Coaching for leadership teams, and the people who depend on them
A leadership team exists to deliver what no single member can deliver alone, to a board, investors, employees and customers. I look at the team from the outside in: what its stakeholders need from it now and in two or three years, and whether the way the team decides and handles disagreement can deliver that.
How I work with teams
A leadership team is a small group making consequential decisions under uncertainty. The quality of those decisions depends on how information flows in the room, how disagreement gets handled, and which behaviors the team rewards or penalizes over time.
I work systemically. That means surfacing the assumptions, unstated agreements and structural tensions that shape how a team functions, such as decision rights, information flow and trust between functions, together with what happens in individuals when the pressure rises. I often work with a co-facilitator and bring the individual layer into the team work: how reactivity and personal habits show up in the room, and how the team can work with them.
I have worked with leadership teams for more than two decades. The work has ranged from assessment-based team sessions and offsites to longer engagements. Teams have included the executive teams of Heap, Affinity, Spring Health, Sempre Health and Scalapay; two functional teams at Sequoia Capital; teams at Meta; the CFO's team at Verkada; a trading team at Deutsche Bank; and Deloitte's Global Offerings Services team. Some of this work has also crossed national or organizational cultures: mixed French and Chinese leaders at Carrefour, European and Chinese teams at Airbus, the World Wildlife Fund's leadership team in China, GSK's leadership team in Korea, and U.S. and U.K. teams at GSK after the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham.
When teams bring me in
How an engagement develops
Each stage is agreed with the team leader and sponsor before it starts. A full engagement usually runs twelve months. The first two stages can also be contracted on their own.
Inquiry
Confidential interviews with each team member and with the people the team serves: board members, investors, direct reports and key partners. The interviews ask what those stakeholders need from the team today and what they will need as the business changes. Where useful, team members also complete a 360, Hogan or Harrison assessment, debriefed privately. We look at organizational arrangements as closely as at individual behavior.
Team working session
A facilitated session, usually a full day, built on what the inquiry found. Written reflection comes before discussion, and less senior voices are heard first. The team leaves with three or four specific changes it has agreed to test, each with an owner.
Follow-through
Over the following months the team works on its agreed changes during its normal business:
Shorter formats
Some teams need a focused piece of work first: an assessment-based team session (individual Harrison or Hogan debriefs followed by a facilitated team session), coaching for co-founders or two senior partners, or the design of an offsite with a structured follow-up session about a month later.
Review
At the close, we compare what has changed with the indicators agreed at the start, and the team runs its own review of the engagement, so the habit of examining itself continues after I leave.
How we judge progress
Before we begin, we agree what should be observably different and choose two or three indicators suited to the team, for example fewer decisions reopened, concerns raised earlier, clearer ownership of decisions, or stakeholders reporting better coordination. We review them alongside the business results that matter to you, without claiming coaching alone caused them.
What we work on
My approach draws on Peter Hawkins' model of the five disciplines of high-value-creating teams. In practice the work goes well beyond team dynamics:
01 · The mandate
What do the board, investors, and the organization actually expect from this team? Most teams are running on a mandate that has never been made explicit, or one that describes the company they were, not the one they're becoming. We surface it, test it, and renegotiate it.
02 · Purpose and decision rights
What can this team do that no other group in the company can? Which decisions does it own together, which belong to individuals, and where has consensus become a way to avoid accountability?
03 · How the team behaves in the room
Candor, conflict, airtime, the softened positions and unchallenged performance surfaced in the inquiry data.
04 · How the team leads outward
The gap between what's agreed in the room and what the organization experiences. Speaking with one voice after contested decisions, and engaging the board, the investors, and the leaders below.
05 · The team's ability to learn
Structured learning reviews, honest post-mortems on decisions, the habit of standing back. This is what makes the change survive the engagement.
Two common difficulties
Teams differ, but two difficulties come up often.
The team that's too warm
Feedback gets softened into reassurance, so people feel comfortable but stay uninformed. Poor performance goes unchallenged because confrontation feels like risking the relationship. Consensus becomes a way to avoid accountability. The team is warm enough. The question is whether it's honest enough.
The team that's too guarded
Candor gets punished, so information becomes ammunition. People manage their exposure instead of the business. Feedback deflects off armor, converging critical views get dismissed as outliers, and the sharpest operator in the room sets the temperature for everyone else.
Different surfaces, same failure: the real conversation isn't happening in the room. In the warm team it's avoided. In the guarded team it's unsafe. Either way, the team is making its most consequential decisions without its best information.
Diagnostic
Questions your leadership team should be able to answer
These are the questions I bring into the engagement. Most leadership teams have never asked them out loud.
Who this is for
Executive teams and founding teams, typically of three to ten people, in companies from venture-backed startups to global enterprises, including investment firms. The team leader needs to want the work, and the team needs to be willing to look at how it operates with an outsider in the room.
I am training in Peter Hawkins' Systemic Team Coaching approach (Team Development Essentials, completed; Practitioner program, in progress) and use Harrison and Hogan assessments.
"This was more than a 'team-building exercise'; rather it transformed how our execs support and challenge one another."
Ken Fine
CEO, Affinity (former CEO, Heap)
"Our Lean Transformation took off like fire, and within a year we were recognized as the outstanding Lean Factory in China."
Former Plant Manager
Western consumer goods multinational, Shanghai
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes about your team, what it is responsible for, and what is getting in the way. If a diagnosis makes sense, I will propose its scope and fees.