Team coaching – at depth – a grounded framework for reflective practice

Published by Aubyn Howard on 11th April 2025

Introduction

Team coaching involves a significantly greater magnitude of complexity than one-to-one leadership coaching. As depth coaches, we can benefit from frameworks that help us to manage and engage with this complexity and stay grounded in our work. This principle is becoming magnified within an ever increasing VUCA world – not least because of the way the psychological impacts of VUCA compound each other ( e.g. Volatility > insecurity, Uncertainty > anxiety, Complexity > confusion, Ambiguity > conflict – see box below).

There are some conventional team coaching competency frameworks or models which are helpful for anyone starting out on this path, but these are not sufficient for engaging with the psychological complexity involved. I would include the excellent EMCC Professional Core Standards model (that we use in our team coach training), as well as Peter Hawkins’ Five Disciplines Model within these.

In this article I outline three simple frameworks for the team coach to draw upon that help us engage with the psychological territory and therefore enable us to recognise and work with unconscious dynamics, forces and energies as well as the conscious; the hidden as well as the acknowledged; the inner as well as the outer worlds at individual and collective levels.

1. SOS

The first of these is so simple and obvious, that I often skip over it when teaching, but increasingly I realise it represents a form of reflective movement in itself that benefits from frequent and continuing practice. SOS, or Self-Other-System refers to the need to include and move between these three essential levels in our awareness, reflection and action.

Inclusion of Self/self provides the ground for all of our practice – simply asking Where am I in this? What is being activated for me here? What might I be unaware of? Is this a pattern for me? opens the way to recognising our identifications and being able to start disidentifying.

This means that as we turn our attention to the Other/others in any situation (e.g. our client or members of a team), we notice where we might be caught, attached or reacting in an objectifying or transactional relationship. This opens the potential for being available and curious, within a qualitatively different I-thou, subject-to-subject, being-to-being, self-to-self relational space. From here we can wonder about what might be going on in terms of our own and others’ projections, transferences, perspectives, narratives and imaginings; e.g. what do I really know and how do I know it? What am I projecting or imagining to fill gaps of not knowing or to fit an inner narrative? What are others doing likewise with each other? What does my outsider viewpoint both enable and limit in terms of what I can see, sense and feel?

The third part of the movement is to then include the wider System, both that we are part of and that the Other (client, coachee, team, etc) is part of and impacted by. There may be obvious and apparent systems forces (e.g. showing up in terms of blocks, inhibitions, stuckness, compulsions, legacy behaviours and patterns, etc) but the art of team coaching involves staying curious, wondering and allowing an unfolding inquiry. For example; how much of what is happening here is about the system, an unconscious acting out of silent patterns or unspoken power? How am I and how are they being caught within this system? What can I see, that maybe they cannot see? Where is there agency or a lack of agency here?

We can easily get lost in the systemic inquiry, so it is important to keep coming back to ourselves, via our embodied sensory intelligence, as well as to the relational space with the Other. Thus the reflective movement completes and continues, and starts to become second nature in our practice as team coaches and group facilitators.

2. The Team Coaching Reflective Practice Model

The practice of ‘SOS’ sets us up for a more systematic reflective process that can be part of a periodic review or supervision process. There may be superficial similarities between this model and others (e.g. 7 eye’s), so it is important to emphasise that this is a process model, working psychologically with human consciousness and the unconscious; with the relational process; with systemic flow, movement and energies.

This is the basic model, each level with an illustrative systemic motif:

The connection between the levels is important, each relates both ways to the next, as part of an iterative and nested reflective process.

Self-reflection

e.g. What is mine and not mine? What parts of my personality are in play? Where could I be caught or acting out of old patterns? My projections and transferences? What countertransference am I experiencing?

Coaching partnership process

e.g. What’s explicit and what’s implicit between us as a coaching partnership? Does this need checking out? Are we working in conscious relationship and is there healthy flow and exchange?

Coach and team engagement process

e.g. How did we come into the system and what impact may this be having? Who brought us in and how? What do we notice about boundary management with this team system?

Team process

e.g. What is unspoken, unconscious, unacknowledged in this team? What are the power dynamics within the system? What are the explicit and hidden roles? What patterns of behaviour keep repeating?

Team and wider system process

e.g. What is the system for the team? What is the team for the system? What are the power dynamics within this system? What other systems is this one part of?

The questions above are illustrative of how this framework can be used to support a process of continuous reflective inquiry by a team coach. This can happen as an inner dialogue (as we reflect in action), as a dialogue between team coach partners (reflecting iteratively on action) and as part of a more formal periodic supervision process, with an external supervisor (reflecting on action from a new perspective).

3. The Six Key Principles

This Team Coaching Reflective Practice Model is enhanced by drawing upon six key principles for how we work as team coaches. At one level, this framework is simply a distillation of what I have found over the last ten years to be the essential principles or perspectives that we need to bring to our work as depth coaches. By essential, I mean that if the depth coach is unaware or unable to engage with any of these, this will eventually impact or limit their work. Each represents an approach or school of thought within the coaching world that has evolved significantly over the last 20 years. I would also suggest that too narrow a focus on only one of these can limit us as depth coaches – a combination need to come into dynamic relationship to be most effective. Of course, this is a very subjective view that reflects my own biases and preferences, but nevertheless I invite you to see how this fits your experience and might support your development. I will unpack them one by one, acknowledging some sources or references to take your understanding further if you are new to them.

The first three principles support the pattern of self – other – system;

Embodiment – the first principle for all this work is that we have a body – that we are embodied beings. It is important (particularly for the cognitively oriented like myself!) to continuously or periodically ground ourselves through somatic and embodied practice, for example breathwork, centring or mindfulness, as well as to use our bodily and sensory experience to inform our awareness and guide our interventions, within the context of using self as an instrument. This principle becomes magnified in team and group work and is well informed by growing understanding about how our nervous systems work as the need for self- and co-regulation in relationship with others. Roberto Assagioli said that psychosynthesis should really be calledbio-psycho-synthesis, but he decided against it for simplicity’s sake!

Resource:

Aquilina, Eunice (2016), Embodying Authenticity – A Somatic Path to Transforming Self, Team and Organisation, London: Live It Publishing.

Relational – the second principle is that we are relational beings and that we are in a relational space when we work as coaches. Our reflective practice and interventions are “anchored within the here-and-how relationships that we experience together within the team” (p2, 2023). We seek to create spaces that allow for not knowing, for inquiry and curiosity which bring us and the team with into deeper relationship with the team process, pattern and emergent potential.

Resource:

de Hann, Eric and Stoffels, Dorothee, Editors (2023) Relational Team Coaching, Abingdon: Routledge

Systemic – the third principle is that we are also part of systems. Dynamic, open, nested, inter-connected, complex adaptive systems of human consciousness. Our capacity to see systemic forces in play and intervene effectively with teams which are also part of wider systems can be enhanced by learning to shift between different systemic perspectives, developing systemic awareness and disidentifying when parts of us are caught or blind to systemic forces. Constellations is a powerful technique for revealing and healing what is going on with a system, which is becoming increasingly popular and can be used with teams (but not in the same was as with family constellations or learning groups).

Resource:

Whittington, John (2016, 2nd Ed): Systemic Coaching & Constellations, London: Kogan Page

The second three principles add dimensionality and depth to our awareness and capacity to intervene effectively, whether our focus is self, other or system.

Developmental – the developmental principle evokes the necessary dimension of what happens over time. Human beings, teams, organisational and societal systems all evolve, develop or grow according to some recognisable principles or patterns, even within their complex uniqueness and difference. A developmental perspective as a coach helps us recognise stages, phases or challenges in team development. The explicit goals or desired outcomes may be about the development of the team, so it can help to draw upon a developmental model which can be shared with the team; e.g. the Group Dynamics Model – see below, which maps well with Clare Graves’ ECLET model and Laloux’s organisational paradigms, as well as more conventional models such as Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions or Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development. For an excellent introduction to the developmental perspective, see Cook-Greuter’s article (2004); and for developmental coaching in general, see Bachkirova (2021).

Resources:

Simpson, Steve; Evans, Joan and Evans, Roger (2014): Essays on the Theory and Practice of a Psychospiritual Psychology, Volume 2 (Published by The Institute of Psychosynthesis). See: Systems, Synthesis and Group Dynamics by Joan Evans, page 3.

Bachkirova, Tatiana (2021), Developmental coaching. Working with the self, Maidenhead: Open University Press

Cook-Greuter, Susanne (2004), Making the case for a developmental perspective. Online paper:

https://www.psychosynthesiscoaching.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Cook-GreuterDevelopmentalPerspective.pdf

Synthesis – the key principle underlying how growth and development takes place is that of polarity and synthesis. This is a core concept in psychosynthesis which I feel is one of the least understood. As a depth coach we support the teams’ capacity to hold polarity tension of opposites (e.g. between freedom and control, integration and change, task and process, masculine and feminine, immanent and transcendent, etc) in a healthy way which allows for breakthroughs and creativity, to reach towards new syntheses of collective intelligence. If this principle is not brought into play, we will see unhealthy splits, increasing polarisation, destructive power politics; see the wider world of national and geo-politics today.

Resource:

Assagioli, Roberto (2018), Balance and Synthesis of Opposites, Source: Assagioli Archives: Florence, Translated by Gordon Symons:

https://www.psychosynthesiscoaching.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/AssagioliGS-BALANCE-AND-SYNTHESIS-OF-OPPOSITES.pdf

Emergence – finally, we include a principle that describes the essential nature of the universe, that of emergence. The paradoxical nature of emergence is that it is both beyond any conscious control and we can engage in co-creative relationship with it. The depth coach holds a space for the emergent whether working with individuals or collectives, supporting the unfolding of self and will, of being and becoming, of self-realisation and self-actualisation, working beyond the linear concrete mind, more with the intuitive holistic mind.

Resource:

Adamson, Fiona and Brendgen, Jane (2022), Mindfulness-based Relational Supervision, Abingdon: Routledge

Embracing all of these principles could either seem like a daunting challenge, or maybe you recognise you are naturally engaging many of them already in your practice. Either way, they can continuously be revisited at new turns of the spiral of our learning and development.

My intention in this article was to speak to some frameworks and principles that inform the way we work as depth coaches with teams. What does this look like in practice? I invite you to join one of our Team Coaching and Group Dynamics training courses, which you can find out more about on our website here. Thank you for reading.