Supervision for Team Coaches: A Six-Session Intensive

Most coaches are trained to work one person at a time. We learn to listen deeply, ask the right question at the right moment, follow the thread of someone’s thinking, and help them see what they couldn’t quite see alone.

Then a client who trusts how you work asks you to work with their team. Or facilitate a group. And suddenly you’re in a room full of people, each carrying their own history, their own assumptions, their own hopes and fears and loyalties. At first, it seems like it should transfer — you know how to listen, after all. You know how to be present.

But it doesn’t take long to realize a team is a different animal entirely. You leave a session wondering why you’re so tired, or why you worked so hard, or why one person in particular is still with you hours later. You notice tension nobody named out loud. You catch yourself reacting to the group in ways you don’t fully understand. And slowly you start to sense that people in that room are responding to more than the agenda — to each other, to you, to authority, to whether they belong.

Eventually, a different question shows up: what’s happening here that nobody ever taught me to see?

This matters, whatever kind of team brings you into the room — whoever you work with, whatever the industry. The task in front of you is real — that’s why you were hired in the first place. But the task can only take you so far. What you know about a group from watching it is one kind of knowledge. What you know once you’ve actually been inside a group yourself — felt what it does to you, in your body, in real time — is a different kind entirely. Once you’ve felt that, you start to notice the moment a team slides into performing competence instead of actually working through what’s underneath. That’s worth noticing. It’s just not where the real work begins. And it’s not where it should end, either.

This six-session series is a living lab for coaches who work with teams. It’s like an extended workshop or a masterclass.  A bit more than a set of tools for managing dynamics more smoothly, plus your work with teams gets sharper as a result. It’s a place to study a living group from inside one.

For six sessions, we become a team, which is also what we study.   Being inside it is part of the learning. We’ll notice what shows up between us in real time — belonging, authority, silence, conflict, trust, who pulls back and who steps forward, the invisible threads holding the room together.

As coaches who work with teams, most of our professional lives are spent watching what happens between other people. What we rarely get is the chance to study those same dynamics while we’re the ones inside them. What happens when you’re not just the observer anymore? When you’re part of the system, and you’re the one who feels needed, or unseen, or in over your head?

This is the kind of learning that is rarely offered in coaching programs in the USA.   They may offer a course on team facilitation. Far fewer ask you to become a student of your own experience inside one — and that’s often where the real learning lives. Not in a model. Not in a framework. In the ways we shape a group, and the ways it shapes us right back.

This work builds session by session, so I’m asking people to commit to the full six — not because any one session won’t matter, but because the real value shows once trust has had time to develop and patterns start to become visible.

This group also works as a doorway into a deeper, year-long supervision cohort for coaches who want to keep building their capacity to work with teams, groups, and living systems.