Why Individual Coaching Isn’t Team Coaching — and Why We Need Both

Imagine you are coaching a leader who tells you:

“My team doesn’t speak up. I ask what they think, but nobody says anything.”

There is plenty you can explore in individual coaching.

What does the leader do when someone disagrees with them? How quickly do they offer their own view? What happens when someone brings an idea they don’t agree with? What might they experiment with differently?

That could be valuable developmental work.

But you cannot actually coach the team’s silence.

The team isn’t there.

Now imagine you are coaching the whole team.

Someone finally says:

“I don’t challenge you because when I do, you explain why I’m wrong.”

The leader goes quiet.

Now the work is different.

The team can notice what happens between them when someone challenges the leader. Perhaps others recognize that they also stay silent. Someone might acknowledge that it has become easier to let the leader decide. The leader may begin to see how something they thought of as explaining or being helpful is experienced by others.

This is work that could not happen in quite the same way in individual coaching because the relationship itself is now in the room.

But something else may also have happened.

The leader has just heard something difficult about themselves in front of the people they lead.

What happens to that?

Different kinds of development

Individual coaching and team coaching develop different things.

In individual coaching, the individual is the client. We can work deeply with their experience, assumptions, patterns, choices, identity and development.

In team coaching, the team is the client.

We are interested not only in each person but in what happens between them and what they are able to create collectively.

Can this team disagree?

Can they make difficult decisions together?

Can they work with conflict rather than avoid it?

Can they share leadership?

Can they notice and change the patterns they repeatedly create?

Can they respond to what their organization and stakeholders need from them?

These are collective capacities.

A group of highly developed individuals does not automatically make a highly developed team.

And yet the two aren’t independent.

Think in levels

One way we find useful for thinking about this is through holons.

The term holon, introduced by Arthur Koestler and later taken up in systems thinking, describes something that is both a whole in itself and part of something larger.

An individual is a whole person and part of relationships and teams.

A team is a whole and part of an organization.

An organization is a whole and part of wider systems.

So we might imagine:

Individual ⇄ Relationship ⇄ Team ⇄ Organization ⇄ Wider system

We can distinguish between these levels, but we cannot completely separate them.

If a leader develops a greater capacity to hear challenge without becoming defensive, that changes the conditions in the team.

If a team stops automatically deferring difficult decisions upwards, that changes what is required of its leader.

If an organizational structure rewards individual competition, that affects what becomes possible between members of a team.

Development at one holonic level changes the conditions for development at other levels.

And team coaching reveals things.

This is where it gets interesting.

Team coaching doesn’t only reveal things about the team.

It can reveal things about individuals too.

Power, authority, trust, conflict, vulnerability, belonging, exclusion and influence are no longer being described from a distance. They are happening while we are coaching.

The leader who thought they welcomed challenge discovers how they actually respond to it.

The person who thought they had little influence discovers everyone waits to hear what they think.

The team member who describes everyone else as conflict-avoidant discovers how quickly they smooth things over themselves.

Some of what becomes visible belongs in the team’s work.

Some may need deeper individual attention.

Some may belong within a particular relationship.

And sometimes what looks like a team problem may also involve something in the wider organization.

This doesn’t mean the team coach has to decide immediately where the “real problem” is.

Quite the opposite.

The more systemic our coaching becomes, the less quickly we need to decide where the problem lives.

We can become curious about several levels at once.

What is happening for this person?

What is happening between these people?

What pattern is the team creating?

What conditions around the team might be shaping it?

And then comes perhaps the most important question:

Where can the work actually be done?

That’s the question we’ll explore next.

Because team coaching frequently reveals developmental work that may also require attention somewhere else.

This is Part One 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 Two, Where does the work belong?. 

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.