How team coaching unlocks the power of senior leadership teams
- Vicky Pike
- 24 hours ago
- 5 min read
Senior leadership teams (SLTs) are the nerve centres of organisations. Strategy, culture, decision-making all pulse through them. And yet, despite the high stakes, these teams are often left to figure out how to work together without the dedicated support they need to truly thrive.
Research from The Centre for Creative Leadership found only 17% of senior leadership teams were rated as operating at a high level of effectiveness across alignment, collaboration, and clarity. According to McKinsey, two-thirds of executives believed their own leadership team was not functioning optimally, primarily due to unclear roles, poor collaboration, and misalignment.
In this article, we explore how team coaching, grounded in action learning and supported by inclusive leadership practices, provides a powerful intervention to develop senior teams not just as a group of high-performing individuals, but as a cohesive, aligned, and collaborative unit.
Common challenges facing senior leadership teams
Many SLTs operate under an assumption: if the individuals are competent, the team will function. But competence doesn’t guarantee collaboration. In fact, the very strengths that earn leaders their seat at the table can become barriers to collective performance.
Common challenges include:
Siloed thinking: Leaders default to representing their own function, rather than thinking systemically.
Low psychological safety: Speaking up, admitting uncertainty, or challenging a peer feels risky.
Unclear decision-making: Ambiguity around how decisions are made leads to frustration and disengagement.
Performative alignment: Teams nod along in meetings but revert to their own agendas afterward.
Power dynamics: Unspoken hierarchies, dominant voices, or underrepresented perspectives can go unaddressed.
The result? Strategy gets stuck. Conflict simmers beneath the surface. And the organisation loses the power of aligned leadership.
The case for team coaching in senior leadership development?
Team coaching isn’t facilitation. It’s not training. It’s not even just about solving problems. It’s about how the team learns and works together in real time.
A team coach works with the team as a living system, observing patterns, naming dynamics, and helping members develop collective awareness and capability. The goal isn’t to make the team comfortable, it’s to make them conscious.
The coach operates inside the work, not outside of it. This means coaching the real conversations, not rehearsed or sanitised versions of them. It’s this proximity to the truth, the messiness, the tensions, the brilliance, that creates breakthrough moments.
Over time, this leads to better collaboration, clearer decisions, and a shift from transactional conversations to strategic, value-creating dialogue.
How Action Learning accelerates senior team growth
Action learning amplifies this impact. Developed by Reg Revans, the method rests on a simple but powerful premise: real learning comes from tackling real problems while reflecting in action.
In a senior team context, this means the team brings a genuine, complex challenge, such as a stalled strategy, a cultural shift, or a delivery bottleneck, and works on it together. A coach facilitates the process, encouraging open questions, challenging assumptions, and surfacing group dynamics as they unfold.
This isn’t roleplay. It’s real work. But with new thinking.
Instead of abstract learning, the team improves while doing the work. This dual focus on performance and learning is what makes action learning so effective especially for high-achieving senior teams who want results and reflection.
What executive team coaching reveals about team dynamics
Executive team coaching, especially when combined with action learning reveals three powerful barriers to senior team performance:
1. How the team talks
Is the team defaulting to advocacy or inquiry? Are all voices heard? Who interrupts, who retreats, and who drives the agenda? These behaviours become visible and coachable. The team begins to notice who dominates airtime, how decisions are made (or not made), and what language reinforces or challenges the team’s identity.
2. What’s not being said
Teams often avoid the hard conversations: unresolved conflict, inconsistent values, or decisions that lack buy-in. Coaching brings these to the surface safely and productively. Silence is reframed as a data point. Discomfort becomes a signal. The team learns how to stay with the ‘edge’ of a conversation instead of smoothing it over.
3. Where the team gets stuck
Patterns of circular debates, deferring decisions, or revisiting the same issues are gently challenged. The coach helps the team spot and shift these habits; not by giving advice, but by building the team’s capacity to see themselves clearly and choose differently.
What it feels like to be coached by Ideara
Our coaching is deep, brave, and human. Here’s what your team can expect:
Elevating emotional intelligence: We explore how emotions influence behaviour, decision-making, and team energy. Leaders learn how to stay regulated, stay present, and lead from the inside out.
Uncovering limiting beliefs: We surface the stories teams hold about themselves and each other, and replace them with conscious, empowering narratives.
Strengths-based connection: We help team members recognise and value their own and each other’s unique strengths, building trust, mutual respect, and momentum.
Creating collective clarity: Together, we develop a team vision and values. We ask: How do we want to be seen? What difference do we want to make? From there, we co-create behaviours that align with these aspirations.
Building a confidence culture: We cultivate environments where team members build each other’s confidence and contribute meaningfully. Not just speak, but be heard. Not just represent their function, but represent the future.
Shaping identity and impact: We support teams to understand how they show up individually and collectively, and what it takes to evolve from competent individuals to a truly cohesive force.
Embedding inclusive leadership and DE&I in senior teams
One of the most transformative shifts team coaching enables is the ability to see and connect through many perspectives.
Too often, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) work is seen as a separate initiative. But real inclusion becomes possible when senior teams actively reflect on how they think, behave, and make decisions together. This is where coaching plays a vital role.
Inclusion is not a sentiment, it’s a practice. We help senior teams go beyond box-ticking and start asking better, braver questions.
This work is especially important in tech and product teams where, as noted in your “Women in Tech: From Entry to Endurance” series, 48% of women enter software roles, yet only 30% reach senior leadership. This is not a pipeline problem it’s a leadership system problem.
When senior teams shift from representation to participation, from “who do we have” to “who do we hear and learn from,” inclusion becomes embedded, not delegated. Diverse perspectives stop being a “nice to have” and start being seen as what they are: business critical.
Measurable results of coaching senior leadership teams
While team coaching isn’t about a quick fix, it leads to tangible results over time:
Faster, better decisions because alignment is real, not just verbal.
Greater psychological safety which enables creativity and risk-taking.
Clarity of purpose as the team defines its shared goals, not just departmental targets.
Resilience and adaptability because the team can learn, unlearn, and re-learn together.
Inclusive cultures where different perspectives are genuinely valued and leveraged.
Final Thought: The team is the strategy
Peter Hawkins, a pioneer in systemic team coaching, reminds us: “How the team works together is part of what creates success.” In senior teams, that’s especially true. A well-coached team becomes a multiplier for organisational effectiveness.
Investing in team coaching isn’t about fixing dysfunction. It’s about enabling brilliance; creating the conditions for the team to think, learn, and lead together, with courage, cohesion, and compassion.
Because when the senior team thrives, the organisation follows.
Read here to find out more about our team coaching or if you want to explore what this could look like for your team, get in touch.