Coaching New & Restructured Leadership Teams

Why the Start Matters More Than Most Teams Realise

There is a natural temptation, when a leadership team comes together — whether brand new, newly led, or reconstituted after significant change — to get straight to work. There is strategy to set, decisions to make, and stakeholders expecting results.

But moving too quickly past the team itself is one of the most common and costly mistakes leadership teams make.

Bruce Tuckman’s forming-storming-norming-performing framework describes the journey every team goes through. A team does not simply begin performing. It forms. It works out — sometimes uncomfortably — how to function together. It finds its norms. Only then does it reach sustained high performance.

When a leadership team forms or reforms, that journey begins again. The question is not whether the team will go through it. It is whether it will navigate it deliberately and quickly, or slowly and reactively.

Why the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing Framework Is More Useful Today Than Ever

What Makes a New or Reformed Leadership Team Different

Not all leadership teams are at the same stage. An established team working on performance has a different set of needs from a team that is just finding its feet. Coaching designed for an established team will miss the specific dynamics — and opportunities — that are unique to teams in transition.

New and reformed leadership teams typically share several characteristics:

• Relationships are still forming. Trust between members — including trust in each other’s judgement, intent, and ways of working — is in its early stages. This is entirely normal and addressable, but it needs to be acknowledged and worked on, not assumed.

• Roles and boundaries are not yet clear. Even when individual responsibilities are defined on paper, the practical question of how the team makes decisions, shares accountability, and manages the boundary between individual and collective leadership is still being worked out.

• Norms have not been established. How does the team have difficult conversations? How does it handle disagreement? What does it expect of each member? These norms, left unaddressed, form by default — and default norms are rarely the ones you would choose.

• A new leader resets the team. When a new leader joins or takes over, the team does not simply continue. It reforms. The new leader’s personality, style, and approach will reshape the team’s dynamics, for better or worse, whether or not anyone is paying attention to it.

If you are joining a leadership team learn How to Join a Leadership Team.

What Triggers the Need for Coaching at This Stage

Organisations typically seek leadership team coaching for new or reformed teams in response to one of several common trigger events:

• A new chief executive or managing director has joined and is building or reshaping the leadership team around them

• An organisation has restructured, resulting in a new team configuration with different members and/or a different remit

• Significant membership change — one or more senior leaders have left and been replaced — has shifted the team’s dynamics

• A merger or acquisition has brought together leaders from different organisations who now need to operate as a single team

• A leadership team has been formed for the first time — for example, a growing organisation establishing formal senior leadership for the first time

In each of these situations, the team faces the same fundamental challenge: building the trust, clarity, and shared accountability that high performance requires, whilst simultaneously delivering on the expectations of the organisation.

Effective leadership team coaching doesn’t slow this down, it accelerates it.

What Leadership Team Coaching Looks Like for New and Reformed Teams

Archetype’s approach is grounded in the world’s leading evidence-based leadership team methodology.

The first step is discovery, where we learn about the team’s situation. For a single workshop this may a conversation or for a series of workshops it may involve one-to-one conversations with each team-member.

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 work may be a workshop focusing on a specific capability or a structured programme including 1:1 coaching.

A workshop or programme will include some or all of the below elements to deliver the desired development:

Commissioning — Before a new or reformed leadership team can perform, it needs absolute clarity about why it exists, what it is accountable for, and what success looks like.

Clarifying - With mandate established, the team works to develop shared clarity around vision, priorities, and strategic direction. Research indicates that teams with clear purpose are 50 per cent more effective at achieving their goals.

Co-Creating: How The Team Will Work Together - directly addresses the forming and norming challenges that new and reformed teams face. It builds the internal processes, relationships, and ways of working that enable the team to deliver results exceeding the sum of individual contributions.

Outputs include agreed team norms, decision-making frameworks, and a shared understanding of how the team will navigate disagreement, manage accountability, and support each other.

Connecting - High-performing leadership teams manage relationships with boards, employees, customers, and other stakeholder groups. For a new or reformed team, establishing credibility and trust with these groups quickly is critical.

Core Learning - The most valuable outcome of coaching a new or reformed team is building the capacity to learn, adapt, and improve over time. Core Learning embeds the behaviours and processes that enable the team to reflect on how it is working, identify what needs to change, and make those changes.

The First 90 Days: A Window of Opportunity

The first 90 (or so) days of a new or reformed leadership team are disproportionately influential. Patterns established early — how members interact, whose voice carries most weight, how decisions get made, whether difficult conversations happen openly or get avoided — tend to persist and are easier to form at the start than to change later.

Organisations that invest in coaching during this window consistently see faster cohesion, clearer direction, and stronger early performance. Those that wait until problems emerge find that patterns have already calcified and trust has already been eroded in ways that take significant time and effort to repair.

Why High-Performing Leadership Teams Are the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

Signs Your New or Reformed Leadership Team Would Benefit From Coaching

Not every new or reformed leadership team will show obvious signs of struggle. Some of the strongest cases for coaching come from teams that are performing adequately but have not yet reached the level of trust, alignment, and collective capability they are capable of. Common indicators include:

• Members are collegial in meetings but decisions are not being implemented consistently

• The team discusses tactics but rarely has substantive strategic conversations

• Members default to their functional roles and are reluctant to challenge peers on organisation-wide issues

• The team leader is carrying the weight of leadership team effectiveness largely on their own

• There is polite agreement in meetings but divergent priorities in practice

• The team has not explicitly discussed how it will work together — its norms, values, and ways of operating

Any one of these patterns, left unaddressed, will limit the team’s effectiveness. Together, they indicate a team operating below its potential and below what the organisation needs from it.

Four Types of Leadership Team — Which One Do You Have?

Who This Is For

This work is designed for:

• New chief executives and managing directors who are establishing or reshaping their leadership team and want to build it for high performance from the outset

• Boards and chairs commissioning support for leadership team effectiveness following executive change

• HR directors and people leaders supporting a newly configured team through a restructure or significant transition

• Established teams with significant new membership — where one or more departures and appointments have reset the team’s dynamics and a deliberate recommissioning is needed

If you are unsure whether your team’s situation warrants this kind of coaching, the best starting point is a conversation. Archetype works with leadership teams across New Zealand’s private, public, and not-for-profit sectors.

How Archetype Works With New and Reformed Leadership Teams

Archetype’s leadership team coaching is delivered by Tony Gardner — a former chief executive and board chair with over 25 years of real-world leadership experience, combined with deep expertise in systemic leadership team coaching.

The work begins with a thorough assessment of where the team is: its composition, context, stakeholder environment, and specific transition challenges. From there, the coaching is designed around the team’s actual needs, not a generic programme.

Typical engagements include:

• A structured team launch or recommissioning workshop to establish mandate, shared direction, and team norms

• Regular coaching sessions with the full leadership team focused on the Five Disciplines

• One-to-one coaching for the team leader to support their role in shaping team culture and performance

• Structured feedback loops to embed learning and track progress

The aim is not dependency on the coach. It is a leadership team that has the foundation, habits, and collective capability to sustain high performance on its own.

→ Leadership Team Coaching — Our Full Approach (link to parent pillar page)

Frequently Asked Questions

How is coaching a new leadership team different from team building?

Team building typically focuses on relationships and connection — important, but insufficient on its own. Leadership team coaching addresses the full system: mandate, direction, ways of working, stakeholder relationships, and the ongoing capacity to learn and adapt. It treats the team as an entity with a specific job to do, not simply a group of people who need to get along better.

How long does it take to see results?

New and reformed leadership teams that engage in structured coaching typically experience meaningful improvements in cohesion and clarity within the first two to three months. Sustained high performance — where the team is genuinely operating as a collective leadership entity — usually emerges over six to twelve months of consistent work.

Does this work alongside individual leadership coaching?

Yes. Leadership team coaching addresses the collective entity. Individual coaching supports each leader’s personal development and their specific role within the team. The two work together well and are often complementary — particularly in the early months when individual leaders are navigating significant personal transitions alongside the team’s development.

→ Leadership Coaching (link to individual coaching page)

What does an Archetype engagement typically look like?

Each engagement is designed around the team’s specific context and needs. Most begin with an assessment phase, followed by a structured launch or recommissioning workshop, and a series of regular team coaching sessions over six to twelve months. Archetype works with leadership teams across New Zealand in person and virtually.

Take the First Step

A new or reformed leadership team has a narrow window to establish the foundations for high performance. Coaching during this period is one of the highest-return investments an organisation can make.

To explore whether leadership team coaching is right for your team, contact Archetype for a no-obligation conversation.