Team Coaching: unlocking the potential of high performing teams

Your leadership team is smart, experienced, and full of good intent. Individually, they are clearly high performing, full of potential. So why are decisions slow? Why do silos dig in deeper? Why do they not pull together? 

It’s easy to point at diaries, deadlines, or difficult personalities, which all no doubt have an impact. You may well have spent time and money trying to address those things, perhaps with some success, before things fell back. But what if that’s not the main issue? 

For obvious reasons, most teams spend their time focused on what they’re here to do. Strategy. Delivery. Transformation. KPIs. These are the ‘visible’ priorities of the team’s life. Meeting agendas reflect it; project plans depend on it. It’s the scaffolding of the team. 

But it’s not what’s driving your team. The real engine is running underneath. 

 

The hidden mindsets driving your team 

What you don’t really talk about (but everyone probably sees) becomes the most powerful thing in the room. The patterns everyone feels but no one quite names. The unspoken assumptions. The obvious, or hidden, conflicts and tensions. 

Have you ever sat in a meeting with an elephant so obvious that it might as well be holding the pen? That’s the process level. And it runs your team, whether you like it or not. If you leave it unchecked, it’ll quietly erode performance for months, if not years. 

It is highly unlikely to resolve itself until someone, the team’s leader, finally decides to grab the bull by the horns and go boldly into it. That’s where team coaching can help.  

Results hierarchy that displays behaviours (actions), relationships, and results above the threshold of visibility, and mindsets (attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) below the threshold of visibility.

 

What is team coaching? 

Team coaching allows a group of people with common goals, such as senior management teams, to work with a coach to reflect and work towards their aspirations.  

The series of coaching helps a group slow down just long enough to see what’s really going on within the business. It gives space to tackle the business priorities, and also the human dynamic that underpins it. With the right coach, teams get to ask the things they normally avoid: 

• What patterns are we stuck in? 

• What are we not saying? 

• How are we affecting each other? 

• How does that ripple out, for better or worse, into our culture and wider performance? 

It helps teams to name what feels off-limits and gives them a shared language to do something about it. 

Not theory or fluff – practical, applied awareness that leads to better thinking, better relating, better decisions, and better results. 

 

Creating high-performing teams through coaching  

Great teams don’t just get the work done. They get curious about how they’re doing it, and what it’s doing to them. They test their assumptions. Not behind backs, but face-to-face. They lean into awkwardness, notice their limiting patterns and blind spots, not just results. 

Team coaching creates a space that allows the group to understand where each person is really coming from - not just what they want, but why it matters so much to them. This is important for teams, as it’s usually where a lot of misunderstanding comes from. For example, if you see yourself as a steward of the whole organisation, but one of your directors is motivated primarily by their own department’s needs, you’re going to miss each other completely. 

In short, team coaching helps you to reflect together, not as a tick-box exercise but to keep the team honest, human, and learning. 

 

Accelerating performance through reflection 

Most senior teams think that they’re moving too fast to ask how they’re showing up. But speed without reflection is rarely effective. As an old mentor of mine used to say, there’s a difference between movement and progress.  

A helpful reframe is that most teams are moving SO FAST that they must find time to ask how they’re showing up, no matter what. 

Some of the conversations that take place aren’t comfortable. They’ve been avoided for the very reason that they’re awkward, exposing, and even painful. But they’re often the most important ones leaders have because they enable the team to step up to a whole new level of operation. 

We saw this through our work with global media and entertainment company Vubiquity. Faced with a need to align the leadership team on business goals and forge stronger connections, we gave the team space to reflect, build trust, and have honest conversations. Combined with personal development action plans, this insight set the foundation for honesty, transparency, and increased alignment to support the company's strategic goals.  

 Read the full case study >  

When a senior team shifts its approach, the ripple effect isn’t subtle. Everyone feels it, and it changes how people experience leadership and the organisation’s culture. It lifts the ceiling on collaboration. 

So, if your team feels stuck - great people, great skills, great intentions, results that don’t match - don’t just work harder. Pause, reflect, and consider whether executive team coaching and development might help you put some elephants on the table and deal with them. That’s usually where the breakthrough lives.