Team Coaching Models Explained: What the Research Says and Which Approaches Are Gaining Momentum
Posted by Cara Leverett
Team Coaching Models Explained: What the Research Says and Which Approaches Are Gaining Momentum
Team coaching has matured rapidly. The challenge is no longer whether to use it, but understanding which approach is most appropriate for the challenge your team is facing.
Team coaching has moved from a niche leadership intervention to a mainstream capability-building strategy.
As organisations become more matrixed, geographically distributed, and dependent on cross-functional collaboration, many performance challenges can no longer be solved by developing individual leaders alone. Organisations increasingly recognise that high performance emerges from collective effectiveness: how teams make decisions, manage conflict, navigate complexity, and adapt under pressure.
This shift has accelerated interest in team coaching. Yet despite growing demand, there remains considerable confusion about what team coaching actually involves. The term is often used interchangeably with team facilitation, team development, leadership offsites, action learning, and group coaching. While these approaches may overlap, they are not the same.
For senior leaders considering investment in team coaching, understanding the underlying models matters. Different approaches are grounded in different assumptions about performance, behaviour change, systems thinking, and organisational effectiveness. Some have substantial evidence behind them. Others are emerging and continue to evolve.
At BOLDLY, we see team coaching as one of the most important developments in leadership and organisational development over the past decade. The growing research base suggests that when applied appropriately, team coaching can improve not only team performance, but also adaptability, psychological safety, stakeholder engagement, and organisational alignment.
Why Team Coaching Has Become More Important
Historically, leadership development focused on the individual.
The assumption was straightforward: develop better leaders and organisational performance will follow.
While leadership capability remains critical, many contemporary organisational challenges are increasingly systemic rather than individual. Strategy execution, transformation, innovation, customer experience, and culture are rarely determined by one person's capability. They emerge through interactions between people, teams, structures, incentives, and organisational dynamics.
As Professor Peter Hawkins has observed through his work on systemic leadership and team performance (https://www.peterhawkins.com), organisations increasingly succeed or fail through the effectiveness of their leadership teams rather than the effectiveness of individual leaders.
This has fundamentally altered how many organisations approach development.
Rather than asking, "How do we develop better leaders?" organisations are increasingly asking, "How do we improve the quality of collective leadership?"
This question sits at the heart of modern team coaching.
What Makes Team Coaching Different?
The International Coaching Federation defines team coaching as partnering with a team to maximise its collective talent and potential in order to reach common goals and shared objectives.
Importantly, the client is the team itself.
This distinguishes team coaching from executive coaching delivered to multiple individuals within the same team.
A team coach focuses on:
- Team purpose
- Collective effectiveness
- Decision-making patterns
- Team dynamics
- Stakeholder relationships
- Shared accountability
- Systemic interactions
The focus is not simply on improving individual behaviour. It is on improving how the team functions as a collective system.
The Hawkins Five Disciplines Model
Among contemporary approaches, Peter Hawkins' Five Disciplines Model has become one of the most influential frameworks globally.
Developed through decades of work with executive teams and now taught internationally through the Systemic Team Coaching approach (https://www.peterhawkins.com), the model shifts attention away from internal team dynamics alone and towards the broader organisational system.
The model focuses on five interconnected disciplines:
Commissioning
Why does this team exist?
What value is it expected to create?
Clarifying
What shared purpose and objectives unite the team?
Co-Creating
How effectively does the team work together?
Connecting
How well does the team engage stakeholders beyond the team itself?
Core Learning
How effectively does the team learn and adapt over time?
One reason this model has gained significant traction is its emphasis on stakeholder value creation rather than team harmony. High-performing teams are evaluated not by how much they enjoy working together, but by the value they create for the wider organisation.
This perspective aligns particularly well with executive and senior leadership teams navigating increasingly complex business environments.
Systemic Team Coaching
Systemic Team Coaching has arguably become the dominant methodology in large-scale organisational team coaching programs.
Its central premise is that teams cannot be understood in isolation.
Every team operates within multiple systems:
- Organisational systems
- Customer systems
- Market systems
- Cultural systems
- Leadership systems
Performance challenges often originate outside the team itself.
For example, a leadership team struggling with alignment may actually be responding to conflicting incentives elsewhere in the organisation. A project team experiencing conflict may be operating within an unclear governance structure.
Systemic Team Coaching encourages teams to explore the broader context shaping their behaviour.
This systems orientation reflects wider developments in organisational psychology and organisational development, where linear explanations of performance are increasingly being replaced by complexity-informed approaches. Similar thinking has emerged within the work of the Center for Creative Leadership (https://www.ccl.org), which continues to publish research highlighting the importance of collective leadership capability and organisational systems.
Among large organisations undergoing transformation, systemic approaches continue to gain popularity because they acknowledge the realities of organisational complexity.
The GROW Model Applied to Teams
Many executives are familiar with the GROW model developed by Sir John Whitmore.
The framework focuses on:
- Goal
- Reality
- Options
- Will
While originally developed for individual coaching, many practitioners have adapted it for team settings.
The appeal of GROW lies in its simplicity and accessibility.
Teams can quickly align around goals, explore current realities, generate options, and commit to action.
However, the model is generally considered less sophisticated than systemic approaches when dealing with complex organisational challenges.
For this reason, GROW often works best in operational teams with clearly defined objectives rather than executive teams navigating ambiguity and transformation.
Action Learning Approaches
Action learning occupies an interesting position between coaching, leadership development, and problem-solving.
Developed by Reg Revans, action learning involves small groups working on real organisational challenges while simultaneously reflecting on how they think, learn, and collaborate.
Participants present live challenges and receive structured questioning from peers rather than advice.
The process develops both individual and collective capability.
Action learning remains particularly popular in leadership development programs, transformation initiatives, and high-potential talent programs because it embeds learning directly into real organisational work rather than separating development from execution.
Relational Team Coaching
Relational team coaching draws heavily on social constructionist and dialogic theories.
Rather than viewing teams as collections of individuals, relational approaches focus on interactions.
The underlying assumption is that performance emerges through conversations, relationships, narratives, and shared meaning-making.
The coach pays particular attention to:
- Language patterns
- Power dynamics
- Dialogue quality
- Inclusion
- Collective sense-making
This model is increasingly relevant in organisations facing uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change.
Rather than seeking the "right answer", relational approaches help teams improve their capacity to think together.
The growing interest in relational approaches parallels research into psychological safety, largely influenced by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson (https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6451). Her work has demonstrated that high-performing teams are characterised by environments where challenge, learning, experimentation, and constructive disagreement can coexist.
Team Coaching Through Adult Development
A growing area of interest involves applying adult development theory to teams.
Drawing on researchers such as Jennifer Garvey Berger (https://cultivatingleadership.com), Robert Kegan, and Bill Torbert, these approaches explore how teams collectively make sense of complexity.
The focus shifts from behaviour to meaning-making.
Questions include:
- How does the team interpret challenges?
- How does the team respond to ambiguity?
- What assumptions shape decision-making?
- What developmental growth is required?
These approaches are particularly relevant for senior executive teams navigating transformation, disruption, AI adoption, and organisational change.
Many of these challenges are adaptive rather than technical in nature. They require shifts in mindset, perspective, and collective meaning-making rather than the application of existing expertise.
As leadership challenges become more adaptive, developmental team coaching continues to attract significant interest from practitioners and researchers alike.
What Does the Research Say?
Compared with executive coaching, team coaching remains a relatively young field.
The evidence base has expanded significantly over the past decade, although research remains less mature than individual coaching research.
Several themes consistently emerge.
Research from David Clutterbuck and colleagues (https://www.clutterbuck-cmi.com), alongside contributions from Peter Hawkins, Ruth Wageman, Erik de Haan, and others, suggests that team coaching can positively influence communication quality, psychological safety, role clarity, stakeholder engagement, collective accountability, and team performance.
Research increasingly suggests that coaching helps teams develop greater learning agility and adaptability under changing conditions.
This may become one of the most important benefits as organisations face accelerating disruption.
Studies also indicate that external coaches can help teams surface blind spots, challenge assumptions, and interrupt established patterns more effectively than internal leaders.
Importantly, team coaching appears most effective when connected to real organisational work rather than simulated learning environments.
The strongest outcomes typically occur when coaching is integrated into live strategic priorities.
The broader evidence base for coaching has also benefited significantly from the work of the University of Sydney Coaching Psychology Unit (https://www.sydney.edu.au/business/coaching-psychology-unit.html), led by Professor Anthony Grant, whose research has helped establish coaching as a legitimate field of psychological inquiry.
Similarly, the Centre for Evidence Based Coaching (https://www.centreforevidencebasedcoaching.com) has played an important role in synthesising coaching research and translating evidence into practical guidance for organisations and practitioners.
The Role of Psychological Safety
One of the most influential studies on team effectiveness remains Google's Project Aristotle (https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/).
The project sought to identify what differentiated high-performing teams from others.
Its findings challenged many assumptions.
The strongest predictor of team effectiveness was not intelligence, tenure, technical expertise, or personality.
It was psychological safety.
This finding has had significant implications for team coaching. Increasingly, coaches are helping teams develop the conversational norms, trust, challenge mechanisms, and learning behaviours that enable psychological safety to emerge naturally.
Professional Standards and Industry Development
As team coaching has matured, professional standards have become increasingly important.
Organisations such as the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (https://www.emccglobal.org) and the Association for Coaching (https://www.associationforcoaching.com) have contributed significantly to the development of team coaching frameworks, ethical standards, accreditation pathways, and supervision practices.
This professionalisation reflects a broader trend across the coaching industry.
Organisations are no longer simply asking whether coaching works.
They are asking which approaches work, under what conditions, and how quality can be assessed consistently.
Which Models Are Growing Fastest?
Several trends are becoming increasingly visible.
Systemic Team Coaching continues to gain momentum among executive teams because it addresses organisational complexity directly.
Adult development approaches are attracting growing interest as leaders navigate transformation, ambiguity, and AI-enabled change.
Assessment-informed coaching is expanding as organisations seek greater insight into team dynamics and performance.
Technology-enabled coaching is emerging as a complementary capability, particularly in areas such as reflection, feedback, behavioural reinforcement, and development between coaching sessions.
The common thread across these developments is a growing recognition that organisational performance is fundamentally collective.
Teams create strategy, shape culture, execute transformation, and determine how effectively organisations respond to uncertainty.
Final Perspective
The evolution of team coaching reflects a broader shift in organisational thinking.
For decades, leadership development focused primarily on the individual leader. Today's challenges increasingly require collective leadership capability, shared sense-making, and coordinated action across complex systems.
The strongest team coaching models acknowledge this reality. Whether grounded in systems thinking, adult development, psychological safety, or action learning, they help teams develop the capacity to think together more effectively, navigate complexity more skilfully, and create greater value for the organisations they serve.
For senior leaders, the most useful question is not which team coaching model is best.
It is which model is best suited to the challenge the team is facing, the context in which it operates, and the outcomes the organisation is seeking to achieve.
AUTHOR: Cara Leverett
Cara works across strategy, social media and consulting, supporting organisations to build visibility and meaningful engagement in the coaching, leadership development and adult learning space .She is particularly interested in how coaching-led learning and HR technology can be combined to create meaningful behaviour change and scalable impact for leaders and teams. Her work sits at the intersection of strategy, creativity and innovation, with a focus on translating complex ideas into clear, engaging narratives.
Drawing on a foundation in communications and creative problem-solving, Cara brings an innovative and considered perspective to her work across HR technology and digital learning platforms. She is curious about how organisations use digital tools, insight-led content and coaching experiences to support growth, performance and culture. Cara enjoys shaping ideas that resonate with senior HR, OD, L&D and talent leaders, and turning strategic thinking into content that connects and drives action.
