Why Team Coaches Need to Study Themselves, Not Just Their Teams

You are a coach walking into a team coaching session feeling ready. You’ve prepped. You know the context, the stated goals, maybe even the personalities involved. 

And then you walk into the room (or you let people into the Zoom room). And there they are: the CEO, members of the executive team, perhaps a board member or two, employees at different levels of the organization who were asked to be there. Each has a formal role and a place in the reporting structure. But underneath that are relationships and alliances that may not be visible at first, histories and loyalties that have little to do with the organizational chart, and tensions that were running long before you arrived.

What You Can’t See on the Org Chart

The team also lives inside something larger: an organization with its own culture and history, its own ways of relating to authority, conflict, success, difference, and change. There are things that can be said easily and things that somehow don’t get said at all. The coach walks into all of that, too.

And then there are the roles people come to occupy that may have little to do with their titles. Someone carries the conflict. Someone becomes the person everyone listens to. Someone disappears. Someone can challenge authority and someone else can’t. When things become uncomfortable, the team may already know, without consciously knowing, who will take care of what.

Teams and the people in them have ways of finding roles for us, too. Coaches aren’t exempt.

This is one of the questions I ask coaches who work with teams: What happens to you when you enter the room? Not only what are you planning to do, or what’s on the agenda, but what begins to happen to you once you’re there.

In Team Coaching, You’re Not Just Observing the System — You’re Part of It

A seasoned coach may know this territory well in one-on-one work. There’s a practiced awareness of what you’re noticing in the client and in yourself. Team work asks us to widen that attention. You didn’t build this system, but the moment you enter it, you become part of it.

Perhaps you become unusually responsible for keeping things moving. You find yourself careful around one person and unusually direct with another. You want to protect someone, challenge someone else, impress the CEO, fill the silence, or make sure the conversation goes somewhere. You may feel irritated, inadequate, invisible, essential—or simply unlike yourself.

It’s easy to assume these responses are ours alone. Sometimes they are. Sometimes something happening in the team may be showing up in what it evokes in us. Often we don’t yet know.

This can be confusing terrain, particularly because many coaches haven’t had the experience of being part of a working group where what is happening in the group—including their own experience as a member of it—is part of what they’re there to explore. We’ve been members of groups all our lives: families, schools, organizations, communities, teams. But being part of a group is different from learning to notice what happens to us while we’re in one.

What Group Supervision Offers Coaches Who Work With Teams

This is one reason group supervision can be so valuable for coaches working with teams. You’re not only bringing your work into supervision and thinking about it with other coaches. Over time, you’re having a lived experience of a group becoming a group.

It’s slow and progressive. You notice how roles form and shift, how trust develops, how difference enters the room, how authority gets experienced, and how people move toward and away from one another. There are bumps. People go quiet. Someone takes up more space. The group gets stuck, avoids something, finds its way back. And somewhere in that process, you begin to notice your own place in it.

A group becomes more able, over time, to use what happens between its members rather than simply move around it. For a coach working with teams, experiencing that from the inside can change what you’re able to see when you’re sitting with a team of your own.

Supervision gives us a place to ask not only what’s happening with this team?, but also what’s happening in me in the presence of this team? I might notice myself straightening up when the CEO speaks, protecting the person with the least formal power, or working harder than usual to prove I belong. I might wonder whose approval I care about, who I trust immediately, where I feel free to say the hard thing, and where that freedom disappears.

I might also wonder what role I’m being invited to occupy. Am I becoming the expert, the rescuer, the referee, the person who will finally say what no one else will? And what happens when I take up that role without realizing I’ve been offered it?

I’m also interested in the pressure a coach feels to do something: fix the problem, move the conversation forward, make sure everyone feels heard, demonstrate that the work is valuable. Sometimes that urgency is ours. Sometimes it may tell us something about the team or organization we’ve entered. We don’t have to know right away. We can get curious before we act.

Power, Difference, and Identity in the Room

Power matters here, too, and not only the power that comes with a title. We enter with bodies, histories, identities, professional standing, and our own relationships to authority and belonging. Race, gender, age, class, culture, sexuality, ability, professional background—none of that stays outside the door. Neither does the team’s response to who they experience us to be.

Sometimes difference is obvious. You may be the only woman in the room, the only person of color, or considerably younger than everyone else. Other times you may resemble the people who hold the most power, and that matters too. Familiarity shapes what feels normal, who we trust, what we imagine we can say, and sometimes what we don’t even think to question.

Not everything we feel in a team comes from our personal history. There is real power in the room, real difference, real organizational and cultural history. And our own histories are there, too. Both can be alive at once.

Rather than rushing to decide Is this mine or theirs?, perhaps the more useful question is What is happening here, between us?

Supervision gives us somewhere to stay with that question. Sometimes the most useful material is the irritation we can’t explain, the person we can’t stop thinking about, the moment we rushed past, the silence we filled, or the sentence we almost said and didn’t.

For me, that’s part of the value of supervision for coaches working with teams. We bring not only the team or the case. We bring ourselves in relationship to the work and become curious about what happened to us while we were inside it.

Because we’re not standing outside the system, observing it.

We’re in it.

And what happens to us there may be part of what the team is asking us to notice.

Learn more about Reboot Coach Supervision