What Is Team Coaching? A Guide for Leadership Teams

The quickest way to answer “what is team coaching?” is to ask who the client is. In individual coaching, it is one leader. In team coaching, it is the team itself: its purpose, its relationships and how its members decide together. This guide covers how team coaching differs from other interventions, what the research shows, and when a leadership team needs it.

What is team coaching, exactly?

Team coaching is a coaching relationship in which an intact team is the client and collective performance is the goal. The International Coaching Federation defines it as partnering “in a co-creative and reflective process with a team and its dynamics and relationships” [Source: International Coaching Federation 2020]. The aim is to help the team reach its common purpose and shared goals.

The academic foundation came earlier. Hackman and Wageman’s theory of team coaching centres on the functions coaching serves for a team, not on leader behaviours or styles [Source: Hackman and Wageman 2005]. It also identifies the moments in a team’s work when coaching is most likely to have its intended effect.

The field is now formally accredited. EMCC Global states that its team coaching accreditations were the first internationally recognised ones, with four levels for individual coaches [Source: EMCC Global].

How is team coaching different from individual coaching?

Individual coaching develops one person; team coaching develops what members can only achieve together. The relationships between people are not background to the work. They are the work.

That changes what the coach needs. The ICF says team coaches need a significantly broader knowledge base, covering conflict, power dynamics, cohesion and norms [Source: International Coaching Federation 2020]. It adds that team coaches often have to be more directive than with individuals, and that supervision matters more.

The two are not rivals. Hawkins and colleagues describe team engagements that include individual coaching of members, especially the leader, when it is contracted openly with the whole team [Source: Hawkins, Leary-Joyce and Lines, AoEC]. Phi Management’s executive coaching is one-to-one work for senior and emerging leaders. Our guides to executive coaching ROI and executive presence cover the individual side.

How does team coaching compare with team building and facilitation?

The difference is depth. Team building and facilitation help a group connect or run a good conversation; team coaching works on the patterns underneath its results.

The ICF describes training, consulting and mentoring as “quite directive and therefore distinct from team coaching” [Source: International Coaching Federation 2020]. It says facilitation enhances communication and clarity, but the work “remains on the surface”. Team coaching explores the dynamics below it. Both the ICF and Hawkins and colleagues accept that facilitation and coaching sit on a continuum rather than either side of a crisp line [Source: Hawkins, Leary-Joyce and Lines, AoEC].

Comparison based on the ICF Team Coaching Competencies; framing by Phi Management.

Team building still has a job. Phi Management’s methodology uses it as one learning approach, with interactive activities that build collaboration, communication and trust.

What does the research say about team effectiveness?

It points one way: how a team is designed and how it works together predicts performance better than who is in it. That is exactly the territory team coaching works in.

Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams in engineering and sales [Source: Google re:Work]. It found that what mattered was “less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together”. Psychological safety ranked first of the five dynamics it identified.

The construct comes from Amy Edmondson. Her study of 51 manufacturing teams linked psychological safety to learning behaviour, which in turn drove performance [Source: Edmondson 1999]. The same paper names team leader coaching among the structures that shape team outcomes.

Edmondson has since added a qualification that matters for senior teams: “while there is a statistically significant relationship between psychological safety and team performance, the effect size is larger when the work is more knowledge intensive as well as more in need of problem solving and ingenuity” [Source: Edmondson, interviewed by Nexxworks 2023]. Leadership team work fits that description closely.

Hackman and Wageman add a sobering point. Wageman reports that their six conditions account for 80% of the variance in how well a team performs [Source: Wageman, 6 Team Conditions 2020]. Their 60-30-10 rule puts 60% of the leverage in design, 30% in launch and 10% in hands-on coaching. Coaching a poorly designed team on its meetings works the smallest lever. Our guide to interpersonal dynamics at work looks at psychological safety in practice.

Where does a systemic approach fit?

A systemic approach widens the lens from how a team works internally to how it creates value with its stakeholders. Peter Hawkins developed its best-known model.

Hawkins describes a coach working with the whole team, together and apart, on its collective performance and its leadership with key stakeholders [Source: Hawkins, Leary-Joyce and Lines, AoEC]. His Five Disciplines Model holds that effective teams master commissioning, clarifying, co-creating, connecting and core learning. He argues that the biggest organisational challenges lie in the connections between people and teams.

Phi Management’s systemic team coaching works on five dimensions with the same names.

When does a leadership team need team coaching?

When its results depend on how members work together, and that is where things are going wrong. When the problem sits elsewhere, another intervention will work better. Wageman warns that many CEOs assume their “team” is simply their direct reports, then struggle to say what it should do together [Source: Wageman, 6 Team Conditions 2020].

The decision table below, which we call the Team-or-Individual Test, matches what you see to a sensible first step.

The Team-or-Individual Test, a Phi Management framing.

How does a typical team coaching engagement run?

Most follow the same arc: listen to stakeholders, launch with the whole team, work in spaced sessions, then review. Spacing reflects Hackman and Wageman’s point that coaching works best at particular moments in a team’s work [Source: Hackman and Wageman 2005].

Hawkins and colleagues describe off-site sessions, process consultancy at regular meetings and attendance at stakeholder events [Source: Hawkins, Leary-Joyce and Lines, AoEC]. They use team 360 questionnaires to compare the team’s view of itself with its stakeholders’ view. They suggest repeating them after six months, nine months or a year.

Phi Management’s published coaching plan runs in five stages, totalling five full days over 24 weeks:

1. Preparation: stakeholder interviews.
2. Kick-off session: a debrief on the present and alignment on the future.
3. Chorus Streams: prioritisation.
4. Action Plan: ways of working.
5. Decision Grid: the distribution of authority.

How Phi Management approaches team coaching

Phi Management’s High-Performance Team Coaching is tailored to each organisation, to enhance collaboration, drive performance and achieve strategic goals. Its coaches work on five dimensions: commissioning, clarifying, co-creating, connecting and core learning.

Team coaching rarely stands alone. 360Quest feedback gives each leader a coached feedback session and a personalised development plan. That insight often shows where one member’s contribution to the team needs work.

Frequently asked questions

How long does team coaching take? It depends on the team and the goal, but real change is rarely a single event. Phi Management’s published plan runs five full days spread over 24 weeks. That gives the team time to practise new ways of working in real meetings between sessions. Hawkins and colleagues suggest reviewing progress with a team 360 after six months, nine months or a year. A single one-day session can open a useful conversation, but on its own it is closer to facilitation than to coaching.

Can the team leader be coached individually at the same time? Yes, and it often helps, because the leader shapes the team’s design and launch more than anyone. The condition is transparency. The whole team should know the leader is being coached and, broadly, what it covers. Otherwise it can look like a private channel to the coach. Hawkins and colleagues stress careful contracting with the whole team and clear boundaries. The individual work should serve the leader’s contribution to the team, rather than run as a separate agenda alongside it.

Is a team-building away day the same as team coaching? No. A team-building day can lift trust and energy, and it has real value as a reset. But it is usually a single event focused mainly on connection and goodwill. Team coaching works on purpose, decisions and dynamics over months. The ICF places facilitation and similar work closer to the surface, and team coaching below it. Many organisations use both: an away day to reconnect, then a longer coaching engagement to change how the team actually performs day to day.

Who should take part in team coaching? The intact team, including its leader, together. Team coaching treats the team as one client, so sending a few members or rotating attendance weakens it quickly. Agree who the key stakeholders are before work begins, because their expectations define what the team must deliver. If membership is unclear, or the group shares little real work, resolve that first. Wageman’s research suggests a well-designed team gets far more from coaching than one that was never properly set up to work together in the first place.

The bottom line

So, what is team coaching? It treats the team as the client and works on the purpose, relationships and decisions behind collective results. It works best on a well-designed team, so first ask whether yours is a real team with a clear mandate. To explore whether team coaching, individual coaching or both would serve your leaders, talk to an expert at Phi Management or read more about who we are.