What do executives think are the benefits of team coaching?

Manfred Kets de Vries, at INSEAD, the French business school, is a veteran of team coaching and an authority on the psychology of both coaching and group dynamics. His latest book, The Path to Individual and Organizational Transformation (Palgrave, 2025) contains many nuggets, but I was particularly struck by a list of 25 key benefits that executive teams perceive from team coaching. These range from identifying hidden conflict to clarifying roles and deeper understanding of team challenges, to aligning team norms with an accountability structure. It’s a valuable checklist to apply when engaging with a team, to answer the question: “What would you like team coaching to do for you as a team?”

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What is your system as a coach?

Systemic awareness is a basic requirement of an effective coach in a modern environment. Linear thinking often leads to temporary fixes that may be unsustainable and do more harm in the longer term. Some competency frameworks make things worse, by failing to give sufficient emphasis to the systems dimensions of coaching practice. One of the...

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Where does happiness sit on the coaching client’s agenda?

The remarkable thing about coaching clients putting happiness as a goal is that it is remarkable. The absence of happiness is hard to admit to ourselves or to others. It’s common to feel guilty about not being happy. So, the topic may not arise in coaching unless the coach’s intuition takes them there. There are...

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Building on personal strengths – beyond the basics

Identifying strengths is just the first part of a strengths-based approach to personal development. There are numerous self-completion questionnaires to help with the process, but these should come with a health warning – you have to have a relatively high level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence to see yourself accurately. More effective is to add...

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Where does mentoring come from?

The term Mentor comes from Homer’s Odyssey, where Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, impersonated an old man called Mentor to support both Odysseus and his son Telemachus on their journeys of self-discovery. (Mentor himself was quite useless.) In this and so many epic stories, the hero sets out on a journey – usually unplanned – (more…)

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What is your coaching style?

There are ten pairs of questions below. Which item in each pair best describes how you approach coaching? All the odd numbered statements represent a directive coaching mindset, although some of these items are legitimate coaching behaviours, when used in moderation. All of the even numbers are non-directive. The higher your score of even items,...

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Benefits of mentoring

Mentoring is one of the most powerful and impactful development methods an organization can use to support and grow its people from within. It brings significant, long lasting and wide-ranging benefits not only to the mentees and mentors, but also to teams, the wider organization as well as to key third parties such as the (more…)

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