Most teams function adequately. Work generally gets done, there is a collective sense of who is in the team and the team's purpose is generally recognised even if just by the label 'marketing' or 'customer service' for example. To many, this is what working in teams represents. A semi-structured collective effort to achieve pre-defined corporate goals.
A team leader in this context may not believe team coaching will make any difference to performance or productivity, especially if they feel that any intervention reflects their leadership skills rather than the team's endeavour. Yet a high-performing team is a clear mark of excellent leadership and leaders and their teams should not tolerate mediocrity. No-one wants to go home believing they are average.
How do you identify when team coaching is needed? What is average in a day-to-day working life? A bit like the question of whether fish in the sea notice the water, a leader may not always realise the potential or the problems that are occurring which hinder performance.
The question of whether a team needs coaching is not always straightforward. Not every difficulty calls for it. Some problems are structural: the wrong people in the wrong roles, unclear accountabilities, a strategy that has not been properly translated into priorities. These are important issues, but they are primarily design problems rather than coaching ones.
Team coaching addresses something different. It works on the relational and behavioural patterns that shape how a team actually functions — the norms, spoken and unspoken, that determine what gets said and what stays unsaid, how decisions really get made, and whether people bring their best thinking to the table or hold it back. When those patterns are limiting performance, coaching is usually the most direct path to changing them.
Here are five patterns that suggest a team has crossed that threshold.
Every team has formal meetings. High-performing teams also have a culture where the conversation in the meeting is the real conversation — where disagreement is expressed directly, where concerns are raised while there is still time to act on them, and where the output of a meeting genuinely moves things forward.
When the real conversation is happening elsewhere — in the corridor after the meeting, in private messages, in what people confide to one person but not to the group — something is blocking honesty in the room itself. It might be fear of the leader's reaction. It might be a dominant voice that others have learned not to challenge. It might simply be a set of unwritten norms that have calcified over time.
Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: the team is not using its own intelligence. Decisions are being made on the basis of partial information, because the people who could correct or enrich the picture have learned that it is safer not to. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety makes this mechanism clear: in teams where people do not feel safe to take interpersonal risks, critical information goes unshared — and performance suffers as a direct consequence (Edmondson, 1999).
Conflict in teams is not a sign of dysfunction. Handled well, it is evidence that people care enough about the work to argue about it. The problem is not conflict itself but conflict that cannot be resolved — that goes underground and re-emerges in different forms, in different meetings, between different people.
When a team keeps revisiting the same tensions — about priorities, about ownership, about the way decisions are made — it usually means the underlying issue has not been named or worked through. The team has developed workarounds rather than solutions. People route around the friction rather than engaging with it. The energy cost of this is significant, even when it is invisible.
Team coaching creates the conditions in which that underlying pattern can be examined directly and honestly, rather than managed around. It is often in that conversation — the one the team has been avoiding — that the most significant shifts happen.
A team that trusts itself makes decisions and moves on. A team that does not will often either slow decisions down through excessive consultation and qualification, or make them quickly and then relitigate them — finding reasons to reopen things that seemed settled.
Both patterns are expensive. Research consistently finds that high-performing teams move faster through decisions not because they have less to discuss, but because they have clearer norms for how decisions get made and greater trust that the process is sound (Hackman & Wageman, 2005). When those norms are absent, or when trust in the process is low, teams compensate by adding more steps, more sign-offs, more reassurance-seeking — and the organisation slows around them.
If the question "who decided that, and when?" has different answers depending on who you ask, that is usually a reliable signal.
How a team absorbs new people tells you a great deal about its underlying culture. A team with healthy norms integrates new members relatively naturally: they understand what is valued, what is expected, and how to contribute. They may find the pace challenging, but the culture itself feels navigable.
When new team members consistently take a long time to settle, or report difficulty understanding how the team really works, or find that the written rules and the actual rules are substantially different — that is the culture revealing itself. The team has a set of norms that it has never made explicit, cannot easily describe, and struggles to pass on. That tends to suggest the norms themselves need examining.
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A team's culture is most visible at its edges — in how it treats the person who has just arrived, and in what it expects them to figure out for themselves. |
This is perhaps the most telling pattern of all, and the one that leaders themselves are often last to notice.
In a high-performing team, leadership is distributed. People take initiative, share accountability, and actively support each other rather than waiting to be directed. In a team where that is not happening, the leader compensates: they fill the gaps, chase the follow-through, absorb the conflicts that the team cannot resolve between itself. They work harder and the team, in a quiet and unintentional way, lets them.
This is not a failure of leadership so much as a symptom of a team dynamic that has never fully matured. Research on team development consistently identifies a pattern in which collective ownership and shared accountability either develop — or do not — depending on the quality of the relational culture the team has built (Wageman et al., 2008). When it has not developed, the leader carries more than they should, and the team performs below what it is capable of.
The paradox here is worth naming. The leader who works hardest to compensate for the gap can inadvertently prevent the team from closing it. If the team knows that the leader will eventually step in, there is less pressure to step up. Team coaching addresses this directly — not by working on the leader alone, but by working on the team as a system.
None of the patterns above means a team is failing. They are more often signs of a team that is functioning adequately but has not yet found the conditions in which it could function well. The gap between those two things is where the most interesting and productive coaching work tends to live.
If two or three of the patterns above feel familiar, it may be worth exploring what a structured team coaching engagement would involve — not as an admission that something is wrong, but as a decision to take seriously what the team could become.
References:
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Hackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2005). A theory of team coaching. Academy of Management Review, 30(2), 269–287.
Wageman, R., Nunes, D. A., Burruss, J. A., & Hackman, J. R. (2008). Senior leadership teams: What it takes to make them great. Harvard Business School Press.