When Team Coaching Gets Personal

Imagine you are leading a team coaching session.

One team member turns towards the leader and says:

“When you do that, I stop telling you what I really think.”

The room goes quiet.

The leader looks shocked.

What happens next?

There is clearly team work here.

What happens between this team and its leader when someone disagrees?

Who speaks?

Who doesn’t?

What does everyone do when tension appears?

How has this pattern been created and maintained?

Those questions belong in the team.

But there may also be something happening inside the leader that may not be fully workable there.

Shame.

Anger.

Fear.

Defensiveness.

Confusion.

A sudden realization about their impact.

Perhaps an overwhelming urge to explain what they actually meant.

Team work involving an individual isn’t always individual work

This distinction matters.

Something can involve one person very directly and still belong to the team’s work.

If the leader’s behaviour affects how the team handles challenge, the team needs to be able to work with that pattern.

Moving the issue immediately into the leader’s individual coaching can inadvertently remove something the team needs to address collectively.

Some of the leader’s emotion may itself be part of the relational work. The team may need to witness uncertainty, vulnerability, accountability or repair rather than have every deeply personal response moved elsewhere.

But the reverse is also true.

We shouldn’t expect the team to become the container for every piece of personal developmental work stirred up in its members.

The leader may need somewhere else to explore:

Why did that affect me so strongly?

What was I protecting?

What happens inside me when my authority is challenged?

What assumptions am I making about what a good leader should know or provide?

What is the disappointed dream underneath my reaction?

That is different work.

A soft place to do hard developmental work

This is one reason we value individual coaching alongside team coaching.

Team coaching can be exposing.

People are discovering themselves while simultaneously remaining in relationship with others.

For the leader, that can be particularly demanding because they may need to hear something difficult about their impact and continue sitting with the people they lead.

Individual coaching can offer a soft place to do hard developmental work.

Not a comfortable place in which challenge disappears.

A sufficiently safe place to stay with the challenge long enough for something new to become possible.

Individual coaching can work with meaning, assumptions, patterns and choices activated by the experience. Where the material moves beyond coaching scope or the practitioner’s competence, another form of professional support may be more appropriate.

And this isn’t only relevant to the formal leader.

A team member may discover that they hold far more informal power than they realized.

Someone may become aware of how quickly they withdraw.

Another may recognize their role in maintaining conflict between two colleagues.

Another may discover how strongly their sense of belonging is tied to being indispensable.

Ideally, developmental support is not reserved only for the most powerful person in the system.

This raises an equity question: who receives confidential developmental support, and who is expected to do their development in public?

But individual coaching isn’t the back room

There is a danger.

The leader leaves a difficult team session and tells their individual coach:

“They’re all blaming me. Half of them are the problem.”

What is the coach’s job?

It isn’t necessarily to agree.

Nor is it to defend the team.

The individual coaching space can allow the leader to say what they couldn’t appropriately process in the team—and then become curious about it.

What else might be true?

What are they defending?

What did they hear underneath the words?

What part of the feedback might they not want to hear?

What is theirs to take responsibility for?

What new capacity would allow them to return differently?

Individual coaching alongside team coaching should not become private strategizing about how to “deal with the team.”

Its developmental value lies in increasing the person’s capacity to participate differently in the system.

The content doesn’t need to travel

This is an important distinction when we start connecting individual and team coaching.

Integration does not require the individual coach to tell the team coach what the leader said.

It doesn’t require the team coach to brief the individual coach after team sessions.

The confidential content can stay where it belongs.

What travels is the development.

A leader returns better able to hear challenge.

A team member returns more aware of their informal influence.

Someone becomes able to stay in a difficult conversation rather than withdrawing.

Another relinquishes some control.

The system encounters that person differently because the person is participating differently.

The content doesn’t need to travel. Capacity does.

This does not mean information never travels. Agreed themes, structural issues, safeguarding concerns, or insights a person chooses to bring back may appropriately move across boundaries. Confidential coaching content does not need to travel for development to travel.

Which raises a very practical question for coaches.

If individual and team coaching are happening at the same time, should the same person be doing both?

This is Part Four 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.

or

Read Part Five, Should I Coach the Team AND the Leader?

These moments require more than a good question or facilitation technique.

Master the Art of Team Coaching creates space to develop the discernment and systemic presence they ask of us.

Team Coaching Supervision offers a space to explore what you see, hold and miss in your work with teams.