From Trust to Transformation: How Team Coaching Enhances Leadership Performance
Written by Louise Fogstrup and Karen Saunders
Louise and Karen are Enablers at Enabling Change. With backgrounds in change management, business transformation, organisational development, executive coaching and leadership development, they have worked with executive teams and senior management across different industries and geographies. Learn more about them here.
It is always expected that high performing sport teams have coaches. Indeed, it would be unusual to find a professional soccer team without a coach. Their role is to bring out the best in the players, make sure that they work cohesively towards their goal and enable continuous and sustainable high performance. This is how professional sports operate.
However, it is very different in the business world. Here, we generally expect the most senior leader in the room to set strategic direction while also acting as a coach for their team. Herein lies the first challenge. In a sports team setting, a coach is someone who can look at the team from the outside in. They serve as an objective observer, offering an external perspective that helps the team recognise areas for growth, strengthen collaboration, and improve team performance.
The higher up the organisation leaders go, the lonelier it can feel. While they may have more opportunities for general feedback, few people can observe the leadership team in action and offer truly unbiased insights with an outside-in view. This lack of external perspective makes it difficult for leaders to gain the clarity needed to enhance both their own performance and that of their team. Consequently, many leaders feel the pressure to be everything for their teams without sufficient support, leading to teams that struggle to reach their full potential and deliver the results expected.
Enabling Change has the privilege of working closely with many leadership teams across extended periods of time. Each leadership team has its own strengths and challenges, but a common theme in times of change is the need for stronger alignment and a unified voice.
“As coaches, we bring an outside-in perspective, identifying patterns across teams. This enables us to tailor our support, helping each team function cohesively and perform at its best.
Over the years, we have worked with several organisations and leadership teams to address these challenges. By providing team coaching to their leadership team, we enabled them to stand more aligned as one leadership team through improve collaboration and create a more supportive and effective work environment.
In this article, we share an example of our approach. We offer key insights from the experience, and we reflect on the value that team coaching brings to leadership teams.
Just as no two leadership teams are the same, we craft our approach to meet the distinct needs of each one.
Case Study
Context
The Leadership Team of a medium-size company was taking their organisation through a transformation. We had been supporting the executive and their team to build a strategy for doing so. The focus to date had mainly been on the transformation itself and its desired impact, to make sure they had a shared journey. It was recognised that dedicating time to improving teamwork, by exploring their blend of behavioural preferences, was essential to bring out the best in each other. It would enable them to lead a successful transformation as one leadership team.
As part of this journey a 2-day event was organised to give space to grow together behaviourally as a group to drive a strategic journey.
Our Approach
We kicked off with holding individual sessions with each leader to build rapport, gather insights, and provide feedback on their personal profiles. In this instance we used DISC, as we felt it was best suited. Note however that in Enabling Change we use a broad range of profiling tools.
Each leader reflected on two key questions:
1. How do I see myself leading change?
2. How do I see us leading change as a Leadership Team?
These sessions encouraged self-awareness and gave each leader a voice, free from external influence. We then compared their insights with employee feedback from recent change workshops and a change readiness survey to identify patterns and opportunities.
From this, we identified key strengths:
The change had been communicated effectively.
Leaders had clearly explained the rationale and goals.
The organisation broadly recognised the need for change.
And several challenges:
A need for clearer guidance on how to bring the transformation to life across organisational areas.
The importance of the leadership team speaking with one voice.
A tendency for leaders to lead change individually rather than as a collective.
During the two-day event, the team focused on defining a shared purpose, building trust, and exploring team dynamics. DISC profiling helped the team understand their behavioural preferences and how these influence collaboration and leadership.
On Day 2, the team explored accountability, trust, decision-making, and their role in driving change, ensuring clarity and alignment on the way forward.
Results
Addressing the challenge of individual vs. collective leadership, the one-on-one DISC sessions enabled each leader to engage in self-reflection ahead of the event. This preparation helped them arrive ready to explore their behavioural preferences as a group, laying the groundwork for a more unified approach to leading change.
To support the need for a shared voice and direction, the team defined a collective purpose. This became a guiding compass for future decisions and actions, helping them assess whether their behaviours and choices were aligned with their overarching mission.
The team explored trust, which created space for vulnerability and honest dialogue, setting a constructive tone for the sessions. They recognised that trust-building is a continuous investment - one that strengthens engagement across the organisation.
To improve clarity on how to bring the transformation to life, the team worked in groups to explore accountability, decision-making, and their strategic roles. These exercises helped translate abstract goals into concrete actions and responsibilities.
As a result of these efforts, the Leadership Team developed a stronger collective mindset and a more cohesive approach to navigating change dilemmas.
“Most importantly the results lasted. Nine months later, when we revisited the team and repeated the trust assessment, scores had increased by 50%. The team demonstrated greater alignment, stronger collaboration, and a visibly more unified presence.”
Reflection
Why Leadership Team coaching?
Building Team Trust
As mentioned earlier, the higher up the organisation one goes, the lonelier it can feel. This resonates with many of our clients. As trust develops through team coaching, the barriers gradually come down and individuals are willing to share their thoughts more openly. This helps others in the group realise they’re not alone in their feelings and experiences. It develops a sense of ‘we’re all in this together’ and opens the team up to more authentic and vulnerable conversations, thus strengthening the bond and enabling space for creativity and high performance.
Building Team Awareness
Team coaching provides a platform to discover the blend of behavioural preferences across a group. Often supported by behaviour profiling, this elevates the self-awareness of individuals to a team level. By applying the blend of strengths and limitations to the context the team is operating in, they can consider how this may be serving their ambition. Do they risk a particular trait taking over in the group due to the majority holding a preference for it; is there anything that might be lacking? If so, how can this be mitigated?
@ Enabling Change, The benefits of Leadership Team Coaching in Change Readiness
Building Team Purpose
In addition to considering how the team ‘shows up’ for each other, team coaching enables consideration of the impact on the wider business. What should employees of the company be able to expect from the leadership team as a whole, rather than as a group of individuals who represent their own functional area? What is their purpose as a collective? This cements the key purpose and focus for the team, and they can hold each other to account in support of this.
Enhancing Performance and Change Readiness
Team coaching can be a powerful tool and a true game changer, for improving performance and creating a change-ready team. It offers an external perspective that can shift team dynamics, making it particularly valuable when performance falls short of expectations.
When integrated with internal initiatives such as behavioural profiling and applied within the context of a concrete business challenge, team coaching provides a shared focus for the leadership team. It helps strengthen trust, alignment, purpose, and collaboration, enabling the team to work more effectively as a unified force, improving the likelihood of successful change.
Conclusion:
Just as in professional sports, where a coach creates the environment for athletes to reflect, grow, and perform at their best, the role of a team coach in business leadership teams, is to foster the conditions for meaningful reflection. By enabling vulnerability and candid conversations, trust can be built, an essential foundation for high-performing teams.
However, lasting success requires more than just external support. Leadership teams must commit to making the time and space to grow together, holding themselves and each other accountable. Everyone has a role to play in ensuring collective success.
While the benefits of operating as a cohesive unit are clear, overcoming ingrained habits and ways-of-working can be challenging. Early efforts may feel awkward and time-consuming. This is why ongoing communication and regular review are critical in sustaining progress and embedding new ways-of-working.
By embracing the principles of team coaching, leadership teams, just like sports teams, can achieve greater alignment, improved decision-making, resilience, and agility to navigate complex challenges.
References and further reading:
“The five dysfunctions of a team” - Patrick Lencioni, 2002, Jossey-Bass
“We’re all in this together” – Mike Robbins, 2020, Hay House
“The fearless organization” – Amy C. Edmondson, 2019, HBS, Wiley