Team Coaching as a Spiritual Practice

Team coaches, have you ever thought of your work as a form of spiritual practice? In navigating complex times, we are called on to support teams as they explore purpose at a collective level. If spiritual practice is an intentional activity that nourishes a relationship with a divine universal energy, it may well be part of what we do with teams.

Team coaches are skilled at sensing into the undercurrents of a system. Acting as instruments, we tune into our senses and mirror back what we notice physically and emotionally within and without us. We watch for cues – a silence, a smile, or perhaps an aura of sadness, frustration, or excitement – and reflect those back to the group to create awareness of the collective energy. As the team begins to see, hear and feel itself as one entity, the capacity to tap into collective intelligence grows.

As a coach, you guide team members in first hearing their own voices within the team, then those of others, and only then moving to a balcony view of tapping into what the voice of the team has to say. At this point, many issues between team members dissipate as they lean into an aligned team purpose. Understanding who they are at their essence helps in serving themselves as a system, and to see how their system serves the department, the organization, clients and the world.

In meeting regularly to focus on the team as a single entity rather than only the relationship between team members, we engage in a form of spiritual practice that can indeed be transformational.

As we work with our own internal systems, coaches can mirror this transformation in a parallel practice. Coaching supervision – recommended by accreditation boards including the EMCC and ICF – is increasingly recognized and even required for team coaches pursuing the ACTC credential.

Supervision offers a spiritual way to connect to your coaching practice and the teams you serve, as you expand your capacity to see, release stuck energy and tap into systemic potential. 

Whether you enter supervision alone or with your co-coach, and work one-on-one or in a group with a supervisor, one aspect of supervision is as a space to consider how you are connecting to source. Perhaps you might reflect on your essence as co-coaches with the use of metaphor so that you may access it with more ease, or reflect on the energy that will support a particular team. In doing so, you overlap the practical with the energetic elements of coaching – a spiritual practice.

Kerry Woodcock PhD, PCC, ORSCC, ACTC, EIA-SP, ITCA, ESIA, develops core, collective and change leadership capacity in leaders, teams and organizations, coaching pioneers and influencers to amplify the power of relationship and lead over the edge of change. 

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