In team coaching we often say:
The team is the client.
That distinction matters.
We aren’t there as the leader’s coach with the rest of the team providing useful information.
Nor are we there to improve each person individually and hope a better team emerges.
We coach the collective.
And yet there is something else we need to remember.
The people sitting around the table do not necessarily have equal power.
The leader is in the team
The leader participates in the team’s patterns.
They may avoid conflict.
Over-function.
Rescue.
Dominate.
Withdraw.
Invite challenge.
Close challenge down.
Create dependency.
Encourage shared leadership.
Like every other member, the leader both shapes and is shaped by the team.
So it would be strange to treat the leader as somehow outside the system we are coaching.
But it would be equally strange to pretend that formal authority disappears when team coaching begins.
The leader may have influence over resources, priorities, opportunities, performance assessments and people’s careers.
When the leader says:
“Please challenge me.”
a team member is not necessarily taking the same interpersonal risk as the leader takes when challenging them.
The leader is a member of the team.
And they aren’t simply another team member.
Both are true.
Power doesn’t disappear because we put the chairs in a circle
This becomes particularly important when we are trying to create psychological safety.
A team may appear open.
People may be friendly.
The leader may genuinely want candour.
And still, people may be carefully calculating what is safe to say.
As team coaches, we need to become curious about formal rank and power rather than assuming equality because everyone has been invited to participate.
Who can make decisions?
Who controls resources?
Whose approval matters?
Who carries consequences for whom?
But formal authority is only part of the picture.
Power is also shaped by identity, culture and belonging: whose voice is treated as credible, who is seen as an insider, and who carries greater interpersonal or career risk in challenging authority. Equal invitation does not create equal risk.
Who else has power here?
Sometimes the person with greatest influence in the team isn’t the person with the biggest title.
It may be the person with twenty years of organizational history.
The technical expert nobody can afford to lose.
The charismatic team member others follow.
The person with particularly strong relationships across the organization.
The person everyone looks towards before deciding whether something is a good idea.
Even the person who rarely speaks may hold considerable influence.
Watch what happens when they finally do.
This is informal rank.
And it matters because teams organize themselves around influence as well as formal structure.
Which leads to a question we find increasingly useful:
Whose capacity is organizing this team?
And what conditions in the system are organizing the capacity this team can currently access?
Capacity isn’t distributed evenly
People within a team do not necessarily bring the same developmental capacities.
One person may be more able to stay with uncertainty. Another may be more able to work with conflict, share authority, take different perspectives or think beyond their own function.
That doesn’t mean we can simply rank people as more or less developed. Development is uneven. We can be highly developed in one capacity and less developed in another. And what we can access can also change under pressure or in particular relationships.
Imagine several members of a team are able to hold ambiguity, share authority, work constructively with disagreement and think beyond their own function.
But an influential member finds uncertainty much harder to tolerate and repeatedly pulls the group back towards certainty, control or familiar ways of working.
The developmental capacity exists within the team.
But the team may not yet be able to access and enact it consistently as a collective.
We’ve seen teams respond to this gap by initially protecting and accommodating.
People translate.
Compensate.
Work around.
Take on more themselves.
Try not to expose the gap.
Eventually that accommodation can become frustration.
Then hopelessness.
Then disengagement.
Sometimes people leave.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the team has “outgrown” its leader.
That’s too simple.
It suggests something subtler:
The developmental potential present within a team can exceed what the team is currently able to access and enact collectively.
And people with significant formal or informal influence can have a powerful effect on what becomes possible.
What does the team coach do?
Not diagnose the least-developed person in the room.
Not secretly decide who is holding everyone back.
And certainly not turn team coaching into an assessment of the leader.
Instead, become curious with the team.
What becomes possible here—and what repeatedly becomes impossible?
Around whom or what does that change?
What happens when leadership is shared?
What happens when authority is challenged?
Who has influence here that may not be visible on the organization chart?
What capacities already exist in this team that you are not yet able to consistently access together?
These questions shift our attention from:
Who is the problem?
towards:
What is organizing this system?
And sometimes that inquiry reveals developmental work the team can undertake together.
Sometimes it reveals work an influential individual may need to undertake themselves.
Which takes us to another question.
What happens when team coaching becomes deeply personal?
This is Part Three 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?
or
Read Part Four, When Team Coaching Gets Personal.
Where might your team coaching practice take you next?
Deepen your practice. Expand your perspective. Discover what’s possible when you go deeper into the work.
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