Systemic Team Coaching

Coaching individuals alone rarely changes how a team works

Organisations often invest in coaching each member of a leadership team and then wonder why the team behaves the same way. Each leader improves, but the team’s habits, unwritten rules and relationships stay where they were.

A systemic approach takes the team itself as the client. The individuals matter, but the focus is on what happens between them and on how the team works with the rest of the organisation. For a plain explanation of the underlying idea, see what systemic coaching is.

Signs a leadership team needs a systemic approach

• ✦Members report to the CEO individually but act more like a group of department heads than a team.
• ✦The same problems return after every offsite, despite good intentions.
• ✦Patterns from a previous leader, merger or restructure still shape how people behave.
• ✦The team works well internally, yet the wider organisation experiences it as distant or inconsistent.
• ✦Silos between functions are blamed on individuals rather than on how work and incentives are set up.
• ✦In a family-owned business, family and non-family leaders work side by side and roles are not always clear.

Four lenses for seeing a team from the outside

These lenses help a team see itself as others do. They often show that a problem labelled as a personality clash is really a gap in purpose or an unclear mandate.

Every systemic team coaching engagement is built around your team

There is no fixed package. The shape depends on your team, its context and what you want to achieve, and it sits within my wider team coaching work. Depending on your needs, an engagement can include:

• ✦leadership assessments that give the team shared data about itself
• ✦facilitated team coaching sessions on real business issues
• ✦workshops that introduce a shared language
• ✦team reflection on how decisions and conflict are handled
• ✦behavioural tools the team can keep using
• ✦action planning and follow-up coaching to sustain the change

The work starts with a conversation with the team leader

Systemic team coaching usually begins with the person who leads the team, and often with HR. I want to understand why now, what the organisation expects of the team, what has already been tried and what success would look like.

The first session with the full team then builds a shared picture: what the team is for, what is working and what is getting in the way. I facilitate and ask questions; the team does the thinking. That is how ownership stays with the people who will carry the change. We define clear outcomes at the start and review progress throughout.

What shifts when a team can see its own system

The change is usually less dramatic than people expect, and more durable. Teams that have worked systemically tend to describe differences like these.

• ✦Conversations in leadership meetings become more productive, because the underlying tension has been named.
• ✦Conflict becomes healthier: disagreements are raised in the room and closed there.
• ✦Decisions move faster, because the team has agreed who decides what.
• ✦Accountability is shared instead of pushed down or sideways.
• ✦The wider organisation starts to experience the team as aligned rather than as a collection of separate functions.

Why I work with teams as systems

I hold certifications in Systemic Coaching and Systemic Team Coaching, and I am an ICF Professional Certified Coach with more than 4,500 coaching hours. Before coaching, I spent more than 26 years in leadership, HR and talent development, supporting executive teams through growth and transformation in financial services, FMCG, entrepreneurship and government.

Those years taught me that teams fail when trust breaks down, communication becomes unclear and assumptions replace conversations. If your main issue is that the top team pulls in different directions, executive team alignment coaching focuses on that specifically.