- 23/02/2025
- |Executive Coaching, Organisational Consulting, Team Coaching
Every single one of us is part of a team. We start off life in our family, our first important team, where we depend on each other to support us. As we go through life, we create connections with our family, friends, teachers, and as we age, in work, colleagues, managers, and leaders.
However, I believe we’re at an inflection point with work and teams. What has got us here won’t get us there [Marshall Goldsmith, 2007].
What is the problem that we’re trying to solve?
The traditional style of command and control form of leadership is no longer providing the results that we need if it ever did. Organisations from sole traders to multinational consultancies are struggling. Redundancies abound, productivity falling, profits reducing, salaries stagnating, not to mention decreasing in real time due to inflation post covid. It’s hard.
When I am speaking to organisations right now, large and small, I hear about frayed tempers and leaders doubling down on command and control in the belief that we’re under threat and facing uncertain times. We work harder, get more and more granular to solve problems, forgetting the big picture, and failing to understand why it’s not working.
As Hawkins (2024) eloquently phrases it ‘there is a narrowing of human consciousness’.
I heard a story recently of a partner in a Big 4 consultancy who moved floors in the building. He knew no one. It was like a new job. We are so unconnected; We’re losing the connections we sorely need to function as humans, trust is damaged through constant change, and we’re not listening or thinking anymore. It’s no wonder we yearn for more certainty and balance – and even more so, connection. But we’ve continued to let it happen – we work harder, the task list grows, and we burn out. We’re stuck in doing.
It doesn’t need to be like this. I really believe that.
We started off life by making connections and deep relationships. If we think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – as humans, we have physiological needs like food and water. We then have important needs around safety. We move to love and belonging, then self-esteem, and self-actualisation – including creativity, meaning and potential. When these are missing, we’re not complete and we struggle.
How can we approach this differently?
To make a shift from where we are and where we need to get to, we need to be relational. How we connect, interconnect and reconnect. We need to take a systemic approach. Nieuwerburgh et al (2025) describe this in terms of systemic awareness:
“Systemic awareness is an understanding of how we operate within our personal, societal and professional contexts. Having this awareness means that people understand how they interact with others and the environment. It is based on the view that organisations, societies and other groups are always changing, organic and interconnected.”
When we say systemic, it’s not the hard systems we’re referring to, it’s the human needs and the human connections that make this work. What can we do together that we can’t do alone?
We need to think more about collective leadership, and how we’re interconnected.
Taking a systemic approach to a team, and an entire organisation can be a first step to making this shift. The system is already there, but sometimes we just can’t see it. But if we can start to perceive it, we can reconnect it.
Barbour and Widdowson (2021) carefully define Team and Systemic coaching as:
Team and Systemic Coaching helps teams work together, with others and within their wider environment, to create lasting change by developing safe and trusting relationships, better ways of working and new thinking, so that they maximise their collective potential, purpose and performance goals.
I would go further to bring in the concepts of neuroscience. If we define neuroplasticity as the ability of the brain to change and adapt in response to new experiences, injury, or changes in the environment. Thinking of organisations that have gone through significant organisational trauma (Bailleur 2018), and organisational change, I’d coin the phrase ‘systemic neuroplasticity’ – ‘new ways of thinking, and the ability of the system to change and adapt in response to new experiences, trauma, or changes in the environment’.
To achieve this, we can’t just consider individuals on their own. Where things happen is the connections between people. The things we often need to make visible are what happens in the spaces between – what can’t we see that we need to see?
How many times in meetings has an offhand comment been made and the atmosphere completely changed? How many times does someone discuss that change? How many times has that exactly been the point that needed to be discussed?
This is far from being a woolly idea – Team and Systemic coaching has proven significant benefits (figure 1)
By understanding the influences on an individual, a team, a team of teams, and the organisation, we start to see where there are missing connections, broken lines of communication, or just things that don’t work. By thinking about our stakeholders, our teams’ stakeholders, their priorities, and their needs, we start to establish the purpose of a team – we exist to serve the needs of stakeholders.
Joke: What comes first the purpose or the team?
Answer: Actually, it’s not a joke, a team doesn’t exist without a purpose – but often that isn’t clear.
I’ve spoken to many team members individually and asked, ‘What is the purpose of this team’. I end up with as many purposes as the team members, which is often unrelated to the purpose of the organisation. Immediately we can see a team is working at cross purposes. No wonder there are frayed nerves and arguments over deadlines if no one is working towards the same goals.
If we can co-create an organisational purpose, and then integrate this into the entire organisation, creating a team purpose, and what we can refer to as an integrated purpose, there is more clarity on the collective aims. People start working together, and we produce more together than often inappropriate competition with colleagues.
This can also have a huge positive impact on culture, which we can define as an organisational mindset. If we can understand the purpose of each team, how they work together, and be clear on the strategic mindset (early adoption, growth optimisation, or change agency) [1] we begin to be more aligned.
To bring this together and work with teams and organisations in a systemic way, we suggest the following:
- Consider the team dynamics. Does the team know each other well enough to call things out, and shift from unhealthy conflict to healthy dialogue? Work on trust. What is not being said that needs to be spoken.
- Get people on the same page. Do we understand who the key stakeholders of a team are and identify what their needs are? Don’t only think about the Team. Think about the outside in – what and who impacts the team. This can lead to the purpose of the team. These stakeholders and the purpose of the team may change over time. There may even be times when a team needs to be disbanded.
- Listen to each other. How many times have you sat in a room, there was a gap for breath, and someone jumped in with a different point, or shot down a person that hadn’t even finished their thought? Allow thinking to happen – It happens in the silence.
Once we build trust, start to listen to each other and understand purpose, we can start to consider the organisational mindset.
Getting this right sounds hard, but we believe taking a systemic approach is profoundly simple. Finding that systemic alignment between people, teams, teams of teams and organisations has significant and tangible benefits, as well as transforming organisations back to places that, well, we’d actually like to work in.
Richard Galbraith, Associate Coach, Leading Figures
Booklist and references
1. Hawkins, P. (2021). Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership. 4th ed. London: Kogan Page.
2. Barbour, P. and Widdowson, L. (2021). Building Top Performing Teams: A Practical Guide to Team Coaching to Improve Collaboration and Drive Organizational Success. London: Kogan Page.
3. Whittington, J. (2020). Systemic Coaching and Constellations: The Principles, Practices and Application for Individuals, Teams and Groups. 3rd ed. London: Kogan Page.
4. Bailleur, P. (2018). Stuck: Dealing with Organisational Trauma. Systemic Books Publishing.
5. Nieuwerburgh, C. and Lowe, T. (2025). Effective Reflective Practice: Improving Practice through Self-Reflection and Writing. London: SAGE.
6. Goldsmith, M. (2007). What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. New York: Hyperion.
[1] ‘Strategic Mindset’ and the archetypes copyright Karen Lord & Archetypal Potential ™
