Coaching Leadership Teams Through Change

Most change initiatives fail not because the plan is wrong but because the leadership team leading the change is not working well enough together. Research consistently finds that 60-70% of major change programmes fall short, and that poor leadership alignment is the most common reason. Coaching a leadership team through change addresses this directly — building the collective capability, trust, and shared disciplines that allow a team to lead an organisation through disruption rather than being destabilised by it.

This article explores why change is a particular test of collective leadership, what makes it hard, and how leadership team coaching helps.

3 min read

Colourful separate strands twisting into one strong rope, symbolising a leadership team aligning around a shared change agenda

Why Change Tests Leadership Teams So Hard

Change creates conditions that expose every weakness in a leadership team. Pace increases, information is incomplete, priorities compete, and the pressure to perform individually can pull leaders away from the collective commitments that the change requires. Uncertainty makes some leaders defensive and others impulsive. The result is a leadership team that fragments precisely when it needs to be most cohesive.

Three patterns are especially common in leadership teams navigating change:

Misalignment on what the change actually means. Leaders agree at a strategic level but interpret the implications differently for their own areas. The result is that the same change is led differently across the organisation, creating confusion and inconsistency.

Unspoken disagreement about pace and priority. Some leaders are ready to move; others are not. If the team has not developed the trust and candour to surface that disagreement openly, it drives underground — slowing implementation and generating corridor politics.

The team as a group of change managers rather than a team. Each leader manages change for their own function. No one is accountable for leading the change as a collective endeavour. The organisation experiences the change as fragmented and the leadership team as absent.

Research consistently finds that a large share of major change initiatives fail to deliver their intended benefits — often estimated at around two-thirds — and that poor leadership alignment is the most common reason. Studies by IMD and McKinsey both identify lack of senior team alignment and insufficient leadership support as the primary causes of change failure, ahead of flawed strategy or inadequate planning. In most cases, the plan is not the problem; it is the collective leadership capability to implement it that falls short.

What Leadership Team Coaching Does in a Change Context

Leadership team coaching in a change context is not change management consulting. It does not build the change plan or manage the programme. What it does is develop the leadership team’s collective capability to lead the change — to make the decisions the plan requires, to hold the course when it becomes uncomfortable, and to model the behaviours and commitments the rest of the organisation needs to see.

In practice, this means working on four things:

Shared understanding of what the change demands of the team. Not the operational plan, but what it requires of this specific group of people in terms of how they lead, decide, and show up together.

Trust and candour under pressure. Change surfaces disagreements that are easier to avoid in stable times. Coaching creates the conditions in which those disagreements can be worked through productively rather than suppressed or escalated.

Clarity of collective accountability. Who is accountable for what in this change, and how does the team make decisions when circumstances shift? Coaching helps the team establish clear, shared answers rather than leaving accountability ambiguous.

A story the whole organisation can follow. A leadership team that cannot tell a coherent story about the change — one that answers why, what, and how — cannot expect the organisation to follow with confidence. Coaching helps the team develop and hold that story together.

The Archetype Approach to Change-Oriented Leadership Team Coaching

Archetype’s work with leadership teams in change contexts draws on two disciplines that are often practised separately: leadership team coaching and change management. Integrating them allows us to work on the structural and human dimensions of change simultaneously — the what of the change and the how of the team leading it.

Our approach is structured, evidence-based, and adapted to the pace and nature of the change your organisation is facing. We work with leadership teams at the start of a change initiative, when alignment and commitment matter most; in the middle, when pressure and fatigue test the team’s collective resolve; and at the point of transition to steady state, when embedding new ways of working requires deliberate attention.

Signs That Your Leadership Team Needs Coaching Through Change

The following are common indicators that a leadership team would benefit from coaching support during a change programme:

  • Leaders are aligned at the strategic level but their functions are implementing the change inconsistently.

  • Decisions agreed in leadership team meetings are being revisited or quietly reversed at the functional level.

  • The pace of change is creating visible tension between leaders who want to move faster and those who need more time.

  • The leadership team is spending its time managing the programme rather than leading the organisation through it.

  • Staff and middle managers report uncertainty about what the change means and where it is heading.

  • The team feels the pressure of the change but has not created space to reflect on how it is leading.

If two or more of these feel familiar the leadership team’s collective capability to lead the change is likely hindering progress.

Possible next steps: