Leadership Team Coaching: Developing the Team that Leads
Leadership team coaching is a structured, evidence-based process that helps a senior leadership team improve how it leads as a collective. It works on the team’s purpose, alignment, decision-making, trust, stakeholder relationships, operating rhythms, and ability to learn together.
For CEOs, boards, and people leaders in New Zealand organisations, it is most useful when the leadership team’s collective performance has become a constraint on strategy, change, execution, or organisational confidence.
Contents
You can jump to what interests you …
Find the Right Starting Point for Your Leadership Team
What is leadership team coaching?
The Impact of Leadership Team Coaching
Five Signs Your Leadership Team Needs Coaching
What’s the Difference Between Individual Coaching and Team Coaching?
The Two-Team Tension: My Team or the Leadership Team?
Evidence-Based Leadership Team Coaching
Coaching Leadership Teams Through Organisational Change
Leadership Team Coaching Results and ROI
What to Expect from a Leadership Team Coaching Programme
What to Expect from an Archetype Leadership Team Coaching Programme
Find the Right Starting Point
Different leadership teams are at different stages or in different situations.
Some are trying to understand whether they are genuinely operating as a team, others are navigating change, struggling with decision-making, or trying to understand why meeting room agreement is not translating into action.
Use these links to start with the question closest to your situation …
To understand what makes a senior leadership team effective read What Makes a Leadership Team Effective?
If you are unsure whether you are operating as a real team read Five Signs Your Leadership Team Is Functioning as a Group Not a Team.
To assess your team’s current effectiveness take the Leadership Team Effectiveness Assessment.
If decisions are slow, unclear, or repeatedly revisited read Leadership Team Decision-Making.
If your team is leading significant change read Leadership Teams Leading Change.
If alignment is breaking down during change read Leadership Team Alignment During Change.
If departmental loyalty is coming before organisational leadership read The Two-Team Tension.
For a new or recently changed leadership team read New & Changing Leadership Teams.
What Is Leadership Team Coaching?
A leadership team is not simply a collection of talented leaders. It is a distinct organisational entity with its own purpose, dynamics, and potential - and it requires deliberate development in its own right.
Leadership team coaching engages the team collectively over a sustained period, typically six to twelve months. Unlike a one-off workshop or a team-building day, it works with the team's real issues in real time: the strategic challenges, the decision-making patterns, the stakeholder relationships, and the moments where collective performance falls short of what the organisation needs.
The approach draws on decades of research into what makes senior teams effective. At Archetype, we combine the frameworks and evidence of the world's leading thinkers in this field including Professor Peter Hawkins' Five Disciplines model and the Harvard research of Professors Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman — with direct, senior real-world leadership experience. The result is coaching that is rigorous, practical, and grounded in how leadership teams actually work.
Explore our Leadership Team Coaching Insights for articles on leadership team effectiveness.
The Impact of Leadership Team Coaching
A leadership team is the most influential group in any organisation. Even small changes in it resonate through the organisation.
Research consistently shows that organisations with highly effective leadership teams significantly outperform their peers — Bain & Company research across more than 1,000 companies found companies with high-performing top teams achieved revenue growth, profitability, and shareholder returns three times higher than average.
McKinsey research concludes that ‘the quality of the leadership team is the single greatest determinant of organisational adaptability.’ When the top team works well, the organisation moves.
The case for investing in your leadership team is clear. Leadership team coaching is one of the most direct and proven ways to do it.
The true state of a leadership team’s performance may be hard to see beneath the surface of seniority and activity. And leadership teams rarely describe themselves as underperforming.
These five signs suggest that a leadership team is not performing as well it could or should:
1. Strategy doesn't translate into execution
The team agrees on direction in the room, then leaves and pursues different priorities. Alignment at the top is assumed rather than built.
2. Decisions are slow, deferred, or relitigated
Meetings produce agreement but not resolution. The same issues surface repeatedly without clear ownership or movement. Read more about leadership team decision-making.
3. Functional heads operate as silos
Leaders manage their own domains effectively but struggle to operate as a collective. Cross-functional collaboration depends on personal relationships rather than shared processes.
4. The team has changed significantly
New CEO, significant new appointments, post-merger integration, or rapid growth has altered the team's composition. The former way of working no longer seems to work. Read more about coaching new and changing leadership teams.
5. The team's external relationships are fragmented
Different leaders send different messages to the same stakeholders. The organisation experiences the leadership team as multiple voices rather than one.
For deeper insights read Five Signs Your Leadership Team Is Functioning as a Group Not a Team or take the Leadership Team Effectiveness Assessment.
Five Signs Your Leadership Team Needs Coaching
What’s the Difference Between Individual Coaching and Team Coaching?
Individual leadership coaching develops a person, helping them develop the capabilities for their journey.
Leadership team coaching develops a team and its systems for being effective.
The distinction matters more than it might appear. A leadership team of individually excellent people can still function poorly as a collective.
Functional heads can optimise their own area at the expense of the organisation. Competing priorities can slow decisions to a crawl. Trust gaps can make honest conversation impossible.
Individual coaching does not fix these problems and can sometimes make them worse, as more confident individual leaders push harder for their own agendas without a shared framework for alignment.
Research supports this distinction. Team coaching delivers 2.3 times greater impact on organisational alignment than individual coaching alone. Organisations that invest in leadership team coaching alongside individual development report 39% greater cross-functional collaboration and 45% improvement in team effectiveness scores within six months.
The unit of change in leadership team coaching is the team itself: its collective mindset, its shared habits, and its ability to create value that no individual leader could create alone.
Learn more about our 1:1 Executive Leadership Coaching
The Two-Team Tension: My Team or the Leadership Team?
Most leaders in a leadership team are members of two teams: they are part of the senior leadership team, and they lead a team of their own. This often creates tension for them around where they place their time, energy, and perhaps loyalty.
Many, consciously or unconsciously, give priority to the team they lead, where they are the senior voice, often started their career, and feel most control. In the leadership team, they are one voice among peers and if that team is not functioning well it feels like it is a worse use of their time.
When this tension is not surfaced and worked with, it quietly undermines collective leadership. Functional priorities trump whole-of-organisation priorities. Leaders protect their own teams when trade-offs are needed. The leadership team becomes a coordination forum for functions, not the place where the organisation is genuinely led.
Leadership team coaching brings this dual role into the open and helps leaders consciously balance their commitment to both teams, rather than drifting towards the most familiar or comfortable one.
This tension is one reason capable leadership teams can still behave like a group of functional leaders. Read more in The Two-Team Tension or explore how it affects leadership team decision-making.
Evidence-Based
Successfully coaching a leadership team requires structure and flexibility. Structure in the form of proven tools and flexibility to shape the process to the unique needs of the team.
Archetype uses the world’s most robust, evidence-based research into leadership team performance as the foundation for its programmes. Professor Peter Hawkins and Professor Ruth Wageman have led the development evidence-based leadership development frameworks that we use as the starting point and resources for our programmes.
The 5 Disciplines for High-Performing Leadership Teams
Professor Peter Hawkins' Five Disciplines model, developed over two decades and refined through hundreds of leadership teams worldwide, provides a map of what high-performing leadership teams must develop.
The model identifies five disciplines, three focused on the team's internal life and two that connect the team to the world beyond it.
Commissioning - the 'why'
Why does this team exist? The primary need for any leadership team is to have a clear purpose that requires the team to collaborate and which every team member understands similarly. Purpose is revealed rather than invented. Many leadership teams skip this step, operating with a vague sense of vague sense of direction that is insufficient to drive alignment and drive high-performance.
Clarifying - the 'what'
Once purpose is clear, the team can clarify what it’s trying to achieve: team KPIs, objectives, roles, expressed in the team charter that translates purpose into accountable action. Clarifying turns the 'why' into the tangible 'what' that everyone can work towards.
Co-creating - the 'how' inside the room
Co-creating is where most team coaching time is spent. It addresses collaboration, decision-making, how conflict is handled, and whether team members bring their real thinking into the room or withholding genuine views. Building genuine co-creation requires psychological safety, the shared confidence that honest contribution will be received, not penalised.
Connecting - the 'how' outside the room
Connecting beyond the team examines the team's relationships with stakeholders and the system within which it operates. Most team development ignores this dimension. Yet a leadership team's performance is shaped as much by how it manages its external relationships as by how it operates internally. Connecting asks: are we one voice to our stakeholders, or many?
Core Learning - the discipline behind all disciplines
Core Learning is the team's capacity to reflect, adapt, and improve continuously. It enables the team to evolve as challenges change, to turn mistakes into insight, and to sustain high performance rather than peak briefly and plateau. It is the discipline that makes all the others durable.
The 6 Conditions of Leadership Team Effectiveness
Alongside Hawkins' framework, Archetype draws on the research of Harvard scholars Professor Ruth Wageman, the late Professor Richard Hackman, and their colleagues.
Their landmark study - Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great (HBR Press, 2008) - examined 120 senior leadership teams across 11 countries, including teams at IBM, Shell, Unilever, and Sainsbury's.
The conclusion: six conditions account for up to 80% of a leadership team's effectiveness.
Three are essential:
1) A real team: a stable group with clear membership, genuinely interdependent work, and shared accountability, not simply a collection of leaders who report to the same person but do not need to work and lead together.
2) A compelling direction: a purpose that is clear, challenging, and consequential enough to demand the team's collective best. Different but aligned with organisational purpose, a leadership team purpose is the cornerstone of its performance, providing direction for how to functions and where it is leading the organisation.
3) The right people: members with the skills, diversity of perspective, and interpersonal capabilities the team's work requires. Sometimes this means members who are not simply the heads of functional departments.
Three are enablers that amplify the essentials:
4) Sound structure: clear norms, sensible size (typically five to seven members), and task design that genuinely requires collaboration. Size is a common challenge, where perceived politics or a desire for inclusivity leads to an over-sized leadership team.
5) Complementary organisational context: the systems, rewards, and resources that enable the team to function effectively. A leadership team does not operate in a vacuum and its performance is impacted by the environment it operates in, from the quality of data and insights it receives, to its relationship with the board, to the recognition and reward its members experience.
6) Expert team coaching: available when needed, focused on collective processes, and offered at the right moments in the team's development cycle. The goal is not a dependence on a coach rather the coach is a resource to be accessed when needed or most impactful. This is often when a team goes through membership. change or the origination is not achieving its goals.
When all six are in good shape the team is strong and effective.
Assess Your Leadership Team’s Effectiveness
If you want a structured way to reflect on how your leadership team is currently operating, start with the Leadership Team Effectiveness Assessment.
The assessment is based on the same research foundations discussed above. It helps you consider whether your leadership team has the conditions, disciplines, decision habits, stakeholder focus, and learning climate required to lead effectively as a collective.
Coaching Leadership Teams Through Organisational Change
Organisational change is one of the most demanding tests a leadership team faces. A new strategy, a restructure, a merger, a shift in market conditions, or a change of leadership at the top all place extraordinary pressure on the team’s ability to think clearly, decide collectively, and move at pace.
A number of reviews conclude that a large share of major change initiatives fail to deliver their intended benefits, often estimated at around two‑thirds, with inadequate senior leadership alignment and engagement cited as one of the most common causes.
Research identifies leadership alignment and collective leadership effectiveness — not flawed plans — as the primary reasons change fails to deliver. IMD’s analysis of major transformations found that lack of senior team alignment is among the most common causes of change failure, ahead of inadequate strategy or poor planning.
Leadership team coaching in a change context works on what matters most: helping the team get clear on what the change requires of them collectively, building the trust and candour needed to make difficult decisions under pressure, and developing the shared disciplines that allow the team to lead the change effectively.
If organisational change is the context for your leadership team’s work, you may also find these pages useful: Leadership Teams Leading Change, Leadership Team Alignment During Change, and Leadership Team Decision-Making During Change.
Results and Return on Investment
The business case for leadership team coaching is substantial and well-evidenced. The outcome is clarity around the team’s role, how it operates and where t is leading the organisation.
The International Coaching Federation reports that 86% of organisations that invested in team coaching reported a positive return on investment.
Research published in coaching and organisational development journals documents an average 45% improvement in team effectiveness scores within six months of a sustained team coaching engagement. And a 52% improvement in psychological safety scores - the cultural foundation on which strategic candour and genuine collaboration depend.
The McKinsey Global Institute has found that organisations in the top quartile for leadership effectiveness deliver approximately twice the financial performance of those in the bottom quartile. The Wageman and Hackman research adds specificity: when the six conditions of team effectiveness are in place, coaching amplifies the performance of a well-designed team significantly.
At Archetype, we have helped private and public sector senior leadership teams around New Zealand improve how they function and lift their performance.
We measure outcomes at three levels: team process (how the team is working), team performance (what it is delivering), and stakeholder experience (how those the team serves experience its impact).
The return on leadership team coaching is not simply better meetings. It is a leadership team that makes clearer decisions, leads change more coherently, reduces avoidable friction, and gives the organisation more confidence in its direction.
If you want to understand where the greatest opportunity may be for your team, start with the Leadership Team Effectiveness Assessment.
What to Expect from a Leadership Team Coaching Programme
Leadership team coaching is about bringing together senior leaders to build unified, powerful leadership.
It is a programme that combines team workshops with 1:1 conversations, typically over three to twelve months.
Discovery and assessment
Before coaching begins we develop a clear picture of where the team currently stands. This includes one-to-one conversations with each team member, often interviews with key stakeholders, and where appropriate structured assessment. Discovery surfaces what the team knows about itself, what it doesn't, and what the organisation most needs from it.
Contracting
Effective coaching rests on clear agreements: what the programme will address, how sessions will work, what confidentiality means in a team context, and how success will be measured. Contracting happens with the team as a whole, not just with the most senior sponsor.
Coaching sessions
Sessions typically run half a day to a full day, monthly or fortnightly, with the team working on its real agenda in real time. Between sessions, agreed actions are implemented and reviewed. The coach observes, challenges, and creates conditions for the team to develop its own capability, not to become dependent on the coach.
Stakeholder integration
At key points in the programme, we may bring key stakeholders to reflect on what they experience and what they need. This is the Connecting discipline in practice and it is where many teams make significant breakthroughs.
Review and embedding
The final phase focuses on embedding new habits, building the team's capacity for self-coaching, and reviewing outcomes against the original assessment.
Interested in combining team coaching with individual leadership development? Learn more about 1:1 Executive Coaching.
What to Expect from an Archetype Leadership Team Coaching Programme
There may be an urgent issue or it may be that the team simply isn’t working that well together. Whatever the situation the first step is a conversation to see what might help.
The way forward may be a one-off workshop focusing on a specific issue or capability, or a structured programme of work including 1:1 coaching to lift the team’s performance and effectiveness. Most of our work is somewhere in between.
The first step is Discovery, where we learn about the team’s situation. For a single workshop this may simply be a conversation. For a programme, it will likely include a one-to-one conversation with each team-member and perhaps others who interact with the team.
The next step is design, where we shape the workshop or programme to the needs and resources of the team and organisation. For a workshop this may only be a couple of hours, for a programme it could be a day of work.
The delivery programme will draw on some or all of the below elements to deliver the desired or necessary change and is concluded with the Review.
Not sure about next steps? Use our Leadership Team Assessment to see how your leadership team could develop.
Talk With Archetype About Your Leadership Team
If your leadership team needs to operate with greater clarity, alignment, trust, decision quality, and collective accountability, Archetype can help you understand what is happening and what kind of development would make the greatest difference.
You can start with a conversation about your team’s context, or use the assessment first if you want a structured way to reflect before making contact.
Leadership Team Coaching FAQs
What is leadership team coaching?
Leadership team coaching is a structured process that helps a senior leadership team improve how it leads as a collective. It focuses on the team’s purpose, alignment, decision-making, trust, stakeholder relationships, operating rhythm, and ability to learn together.
How is leadership team coaching different from executive coaching?
Executive coaching usually focuses on the development of an individual leader. Leadership team coaching focuses on the leadership team as a collective system. It works with how the team makes decisions, handles tension, aligns around priorities, leads change, and holds itself accountable for shared outcomes.
How do we know if our leadership team needs coaching?
A leadership team may need coaching when it agrees in the room but acts differently outside it, revisits the same decisions, protects functional priorities over enterprise priorities, avoids the conversations that matter, or relies on the CEO to integrate everything. A useful starting point is the Five Signs diagnostic page or the Leadership Team Effectiveness Assessment.
What happens in a leadership team coaching programme?
A programme usually begins with contracting and assessment, then moves into facilitated team coaching sessions focused on the team’s real work. The work may include purpose, priorities, operating agreements, decision-making, stakeholder relationships, trust, conflict, and the disciplines the team needs to practise between sessions.
How long does leadership team coaching take?
The right length depends on the team’s context, maturity, and goals. Some teams need a focused intervention around a transition or change process. Others benefit from a longer programme that combines assessment, team coaching sessions, individual coaching, and review over several months.
Who should be involved in leadership team coaching?
The core participants should be the people who genuinely share responsibility for leading the organisation or business unit. That usually includes the CEO, managing director, or senior leader and the direct reports who need to make collective decisions and hold shared accountability for enterprise outcomes.
Can leadership team coaching work alongside individual executive coaching?
Yes. In many cases, the most effective approach combines leadership team coaching with individual executive coaching for the CEO or selected members. The team work focuses on collective effectiveness, while individual coaching helps leaders shift the personal patterns that affect their contribution to the team.
How do we start with Archetype?
You can start by enquiring about leadership team coaching or by completing the Leadership Team Effectiveness Assessment. The assessment is useful if you want a structured way to reflect on your team’s current effectiveness before discussing what kind of support would be most useful.
“Tony understands how powerful it is when leadership teams are teams. He has guided our leadership team from, in some cases, strangers through formation to performance. His style is insightful, flexible and engaging. He has enabled the team to work out how we can do our best work together.”