Should I Coach the Team AND the Leader?

You’ve been coaching a leader for six months.

One day they say:

“This has been really useful. Would you coach my team too?”

It can sound like a natural next step.

You know the leader.

You understand their context.

They trust you.

You may already know quite a lot about the team.

Why wouldn’t you?

Sometimes there may be good reasons to hold both roles.

Continuity, established trust, contextual knowledge, fewer handoffs and accessibility—particularly in smaller organizations—can all be real advantages of one practitioner holding both roles.

But before saying yes, we think there are some important questions to ask.

And most of them aren’t about whether you believe you can remain impartial.

Imagine being on the team

Your boss introduces the team coach:

“This is Alex. We’ve been working together for the last six months.”

The coach says:

“The team is my client now, and everything we do here is confidential.”

You may completely trust their professionalism.

But what might you still wonder?

What has my boss already told them about me?

What do they already think is wrong with this team?

If I challenge my boss, whose perspective will the coach understand more easily?

Will something I say here affect their private coaching conversations?

Nothing unethical needs to have happened.

The perception of allegiance can change the field before the first team coaching conversation has even begun.

Supporting the leader isn’t the same as aligning with the leader

A team coach will inevitably support the formal leader.

The leader is part of the team.

Their development matters.

Their capacity may have significant impact on what becomes possible collectively.

But supporting the leader is different from becoming aligned with the leader’s interpretation of the team.

Imagine the leader privately tells you:

“They’re blaming me, but honestly, two of them are the real problem.”

If you are also the team coach, you now carry that information into the room.

You may be highly skilled at noticing your bias.

You may maintain confidentiality perfectly.

But you cannot unknow what you know.

And the team may know that you know things they don’t know you know.

That is a complex position from which to coach the collective.

Triangulation can happen quietly

Triangulation doesn’t require anyone to behave badly.

A team member tells the coach something privately about the leader.

The leader tells the coach something privately about the team member.

The coach becomes the only person holding both stories.

Soon the coach is carrying relationships that the team itself needs to hold.

This is one reason we often prefer different practitioners when individual and team coaching are happening concurrently.

The individual coach can be fully in service of the individual’s development.

The team coach can remain clearly in relationship with the team as the client.

Each has a more clearly differentiated developmental relationship.

That doesn’t mean the coaching is disconnected.

It means we connect it differently.

Before accepting both roles, ask

What relationships already exist?

What does each party believe my role is?

What confidential information do I already hold?

How might team members experience my relationship with the leader?

Could my existing relationship make some conversations easier—and others harder?

What actual or perceived conflicts of interest might arise?

What biases might I carry without realizing it?

How would I respond if the leader told me something privately about a team member?

Would another practitioner create clearer and more trustworthy conditions for the work?

These aren’t simply contracting questions.

They are systemic questions.

Power, trust and perception matter.

Is it ever okay to do both?

We don’t think this needs an absolute rule.

Timing matters.

Context matters.

The nature of the previous coaching relationship matters.

Contracting matters.

Practitioner capability matters.

There may be situations in which the same coach can appropriately work across roles.

But concurrent individual coaching of the leader and coaching of their team deserves particularly careful consideration.

Ethical practice is not only about whether we maintain confidentiality.

It also asks us to consider boundaries, multiple relationships, power, bias and actual or perceived conflicts of interest.

Sometimes the most systemic choice is not to hold every part of the system ourselves.

Which leads to the final question in this series:

If we differentiate the coaching relationships, how do we keep the development connected?

This is Part Five of Where Does the Work Live?, our six-part series exploring individual coaching, team coaching and the developmental ecosystem around teams, by Sherry Matheson and Kerry Woodcock.

Read Part One, Why Individual Coaching Isn’t Team Coaching — and Why We Need Both.

Read Part Two, Where does the work belong?

Read Part Three, The Leader Is a Team Member. And They Aren’t.

Read Part Four, When Team Coaching Gets Personal. 

or

Read Part Six, Integrate the Development. Differentiate the Relationships.

If these questions are stretching how you think about working with teams, they are central to the territory we explore in Master the Art of Team Coaching.

And when the work becomes complex, supervision gives us somewhere to pause, reflect and look again.

Team Coaching Supervision offers a space to explore what you see, hold and miss in your work with teams — deepening your practice through reflection and dialogue.

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