top of page

Team Coaching

Overcome the Growing Pains of Scaling

How I Work

A leadership team that works well is one of the most powerful forces in a scaling business. One that doesn’t, where decisions are slow, conversations are avoided, and roles are unclear, becomes one of its biggest constraints.

I work with leadership teams in founder-led businesses at moments of inflection, when teams are newly formed, reconfigured, or experiencing the growing pains of scale. The focus is on helping the team find a better way to collaborate, decide, and lead together, so it becomes a source of clarity and compounding leadership rather than friction and delay.

The work addresses the patterns and dynamics that hold teams back: unclear roles and winning behaviours, founder dependency, poor decision-making, avoidance of difficult conversations, and ways of working that no longer scale. It is reflective and practical, grounded in live issues rather than abstract models.

 

The same three multipliers that underpin the executive coaching work apply here at the team level.

 

  • Connected Awareness: understanding the shared assumptions and patterns driving how the team operates and their immunity to change. The beliefs implicitly driving team behaviour are made explicit. Connect what's underneath to how the team leads, and collective behaviour becomes a choice rather than a default.

  • Choice Points: helping the team develop the capacity to pause, notice, name and take perspectives that collectively build shared situational awareness, and create choice points in the moments that matter most. The more the team develops that capacity together, the more possibilities become visible under pressure.

  • Consistent Practice: identifying the small, consistent improvements in how the team works that compound over time. Values-aligned ways of working are embedded until they become the team's natural operating rhythm and the foundation of the trust that allows the business to scale.

geometric abstraction .jpg
geometric abstraction.jpg

Working Together

Team coaching creates space for leadership teams to slow down, talk things through, and see how they’re working together more clearly, especially under pressure.

 

I can incorporate evidence-based assessments and structured feedback to support insight and focus. This may include Gallup StrengthsFinder, Hogan, and HBDI, as well as stakeholder interviews and feedback reports. These inputs provide an external perspective and help ground the work in how the team experiences itself and how it is experienced by key stakeholders.

 

Leadership teams typically engage in team coaching to:

 

Strengthen How the Team Works Under Pressure

  • Develop a shared understanding of how the team operates when the stakes are high

  • Reduce reactivity and improve the quality of dialogue and decision-making

  • Increase capacity to remain effective in conditions of uncertainty and complexity

 

Improve Collaboration and Trust

  • Build trust across differences in style, role, and perspective

  • Work productively with tension, disagreement, and conflict

  • Move from avoidance or defensiveness to open, constructive challenge

 

Clarify Roles, Authority, and Decision-Making

  • Reduce ambiguity around roles, responsibilities, and accountability

  • Clarify decision rights and how authority is exercised

  • Address founder dependency and strengthen shared leadership ownership

 

Establish Ways of Working That Scale

  • Replace early-stage habits that no longer serve the organisation

  • Create shared norms for communication, meetings, and follow-through

  • Align around priorities, pace, and expectations as the business grows

  • Strengthen ownership, accountability, and motivation

 

Address Adaptive Challenges

  • Work through challenges that cannot be solved by structure or process alone

  • Navigate power dynamics, identity shifts, and leadership transitions

  • Support team formation, reconfiguration, or integration following change

 

Build a Learning Leadership Team

  • Increase collective self-awareness

  • Develop the ability to reflect, course-correct, and adapt over time

  • Reduce reliance on external facilitation as the team matures

What to Expect

Team coaching is delivered as a structured, sustained process, adapted from Peter Hawkins’ integrative systemic team coaching model and shaped to fit the team’s context.

 

Engagements typically follow a seven-stage flow:

 

  1. Stakeholder Briefing: A dialogical process with the team leader and sponsoring stakeholders to clarify goals and expectations.

  2. Data Collection: Gathering insight into how the team is currently functioning and where support is most needed.

  3. Diagnosis: Making sense of themes and patterns and forming hypotheses about the team’s development needs.

  4. Team Contracting: Aligning with the team on the coaching focus, process, and goals.

  5. Listening and Design: Developing team self-awareness and co-creating action plans and milestones.

  6. Implementation: Integrating new behaviours, ways of working, and leadership practices into day-to-day operations.

  7. Review and Embedding: Reviewing progress, consolidating learning, and embedding new routines.

 

Throughout the engagement, I facilitate meetings with sponsors and stakeholders to align expectations, review progress, and ensure the coaching supports both the team and the organisation.

 

geometric abstraction .jpg

Team Coaching Testimonial

I worked as an in-house team coach for Sparro, Australia’s largest independent digital performance marketing company, supporting teams for two years. The work focused on strengthening leadership capability, collaboration, and systemic effectiveness across the organisation.

Hannah Jones, General Manager

“Since working with us at Sparro, Andrew has had a profoundly positive impact across the whole business through team coaching.”

 

94% of participants strongly agreed or agreed that coaching provided them with knowledge, skills, and insights that would support their future career development.

bottom of page