Systemic team coaching
Systemic team coaching works with a whole team and the wider system it operates in, such as the organisation, its stakeholders and its customers, rather than with members one at a time. Peter Hawkins and David Clutterbuck are among the writers associated with it. The general research on team coaching reports some positive effects across studies, but a 2020 systematic review said little is known about how well team coaching works. This page did not find a controlled outcome study of the systemic form.
What it is
A systemic team coaching session looks at the team as a system: how it makes decisions, how it relates to other parts of the organisation, and how its patterns affect results. The coach works with the team on its shared goals and on the way it works together.
The approach keeps the focus on the team as the unit of work, rather than coaching individuals within it. Attention goes to the team's collective performance and relationships, and to what the team needs from its wider system to do its work.
Where it comes from
Peter Hawkins has written extensively on team coaching. His chapter Systemic Team Coaching, in The Practitioner's Handbook of Team Coaching (Hawkins, 2019), sets out the systemic approach, and his book Leadership Team Coaching was first published in 2011 (Hawkins, 2011).
David Clutterbuck's writing on team coaching (Clutterbuck, 2022) comes from a related practitioner tradition. Team coaching as a research topic also builds on work on how teams function. Hackman and Wageman's A Theory of Team Coaching (2005) is one peer-reviewed theory of how team coaching works.
The principles underneath
The team is the client
The unit of work is the team as a whole, not each member separately.
The wider system matters
How the team relates to its organisation, stakeholders and customers is part of the coaching, not background to it.
Team processes as well as outcomes
The coach looks at how the team makes decisions and handles disagreement, because those shape results.
Shared responsibility
The leader and the members both carry responsibility for the team's way of working, and the coaching is designed to share that responsibility.
Learning in live work
Patterns are noticed and tested in the team's real meetings and decisions, not only in workshops.
How a session runs
- Agree with the team what the session is for, and which outcomes it should improve.
- Observe or review how the team actually works together: how decisions are made, who is interrupted, and who speaks and who does not.
- Reflect the pattern back to the team, and ask what it does for them and what it costs.
- Look at the wider system: what the team needs from other parts of the organisation, and what it can offer back.
- Agree one or two changes in how the team works, and how the team will check them in its next meetings.
When it tends to fit
- A team meets its targets on paper, but its meetings feel stuck and decisions keep being reopened.
- A team has been formed or reshaped recently and is still working out how its members will work together.
- The team's results depend on coordinating with other parts of the organisation, and the friction there keeps coming back.
What the research shows
Evidence: Some peer-reviewed studies
Traylor, Stahr and Salas (2020) reviewed the team coaching literature in organisations. They report general effectiveness across studies, and note that little is known about the efficacy of team coaching and that reviews on the topic are few. Hackman and Wageman (2005) set out a theory of team coaching. Hawkins (2019) describes the systemic approach in a practitioner handbook chapter, and Clutterbuck (2022) writes on team coaching in a chapter in Coaching and Mentoring. These are reviews, theory and practitioner writing. This page did not find a controlled outcome study of systemic team coaching specifically.
Where the evidence is thin: Studies of team coaching vary in what they count as team coaching. The systemic form has been described mainly in practitioner and theory writing, so the claims on this page about how it runs come from that writing, not from outcome trials.
Sources
- Traylor, A. M., Stahr, E., & Salas, E. (2020). Team coaching: Three questions and a look ahead: A systematic literature review. International Coaching Psychology Review, 15(2), 54–67.
- Hackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2005). A theory of team coaching. Academy of Management Review, 30(2), 269–287.
- Hawkins, P. (2019). Systemic team coaching. In The practitioner's handbook of team coaching (pp. 36–52). Routledge.
- Hawkins, P. (2011). Leadership team coaching: Developing collective transformational leadership. Kogan Page.
- Clutterbuck, D. (2022). Team coaching. In Coaching and Mentoring (pp. 170–209). Routledge.
Where it stops
Team coaching works on how a team functions. It does not replace support for an individual in conflict, burnout or harassment. Where someone's wellbeing or safety is at risk, that needs its own response from a qualified professional.
If a team is in a serious crisis of trust, or the problem is about governance or a person's conduct, coaching alone is unlikely to be enough, and an HR or independent review may need to come first.
Practices for this approach
- Psychological Safety in Teams
What psychological safety actually is, how leaders build it, and where the evidence is real
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
Lencioni’s pyramid — the mechanism behind each dysfunction and the practice that fixes it
- Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
Why every team hits turbulence — and what to do at each stage
- The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
Inclusion, learning, contribution, and challenge — the four stages teams must climb