What Is Team Coaching?

Team coaching is a sustained partnership with an intact team, focused on how the team works as a unit: its shared goals, its decisions, its relationships and its accountability. The client is the team itself, not any one member of it.

That last clause is the whole distinction. In executive coaching, the client is a person. In team coaching, the client is the team, and the coach works on what happens between people rather than what happens inside one of them.

The work runs across months. A single facilitated day is something else, and this piece gets to why.

The definition the profession works to

The International Coaching Federation defines team coaching as "partnering in a co-creative and reflective process with a team and its dynamics and relationships in a way that inspires them to maximize their abilities and potential in order to reach their common purpose and shared goals."

That language comes from the ICF Team Coaching Competencies, published in 2020. It's worth reading the whole document if you're evaluating a team coaching provider, because it sets out what a credentialed coach is expected to be able to do with a team.

Two phrases in that definition do most of the work. "Dynamics and relationships" says the subject is the space between people. "Common purpose and shared goals" says the team has to actually be a team, with something it's trying to accomplish together.

The academic definition came first, and it's worth knowing because it's where the field's thinking started. Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman defined team coaching in 2005 as "direct interaction with a team intended to help members make coordinated and task appropriate use of their collective resources in accomplishing the team's work." Their paper, A Theory of Team Coaching, remains the most cited academic treatment of the subject.

The phrase "collective resources" is the useful test. Most teams have more capability than they actually use, and team coaching is the work of closing that gap.

The competencies themselves aren't a separate framework. They're the same eight ICF Core Competencies a coach already works to, with team-specific behaviors layered onto each one:

• Demonstrates ethical practice
• Embodies a coaching mindset
• Establishes and maintains agreements
• Cultivates trust and safety
• Maintains presence
• Listens actively
• Evokes awareness
• Facilitates client growth

ICF also runs a separate credential for this work, the Advanced Certification in Team Coaching. It requires an existing ACC, PCC or MCC credential, 60 or more hours of team coaching education, five team coaching engagements in the last five years, five hours of coaching supervision and a certification exam. If you want a shorthand for whether a coach has done this specifically, that credential is it.

Team coaching and group coaching are not the same thing

Team coaching works with an interdependent team on outcomes they share. Group coaching works with individuals who happen to be in the same room, each pursuing a goal of their own.

The difference is interdependence. A leadership team that has to agree on next year's priorities is a team, because none of them can deliver their piece without the others. Eight directors from eight different business units learning the same delegation skill are a group, and their success doesn't depend on each other at all.

Both are legitimate. They're just built for different problems, and a provider who uses the words interchangeably is telling you something about how carefully they work.

What actually happens in a team coaching session

A team coaching session puts the team's real work on the table and coaches the team while it does that work. There's no case study and no simulation. The material is the decision the team is actually stuck on.

A session usually opens with the team naming what's in front of it. A missed handoff between two functions. A decision that keeps getting reopened. A commitment made at the last session that half the team didn't act on.

The coach then works on the pattern rather than the content. A team that has reopened the same decision four times has a decision-making problem, not a strategy problem, and the coach's job is to make that visible while the team is in the middle of doing it.

Most sessions include a moment where the team stops and looks at itself. Who spoke and who didn't. Which disagreements got raised and which got parked. What the team does when one member is quietly not on board.

Sessions close on commitments with names and dates attached. The team decides what it will do differently before the next session, and the next session opens by checking whether that happened. That loop is most of where the change comes from.

Who team coaching is for

Team coaching suits intact teams with shared goals and enough authority to change how they operate. Five situations account for most engagements.

• Intact leadership teams. A CEO's direct reports, a division leadership team, a function's senior team.
• Cross-functional teams. Groups pulled from different parts of the business to deliver one outcome, which is the hardest structure to make work. A widely cited Harvard Business Review study of 95 teams across 25 corporations found 75 percent of cross-functional teams failing on at least three of five criteria, including staying on budget, on schedule and to spec.
• New teams forming. A team that has never worked together and is about to be measured on something difficult.
• Teams coming out of a reorganization or merger. Two groups with different norms now sharing one set of goals.
• Established teams that have stalled. The team is competent, the individuals are strong and the results have flattened anyway.

Team coaching is the wrong choice when the team isn't interdependent, when the leader has already decided the answer and wants help selling it, or when the real problem is one person's performance. That last one is an individual matter and belongs in executive coaching or a management conversation.

How long team coaching takes, and why it isn't a one-day event

Most team coaching engagements run six to twelve months. The reason is mechanical: the coach has to see the team behave, and a team's real patterns only appear across repeated cycles of commitment, follow-through and failure to follow through.

A one-day offsite can produce alignment, a charter and a genuinely good conversation. What it can't produce is evidence about whether the team does what it said it would do when it goes back to work on Monday.

ICF sets no minimum length for a team coaching engagement, which means duration is a design choice rather than a rule. In practice, the sessions that matter most are the ones where the team confronts a commitment it dropped, and you can't schedule that into a single day.

Our own team coaching runs across several months and starts with an opportunity assessment: conversations with key stakeholders about what the team is actually trying to change. That's followed by a one- or two-day offsite to build the team charter, a Team Selfie diagnostic that reads the team's current state back to it, the coaching sessions themselves, and a reinforcement phase that keeps the new behavior in place after the coach steps back. The full specification is on our team development page.

The short version

Team coaching develops a team's capacity to work as a team. It's a months-long partnership with an interdependent group, working on the team's own live problems, aimed at how the team decides, disagrees, commits and follows through.

If you're weighing it against a team building event, an offsite facilitator or a leadership training program, those are genuinely different products with different jobs. We compared them directly in Team Coaching vs Team Building: What the Difference Costs You.

If you want to talk about whether your team is a candidate, get in touch. Our nine coaches are all ICF certified and all ran teams inside organizations before they started coaching them.