What Makes Team Coaching Systemic?

In recent years, team coaching has become an increasingly popular intervention in organisations facing complexity, change and uncertainty. Its growth reflects a recognition that teams, rather than individuals alone, are often the primary unit through which work gets done.

Over the past decade, team coaching has increasingly been used as an emergent developmental approach, typically unfolding over months rather than days. Here the coach partners with the team to support its learning and development, rather than delivering a predefined programme or set of solutions. The focus is on helping the team make sense of its own challenges and decide what development matters most.

As the practice of team coaching has expanded, so too have the approaches and models associated with it. One such approach is systemic team coaching. But what makes team coaching systemic, and what difference does this perspective make? 

This article explores these questions.

What Do We Mean by Systemic?

Whilst systems thinking has been around for a very long time, it became prominent in the early 1990s with Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline – the fifth discipline being Systems Thinking. Systems Thinking was the ability to see beyond the individual constituent parts, towards appreciating a greater interconnected whole. Senge argued that some things, such as storms, for instance, couldn’t be understood by their individual parts. Instead, they needed to be understood as a complex whole where every part affected every other part, but not obviously. 

Senge, and many others since, recognise organisations as complex systems consisting of many constituent parts that interconnect and therefore dynamically affect each other, often in unpredictable ways. Predictability is important because it is a key differentiator between complicated and complex.

Dave Snowdon’s Cynefin Framework distinguishes Complicated environments as being ultimately learnable, whilst Complex environments have no predictable links between cause and effect meaning they can only be understood in hindsight. Snowdon’s thinking suggests complicated environments can be analysed and planned for, whilst complexity can only be navigated through probing actions, testing and adjusting. This means plans are likely to fail unless they embed patterns of experimentation with agility to respond.  

The complex nature of organisations and the emergent nature of team coaching helps explain the rise of this approach compared to more structured team development such as team building or team consultancy.  

From Coaching in Isolation to Coaching Systemically

If we think about a one-to-one executive coach the focus is typically on the individual client. The work centres on their goals, beliefs, behaviours and choices. Even when the client brings workplace challenges to the table, the coaching conversation often remains anchored in the individual’s perspective and capacity for personal action.

To make individual coaching systemic, the coach needs to move beyond seeing the individual as a constituent part and, instead, appreciate them within a complex set of interconnected relationships, including things such as conflicting priorities and organisational culture.  

Coaches that focus on individual personalities within teams to explain behaviours within the team aren’t working systemically. To coach systemically means focusing on the relationships, inside and beyond the team, the dependencies, the dynamics and the tensions that help or hinder the team – when it is together and when it is a part, and with regards to all of its stakeholders.  

For team coaching, we can therefore appreciate that when a team coach works with a team and focuses on them as a series of individuals, there is little systemic thinking involved. This is most obvious when team coaches use personality diagnostics or psychometrics to understand team dynamics between individuals. This is more like doing lots of individual coaching, rather than coaching a team as a single entity. 

In contrast, systemic team coaching recognises this wider context. The team is a single entity rather than a number of individual personalities. Thinking systemically means treating the team as part of a wider living system as well, continually shaped by, and shaping, its environment. This shift in perspective is foundational; the focus moves from individual to the collective, and beyond, from events to patterns, from people to relationships – from “me” to “we”. 

Thinking systemically therefore invites curiosity about the wider relationships and interconnections, expectations stakeholders have of the team, and the assumptions the team make about stakeholders.

Influences on Systemic Team Coaching

The term systemic team coaching has been strongly associated with the work of Peter Hawkins and the Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC), through books such as Team Coaching in Practice. Hawkins’ work emphasises that the primary client in team coaching is not just the team itself, but the team in service of its stakeholders.

John Leary-Joyce, CEO at AoEC, has also contributed significantly to the field, particularly in integrating systemic thinking with organisational development and leadership practice.

Paul Lawrence, author of The Wise Team Coach, identifies the difference between two types of systemic team coaching:

• Linear systemic uses a step-by-step process when exploring the system. Hawkins CIDCLEAR or Leary-Joyce’s SIDER models might fit such an approach. Lawrence critiques by questioning if it can be truly systemic – can there ever be a linear process within a dynamic, complex system? 
• He compares this with Dynamic systemic thinking where everything is moving all the time and where linear steps don’t survive the dynamics of the constant swirl of complexity. Team members change, objectives fade, new demands are made, unknown stakeholders suddenly become relevant.  This dynamic systems thinking feels closer to appreciating complex systems for what they are.  

While approaches and models differ, these perspectives share common ground: an insistence that effective team coaching must extend beyond interpersonal dynamics and take account of the organisational system as a whole.

The Team as a Reflection of the Wider System

One of the most powerful insights of systemic team coaching is that teams often mirror the dynamics of the wider organisation. Patterns such as avoidance, over-control, silos, or chronic conflict rarely originate solely within the team. Instead, they are frequently echoes of broader organisational forces.

Teams carry what might be described as the echo of the system. Unspoken tensions, unresolved strategic dilemmas or conflicting priorities at senior levels can all show up in how a team behaves. From a systemic perspective, these behaviours are not problems to be fixed but information to be understood. Repeating patterns, such as circular debates or deferred decisions, signal that something in the wider system is needing attention.

One way to understand this is similar to the duality of culture. When we think of culture, we see similarity across multiple people.  We think of each person as being unique, which they are, yet each person within a culture also holds behaviours and other indicators of the wider culture they are part of. Echoes of the system is similar to this when systemic team coaching.

Extra-Dependent Teams

David Kesby’s research on Extra-Dependent Teams also highlights aspects of the system at work, but through the lens of similarities and differences. Kesby recognises that most organisations combine unique roles and skills along with similar roles and skills. Where differences combine within a team, this provides conditions for interdependency. Where similarities combine within a team, conditions are better to consider it a community of practice, or as he calls them extra-dependent teams. When organisations are seen through these two team lenses, as opposed to a lens that sees all teams as combining in a similar way, the interconnections across the organisational system become easier to observe and anticipate.   

David Kesby’s book Extra-Dependent Teams: Realising the Power of Similarity includes a foreword by Peter Hawkins.

The Coach as Part of the System

A systemic approach also challenges the notion of the coach as a neutral outsider. The coach inevitably becomes part of the system they are working with – whether they like it or not. Feelings, dynamics and patterns present in the team can be experienced by the coach themself – a parallel process to the echoes of the system. 

Parallel process is particularly valuable for the team coach to be attentive to – to be ready for, to sense and to respond to. What happens between the coach and the team may reflect what happens between the team and the organisation. For example, a coach who feels subtly marginalised or pressured to deliver quick fixes may be experiencing something analogous to the team’s own position in the system..

The Role of Supervision

Supervision plays a critical role here, especially for internal coaches. Supervisors can help surface systemic patterns that the coach alone may struggle to see, supporting deeper insight and more skilful intervention.

Systemic Team Coaching and Change

Because dynamic systems are constantly changing, it challenges systemic team coaches to reconsider the notion of change. Too often it’s an attempt to regain control by tightening processes, increasing oversight or accelerating decision-making. In complex systems, this can have the opposite effect, generating resistance or unintended disruption.

A useful analogy is sailing a boat in rough seas. While the skipper may set direction and give guidance, the helmsman must constantly respond to the movement of the water and the wind. The environment plays a decisive role, and overly rigid control can capsize the boat.

Systemic team coaching supports a different stance towards deliberate change, one that values sensing, learning and adaptation. Rather than forcing outcomes, the coach helps the team notice what is emerging and experiment with responses that are informed by the system.

What Systemic Team Coaching Asks of Coaches and Leaders

Working systemically requires a significant shift in mindset. Leaders are invited to move:

• From expert solutions to thoughtful enquiry
• From seeking control to constant curiosity
• From quick fixes to sustained learning

It also demands personal capability – a willingness to engage in uncertainty, developing an ability to be comfortable with ambiguity, honing emotional intelligence, and the ability to stay present with uncertainty are essential skills. 

For the systemic team coach, the ask is all this, and more. It requires combining the paradoxes of sensitivity and resilience, future thinking with immediate presence, and systemic influences with individual action. Indeed, as a part of the system, the team coach has the choice to respond, or not, to systemic influences.  Sometimes doing nothing can absorb echo waves through the system and help protect a team from unnecessary reactions.  

Conclusion: Working With the System

What makes team coaching systemic is not a specific tool or technique, but a way of seeing and experiencing. It is the recognition that teams are embedded in complex systems, that patterns matter more than isolated events, and that the coach is part of the dynamic they are seeking to influence.

By working with the system rather than against it, systemic team coaching creates the conditions for deeper learning, wiser leadership and more sustainable change. Systemic team coaching shifts the question from ‘what is wrong with this team?’ to ‘what is this team revealing about the system it sits within?’

Ultimately, systemic team coaching is less about making teams feel better and more about helping organisations learn. It requires the courage to stay with complexity, the humility to let go of control, and the curiosity to listen to what patterns are telling us. The real edge of systemic team coaching lies here – in choosing to work with the system as it is, rather than colluding with comforting but incomplete solutions.