Team Coaching: Working on Collective Dynamics
From Individual Leadership to Collective Dynamics
Team coaching naturally extends individual support. If professional or leadership coaching helps a person develop their stance, team coaching tackles the relational patterns preventing a collective from moving forward.
It’s not team building (one-time bonding moments), training (method transmission), or facilitation (meeting animation). While these three practices can be mobilized in team coaching, it’s primarily in-depth work on the dynamics between team members.
When a team is stuck, the problem rarely lies in individuals taken separately: if you replace someone and the same problem reappears, you likely have a collective dynamic to address.
Recognizing When a Team Needs It
Four Telltale Signs
Problems keep looping back: You’ve tried several solutions, nothing changes sustainably, the same tensions resurface in different forms.
Conflicts aren’t due to a specific personality: Two people who work well separately get blocked together, tensions emerge in specific interactions.
The team stagnates despite individual skills: Team members are individually competent, but it doesn’t produce collective results.
Communication is broken: Conflicts amplify despite dialogue attempts or some team members carry the team on their backs and burn out.
What It Doesn’t Address Directly
Team coaching works on relationships and interactions. It sometimes reveals broader problems without directly solving them:
- Budget shortages or inadequate processes
- Lack of technical skills
- Fundamental value incompatibilities between the team and organisation
When these blockages emerge, complementary support can be part of the resolution, such as leader coaching, organisational recommendations, or broader transformation.
How I Work With Teams
I Look at Interactions, Not Individuals
A manager tells me: “My team never takes initiative.” Observing closely, I discover he systematically intervenes to solve their problems. The more he intervenes, the less they take initiative. The less they take initiative, the more he intervenes. Each feeds the behavior they reproach in the other.
I don’t look for who’s right or wrong. I look at how relationships structure themselves: who talks to whom, who bypasses whom, where implicit alliances lie. Team problems rarely reside in individuals but in their interactions.
Restoring Bonds When Necessary
Some teams arrive with conflicts that left traces. Before being able to work on new ways of functioning, sometimes what’s been damaged needs repairing.
In these situations, I work with the team on three levels: what each person experiences individually, what happens between people, and what it created for the collective. The goal: that the team can restart on healthy foundations.
It’s not always necessary, but when it is, it’s often a prerequisite before everything else.
A Two-Phase Approach
Diagnosis (sometimes necessary): Depending on the situation, I map the system before intervening, particularly through individual interviews, meeting observations, recurring pattern identification. Sometimes, this diagnosis emerges naturally from the first collective session.
Intervention (always adapted): I work individually to explore what cannot be said in the group, and collectively to act on interactions directly. The mix depends on your situation.
What I Actually Do
- I name patterns the team doesn’t see
- I question solution attempts that failed in the current situation
- I identify action levers to make things move
- I create experiments to test new ways of functioning
- I consolidate learnings to make the team autonomous
Solutions come from your team. My role is to create the framework to reveal them or make them emerge.
What Makes It Work
Three Essential Conditions
Management engagement: Without it, changes don’t hold. The leader doesn’t need to be present everywhere, but must actively support the team’s work.
Room to maneuver: I must be able to decide whom to meet, when and how. An overly framed intervention loses adaptability.
Recognition of the collective problem: The team must recognize “we have a problem together,” not “there are problematic people.”
How I Measure Results
At the interaction level: We observe dysfunction reduction without necessarily having acted on them directly and the emergence of new ways of functioning.
At the operational level: The team delivers, accomplishes its tasks, reaches its objectives without burning out.
Both must be present. A team that gets along well but delivers nothing hasn’t solved its problem. A team that delivers while burning out is headed for failure.
Duration and Investment
An intervention lasts between 3 and 12 months, with monthly sessions. The rhythm allows testing changes between sessions and returning with concrete observations. Some complex cases require more time and/or higher frequency at certain moments.
For Whom This Work Makes Sense
You feel your team can function better but don’t know how. Or you’re a leader/HR manager facing recurring collective blockages.
My systemic approach allows moving beyond simplistic explanations to identify what really maintains problems. Once these patterns are identified, your team can experiment with new ways of functioning and become autonomous.
Let’s Talk About Your Team
An initial exchange clarifies whether team coaching can help you.
30 minutes to understand your situation and see what would be useful - free and no commitment