Why Team Coaching Is What Organisations Need Today

The missing piece in creating truly effective teams

We've become exceptionally good at developing individual leaders. Executive Coaching builds confidence and emotional intelligence, and Leadership Programmes develop strategic thinking. These investments do work for individual development.

But team performance isn’t simply the sum of the individual parts; it’s about how well people work together - how they collaborate, make decisions, and achieve together collectively what they couldn’t do on their own.

And that’s the gap: teams are often left to figure out collaboration, clarity, trust, and accountability on their own. We assume teamwork will just happen, especially if the individuals are skilled.

But what I see is that you can have a group of brilliant people, but they still struggle to function as an effective team.

Individual excellence is important. But team effectiveness is what drives outcomes.

In most organisations, the most critical work is done in teams, whether that’s a senior leadership team, a product or project team or a cross-functional working group. But without being intentional, teams easily find themselves:

• Working in silos

• Second-guessing each other

• Avoiding tricky conversations

• Struggling to make decisions

• Dropping the ball on shared goals

Complex Systems

Today, teams operate in increasingly complex systems, including balancing the needs of multiple Stakeholders from customers, employees, investors, and communities. The VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Changeable and Ambiguous) environment means teams need to sense, adapt, and respond together faster and under more pressure than ever before.

The Hidden Barriers to Team Effectiveness

Through my work with leadership teams and cross-functional groups, I've identified five critical barriers that consistently undermine performance:

1. Unspoken Assumptions

Teams operate on unstated assumptions about purpose, priorities, and process. A leadership team I worked with discovered they had three different interpretations of their strategic priorities. No wonder they felt fragmented.

2. Reluctance to share ideas and be honest.

Many teams avoid difficult conversations, dance around tensions, and make pseudo-decisions that unravel in implementation. Building Psychological Safety helps teams to engage in healthy and constructive dissent.

3. Working in Silos

This needs no explanation - silos create internal competition and misaligned priorities.

4. Not sharing and collaborating

Teams make decisions with incomplete information because they don’t collectively gather and share knowledge - this is particularly common in hybrid and remote teams.

5. Being Busy Fools

Most teams are too busy moving from one project or task to the next without taking time to explore what went well, what needs improving. This leads to repeating ineffective habits or practices.

Why team coaching?

Team coaching isn't a training programme or team building exercise. It’s a systemic approach that gives teams space, structure and support to:

• Align around shared purpose and goals, improving collaboration, accountability and results.

• Understand how they’re experienced by stakeholders (customers, suppliers and colleagues).

• Navigate complexity and interdependence

• Improve psychological safety, trust, feedback, and communication.

• Strengthen their impact on the wider system they’re part of.

This is especially important in today’s world, where most challenges can’t be solved by one person, one team, or one department alone.

Organisations are systems.

When we say organisations are systems, we mean they are interconnected, dynamic, and constantly evolving. What happens in one area affects another, sometimes in obvious ways, often in hidden ones.

A decision made in HR ripples into Finance. A tension in one team affects how another communicates. A disconnect between the board and delivery teams shows up in morale, trust, or results.

Systemic team coaching helps teams understand these connections so they can operate more effectively within their team and between other teams and stakeholders. It brings the “outside in” and encourages teams to think beyond their function or agenda.

I’ve worked with teams navigating growth, restructuring, service pressures, or new leadership. Often, they’re not struggling because they don’t care or aren’t capable; they’re struggling because no one’s created the space for honest conversations, shared clarity, and team learning.

Team coaching changes that.

We start with where the team is now. We look at what’s working and what’s getting in the way. And we co-create new ways of working that improve trust, decision-making, and delivery. Over time, I’ve seen teams:

• Reset after change

• Strengthen cross-team relationships

• Improve communication and meeting culture

• Clarify roles, purpose, and priorities

• Reconnect with the bigger picture and their stakeholders

Do we need Team Coaching?

If you’re part of a team, or managing one, that’s facing complexity, change or growth or if your team is experiencing any of these patterns, team coaching could be what you need.

• Individual performance is strong, but collective results are inconsistent

• Decisions take too long or get revisited repeatedly

• Stakeholder feedback suggests disconnection or misalignment

• Team members feel frustrated with collaboration

• Change initiatives stall in implementation

• There's a sense the team could achieve more together

How Growth Space can help

We have developed a framework for Systemic Team Coaching (inspired by Patrick Leconi and Professor Peter Hawkins). A Team Coaching programme typically involves 4-6 sessions over a few months. It’s a chance for teams to:

• Reflect on how they work together

• Surface and shift unhelpful patterns

• Build trust and psychological safety

• Align behind shared goals and behaviours

• Strengthen their collective leadership across the wider business

We use practical frameworks including Team Charters, personal user manuals, role clarity tools, and create a safe, structured space for honest conversation and inclusive facilitation where everyone has a voice.

Get in touch to chat about your team and how Team Coaching could help:

Email: polly@pollyrobinson.co.uk

Call: 07966 475195