for teams to perform well, consistently and over a long period of time, ongoing team development is necessary. As a result, team coaching is growing rapidly. Team coaching is an experience that allows a team to work towards sustainable results and ongoing development. It is becoming an increasingly important intervention in corporate environments as high team performance requires aligning toward goals, remaining innovative, and adapting quickly to internal and external changes.”
The role of a coach in team coaching is to therefore hold the process and be present to and articulate the team dynamics as they arise when it serves the group.
Preventative Care
Unlike a one-off workshop or squashing emergencies, it’s preventative care. This approach jumps into the messy reality teams face each day - embracing tension and differences that often get swept under the rug. According to leadership expert Patrick Lencioni (Lencioni, 2002), by focusing on a few make-or-break areas, teams gain skills to self-correct issues for good:
Trust & Vulnerability
Modelling openness to lean into tension
Cultivating care and respect amongst members
Creating safety for authentic sharing
Healthy Conflict
Distinguishing good ideological conflict from avoidance or aggression
Learning to debate issues while protecting relationships
Leveraging difference to spur creativity
Commitment
Co-creating aspirational vision paired with accountability
Clarifying roles and decision rights
Securing buy-in to collective goals
Change Capability
Examining barriers embedded in status quo
Prototyping new ways of operating
Codifying learning into habit
With an outsider’s perspective and insider access, the coach supports changes through accountability to new team commitments. This can result in a myriad of experiences i.e., tears, laughter, and frustration before finally addressing the human friction that drains potential.
Why Bother Investing?
Even mid-process, benefits multiply as communication and coordination lift off. People gain back hours out of tension-filled meetings. Leaders spend less time playing referee. Decisions happen faster with facts freely exchanged. Over months, the team transforms - from friendly acquaintances to committed allies who move boldly in the same direction.
Ultimately this builds resilience - equipping your people to flex with rising uncertainty, complexity, and innovation demands. Stable teams = more capable, agile organisations.
Addressing the Root Cause
Team coaching returns control to busy leaders by addressing problems at their root cause - not just the symptoms. The structured approach embeds lasting skills so groups can self-diagnose and correct when new problems inevitably emerge. Leaders set conditions for success by clearly supporting and expecting results from the engagement. But coaching also requires patience - granting time for new practices to overwrite old habits at a behavioural level. Still, the return for organisations making the investment is undeniable - empowered leaders, a seamless collaboration between teams, and real progression toward strategic goals.
If a conversation with me about team coaching for your organisation would be beneficial, email me here.
Reference:
Lencioni, Patrick. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.