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Why human connection is essential for leaders and teams.
“As machines get better at being machines, humans have to get better at being more human.”
This article explores why trust, compassion, and connection are now the true differentiators for leaders and teams in an age of AI and dispersed work.
In a world of AI and dispersed working, the leaders who thrive will be those who build trust, compassion and human connection.
Someone recently said to me, only half-jokingly: “Aren’t you worried all your work will be replaced by AI?”
It’s a fair question! There’s a lot of talk about using AI as your personal coach or turning to a Chatbot for leadership development. It’s a question many of us are asking ourselves.
There’s never been a more urgent need for leaders and teams to build human connection.
With many of us working at home some or all the time, I frequently work with teams that only get together in person once or twice a year. The rest of the time, we only communicate through screens.
We’re living through a time of extraordinary technological change. Artificial intelligence, automation, digital platforms, hybrid working promise speed, efficiency, and new opportunities. And yet, for many of the leaders and teams I work with, the lived experience is often the opposite: disconnection.
McKinsey’s recent research on the future of people management makes the point clearly: in a world of digital disruption and shifting expectations, traditional operating models no longer suffice. Leaders will need to focus less on process and more on people, building trust, compassion, and psychological safety, and creating personalised experiences that make work meaningful.
Technology isn’t the problem in itself. In fact, it frees up time and opens up possibilities. But unless we pay attention to what it means to “be more human,” they risk building organisations that are technically efficient but emotionally lacking.
Creating human connection sits at the heart of everything we do at Growth Space.
We need to remember we are all individual human beings, with lives, interests, passions and challenges outside work. And when we lose that perspective, it becomes harder to build trust, navigate conflict.
Humans have to get better at being more human.
“As machines get better at being machines, humans have to get better at being more human.”
Technology can bring efficiency and insight, but it can’t replace the human skills that make organisations thrive: empathy, emotional intelligence, and the ability to create real connections.
That sense of belonging is built in small, human moments.
Why leaders can’t outsource “the human stuff”
Leaders sometimes talk about well-being, culture, or engagement as if these belong to HR; the people team can be a partner, providing skills, tools, and insights, but they can’t do it all.
Every interaction we have (in meetings, informal chats, how you respond to pressure and the behaviour you reward or tolerate) shapes the culture your people experience. Leaders set the tone for workplaces where people feel valued, trusted, and inspired to grow.
The tone you set in a meeting.
The way you respond under pressure.
The behaviour you reward or tolerate.
What “being more human” looks like
So what does this actually mean in practice? It’s easy to say “be more human” - but in leadership, it comes down to creating the conditions where people feel safe, valued, and able to do their best work. That means:
Empathy and compassion: listening to understand, recognising how people are feeling, and responding with care.
Trust and psychological safety: showing up consistently so people know they can take risks, speak up, and be honest without fear of blame.
Emotional intelligence: being aware of your own impact and noticing what’s going on under the surface in the team.
Clarity and inspiration: helping people see the bigger picture, cutting through the noise, and connecting their effort back to purpose.
Courage and consistency: having the conversations that matter, even when they’re tough, and modelling the behaviours you expect from others.
What gets in the way
One of the biggest barriers I hear from leaders is time. “We’re too busy for this stuff.” But if you don’t make time for connection, though, you spend more time firefighting. Misunderstandings, conflicts, and disengagement all take longer to sort out than an honest, intentional conversation would have.
Why connection is the leadership differentiator:
The differentiator will be whether leaders can create organisations where people feel connected to their purpose, to each other, and to the work they do.
A team that talks honestly builds more trust in a day than in months of polite meetings.
A leader who listens deeply earns loyalty that no pay rise can buy.
An organisation that lives its values consistently wins both hearts and results.
Connection isn’t fluffy. It’s strategic. It’s the foundation of execution, innovation, and growth.
So I’m not worried about being replaced by an AI coach. Coaching, Facilitating, Culture Transformation and Team effectiveness, leadership aren’t done by AI . They’re about sitting down together (or even walking together), building trust, asking the right questions, holding space for reflection, and challenging people to grow.
Do you need support to build a more connected workplace?
At Growth Space, we work with leadership teams to create alignment around strategy, helping them clarify their story, build trust, and energise their people through team diagnostics, facilitation, and team coaching.
If you’d like to explore how I could support your team, get in touch
Email: hello@growth-space.co.uk or call 07966 475195.
How to Align and Motivate Leaders and Teams to Deliver Strategy
“Alignment is not about agreement. It’s about commitment.”
This article explores how leadership teams can create a shared narrative, build trust, and motivate people so that strategy lives beyond the boardroom and drives daily action
How to create alignment, build trust, and inspire people to move strategy forward
Strategy succeeds not when leaders draft the perfect plan, but when they commit to delivering it together. Alignment turns priorities into progress. It transforms leadership teams from a group of individuals into one voice, one story, and one movement that inspires belief across the whole organisation.
It’s common for teams to leave a strategy session believing they’re on the same page, only for cracks to appear later. Each leader interprets priorities slightly differently, explains them in their own way to their teams, and emphasises what matters to their function. Those differences ripple down, creating confusion, duplication, and frustration.
As a result, people don’t know what to focus on, resources get wasted, and the strategy loses energy before it’s even begun.
True alignment transforms strategy from a document into a movement -something people understand, believe in, and act on every day.
Why alignment matters
When leaders aren’t aligned:
Teams hear mixed messages.
Decisions get slowed down or contradicted.
Trust erodes because people don’t know what to believe.
“Alignment is not about agreement. It’s about commitment.”
When they are aligned:
The organisation moves faster.
Everyone is clearer on priorities.
People feel more motivated because they see consistency and confidence at the top.
As Professor Peter Hawkins reminds us, leadership teams don’t exist for themselves; they exist to create value for stakeholders. Alignment ensures the whole team is pulling in that direction, together.
Step 1: Create clarity at the top
Alignment starts with the leadership team. Before anything is shared more widely, leaders must be confident they all share the same understanding of the strategy and priorities.
Example: In one session I facilitated, we explored a new strategic priority. When I asked each leader to describe it in their own words, one focused on growth, another on efficiency, another on innovation. We paused and unpacked those differences. Through structured discussion, we defined:
What the priority actually meant.
Why it mattered to the business.
The concrete steps required to achieve it.
By the end, the leadership team had one shared definition. More importantly, they had tested and challenged their assumptions, so they were confident they could stand behind it with one voice.
Practical step: Try this in your own leadership team: ask each person to explain a key priority in one sentence. If the answers differ, you’ve found your first alignment challenge.
Step 2: Craft a strategic narrative that inspires people
Strategy is not just a list of bullet points, targets and numbers. For people to believe in it, it needs to become a compelling story that makes clear connections to purpose, why it matters, what difference it will make and has emotional resonance.
This turns strategy into something every leader can deliver consistently, every employee can hear and understand instantly, and every stakeholder can connect with and believe in. A strategic narrative links strategy to purpose and gives people a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Example: One client originally framed their strategy around “increasing EBITDA by 15%.” Rationally important, but emotionally flat. We worked together to reframe it:
“We exist to help our clients grow sustainably. Our strategy is about becoming the partner of choice: faster, more responsive, more collaborative. When we achieve that, our financial results will follow.”
The numbers stayed in the background. The narrative became about purpose and value. It gave employees something to believe in, not just a target to hit.
Practical step: Ask: If this were someone’s first day here, how would we explain our strategy in a way that connects to why we exist?
Step 3: Cascade to teams consistently
Once leaders have a shared narrative, the next challenge is consistency. If each leader tweaks the story, employees hear different versions or become focused only on the goals which seem most relevant to their function, this creates siloed working. To avoid this:
Keep the narrative simple — no jargon, no long documents.
Agree on the non-negotiables (the core message that never changes).
Repeat it in every forum: town halls, team meetings, one-to-ones, and onboarding.
Adapt the examples for different audiences, but never change the heart of the message.
Example: One leadership team agreed on three strategic pillars. We worked to make the language so simple and clear that anyone in the business could repeat it. Within months, people across teams were using the same phrases — the message had stuck.
Practical step: Test your narrative by asking employees at different levels: Can you name our top three priorities? If the answers vary, you have more alignment work to do.
Step 4: Energise and motivate people
Alignment isn’t just about clarity. It’s about energy. People need to feel inspired and motivated to act. Leaders can create this energy by:
Celebrating wins and milestones (even the small ones) that show the strategy in action.
Recognising behaviours that bring values and priorities to life.
Sharing success stories, e.g. customer feedback
Involving teams in shaping how priorities are delivered, not just telling them what to do.
Example: A senior leadership team introduced quarterly “strategy showcases,” where teams presented examples of how they had delivered on priorities. It created pride, healthy competition, and belief. Strategy felt alive, not abstract.
Practical step: Create moments where teams share their progress. It not only builds momentum but also shows that strategy belongs to everyone, not just the boardroom.
Step 5: Build trust through leadership behaviours
Alignment only holds if people trust their leaders. Employees notice when leaders’ actions don’t match their words. Trust is built when leaders:
Role-model the behaviours they expect from others.
Follow through on commitments.
Communicate openly, even when things are difficult.
Admit when priorities need adjusting.
Practical step: Audit your leadership behaviours. Are you sending signals that strengthen alignment, or undermine it?
Step 6: Keep it alive
Alignment isn’t a one-off task. It needs to be renewed regularly. Strategies evolve, leaders change, and contexts shift. Without attention, drift creeps in. Ways to keep alignment alive:
Quarterly alignment checks: revisit the narrative and test whether leaders are still telling the same story.
Leadership reflections: make alignment a standing agenda item, not just results, but how the story is being lived.
Refresh the narrative: keep examples and stories up to date so the strategy feels relevant.
Practical step: Build alignment reviews into your leadership rhythm. Don’t assume that once aligned, it means always aligned.
Final Thought
When leaders create clarity at the top, craft a narrative linked to purpose, cascade it consistently, energise people through stories and celebrations, and role-model with trust, strategy becomes more than a plan. It becomes energy and momentum.
Alignment is a living discipline. It’s not about everyone agreeing politely — it’s about leaders committing to one voice, one story, and one set of priorities, and inspiring people to move forward together.
✨ If you’d like to explore how I could support your team, get in touch
Do you need help to build alignment and motivation around your strategy?
II work with leadership teams to create alignment around strategy, helping them clarify their story, build trust, and energise their people through facilitation, systemic team coaching, and leadership development.
If you’d like to explore how I could support your team, get in touch
Email: hello@growth-space.co.uk or call 07966 475195.
How to turn strategy into action
This article shows how leadership teams can close the strategy–execution gap by setting meaningful OKRs and KPIs, breaking them into milestones, assigning ownership, and making time for the work that shifts the dial.
A step-by-step process for translating strategy into milestones, ownership, and momentum.
Most strategies don’t fail because the ideas are wrong, but because they never make it off the page.
Leaders spend hours shaping ambitious goals and priorities, but unless those ideas are turned into clear, measurable steps with ownership and momentum, strategy ends up as shelfware.
Bridging the strategy–execution gap is one of the toughest challenges leadership teams face. It’s not just about setting targets; it’s about making them real. That means translating big goals into measurable outcomes, breaking them down into milestones, assigning ownership, creating rhythms of accountability, and, crucially, protecting time to focus on what really shifts the dial.
Here’s a practical journey leadership teams can follow to turn strategy into action.
Step 1: Set OKRs and KPIs That Matter
The first step is to make goals tangible. Without clear measures, strategy remains abstract.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): Ambitious objectives that inspire, paired with measurable results that track progress.
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): Ongoing health checks that monitor stability and performance.
Transformation KPIs: The most powerful of all. These are targets that no single team can deliver alone — they require leaders to work together in new ways.
Example: One leadership team I worked with had a goal to “increase annual revenue by 20%.” On its own, this was too broad. Everyone agreed it was important, but nobody knew what needed to happen next. We broke it into milestones:
Q1: Define target client segments and refresh the sales pipeline.
Q2: Launch a new marketing campaign and onboard three new strategic accounts.
Q3: Improve conversion rates by redesigning the proposal process and introducing client feedback loops.
Q4: Expand services with two existing clients and finalise partnership agreements.
The revenue growth was achieved not because people focused on the 20% target itself, but because they worked towards clear, achievable steps that made progress visible.
Step 2: Break Big Goals Into Small Steps
Ambitious goals can feel motivating at the top, but confusing and overwhelming. You need to know what this looks like in practice and how progress will be tracked.
That’s where SMART goals come in. For every big objective, define goals that are:
Specific - unambiguous
Measurable - attach a number or evidence of success
Achievable - stretching, but realistic given time and resources.
Relevant - aligned to the bigger strategy, not just busy work.
Time-bound - with deadlines that create urgency and focus.
Once you have SMART goals, break the annual ambition into quarterly or even monthly milestones. For example, instead of saying “grow client revenue by 20% this year,” identify the steps along the way:
Build a refreshed sales pipeline and win two new accounts.
Launch a targeted campaign in one priority sector.
Improve conversion rates by 10% through a new proposal process.
Expand services with three existing clients.
Step 3: Prioritise What Matters Most
Once goals are set, the temptation is to tackle them all at once. But trying to do everything dilutes focus. This is where sequencing is essential. The simple Now, Soon and Later lens helps avoid overload and focus resources where they matter most.
Now: urgent and essential priorities that need immediate attention or are quick wins
Soon: important work that depends on foundations being in place.
Later: longer-term ambitions to return to once capacity allows.
Step 4: Assign Clear Ownership
Even the best milestones won’t move forward without clear ownership. One of the most common reasons strategy execution fails is that everyone assumes someone else will deliver. Without clarity, tasks stall, overlap, or simply fall through the cracks.
The RACI framework is a simple tool to remove this confusion by spelling out roles:
Responsible: the person (or people) actually doing the work.
Accountable: the one person ultimately answerable for success.
Consulted: people whose expertise or perspective is needed along the way.
Informed: those who need to be kept updated, even if they’re not directly involved.
Step 5: Create Rhythm and Discipline
Progress should be transparent, shared, and easy to track so everyone can see the journey from ambition to action. It also requires regular check-ins, visible updates, and space to adapt.
Weekly or monthly check-ins: quick reviews of OKRs and milestones.
Quarterly reflections: deeper look at what’s working, what needs adjusting, and what to stop or start.
Visible tracking: progress dashboards or scorecards that everyone can see. Some teams use scoreboards in team meetings; others use visual progress charts.
Step 6: Make Time for What Shifts the Dial
Eisenhower matrix
The hardest part of execution isn’t knowing what to do — it’s making time to do it. Urgent demands pull leaders back into operations. The firefighting takes over. But strategy requires deliberate attention. Leadership teams must protect time for the work that shapes the future, not just the work that keeps today running.
The Eisenhower Matrix helps here:
Most leaders spend too much time in “urgent and important.” True strategy lives in the “important but not urgent” quadrant — the work that builds capacity, shapes culture, and drives transformation.
Example: In one leadership programme, we mapped leaders’ weekly diaries against the matrix. Most of their time was firefighting. Once they saw this, they began to block out regular sessions for strategy. Six months later, progress was visible in ways they hadn’t thought possible.
Final Thought
Turning strategy into action isn’t about more documents. It’s about discipline, ownership, and focus. Leadership teams can close the strategy–execution gap by:
Setting OKRs, KPIs, and Transformation KPIs that matter.
Breaking them down into SMART milestones.
Prioritising with Now/Soon/Later and/or the Eisenhower Matrix
Assigning ownership with RACI.
Creating accountability.
Protecting time for strategic work that shifts the dial.
Do you need help to turn your strategy into action?
I work with leaders and boards to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, helping them turn ambition into action through facilitation, systemic team coaching, and leadership off-sites.
If you’d like to explore how I could support your team, get in touch
Email: hello@growth-space.co.uk or call 07966 475195.
How to create a strategy that is fit for the future
Strategy isn’t a plan to file away - it’s a living framework that must adapt, engage stakeholders, and look to the future. This article explores how leadership teams can create strategies that are resilient, relevant, and fit for the world ahead.
Keeping Strategy Relevant in a Changing World
Too often, strategy starts by looking inwards: What do we do and what are we good at? Tools like SWOT analysis have their place, but on their own, they risk narrowing the lens. But a strong strategy isn’t about your internal capabilities, it’s linked to your purpose and your value proposition (who do you exist for and what value do you offer them).
Frameworks like the Business Model Canvas remind us that value comes from the people you serve, not just the strengths you already have. A strategy fit for the future asks:
Why do we exist?
Who do we serve?
How do we create value now and in the future?
Strategy should be agile
Strategy isn’t a business plan you draft once, file away, and revisit in three years. A strategy that works is a living document: it needs to be:
Understood: people across the organisation know what it means for them.
Acted on daily: it shapes decisions and behaviours, not just slides.
Agile: it adapts as the environment shifts.
Reviewed regularly: it’s tested, refined, and re-energised.
Leadership teams often stumble when strategy is treated as an event, not a practice. A two-day retreat might spark alignment, but if it isn’t embedded into rhythms, rituals, and conversations, it fades. Strategy has to live in the everyday — in what leaders talk about, measure, celebrate, and role-model.
That requires a broader lens. To be truly fit for the future, strategy must look outwards to the people and systems you serve, and forwards to the future you want to create.
A strategy that’s truly fit for the future requires two critical shifts:
Future-back thinking: imagining the future you want to shape, then working backwards.
Outside-in perspective: considering what your stakeholders need and expect, not just what matters internally.
This combined approach is a discipline developed by Professor Peter Hawkins. His work reminds us that leadership teams exist not for themselves, but to create value for their stakeholders: customers, employees, investors, communities, and society at large.
I’ve seen first-hand how powerful this shift can be. The turning point comes when leaders stop asking “What do we need to fix today?” and start asking “What future do we want to create, and what value must we deliver to those who depend on us?”
Why Strategy Needs More Than Business-as-Usual
Research shows that organisations that look beyond five years significantly outperform those focused only on short-term horizons. Yet many leadership teams struggle to make this leap. The urgent squeezes out the important. Operational pressures dominate. And strategy sessions risk becoming little more than fire-fighting.
There’s another trap: focusing solely on internal ambitions. Growth targets, margin goals, and market share objectives are all valid, but have risks. A strategy that ignores stakeholder needs is unlikely to succeed.
Future-back and outside-in thinking provide a wider field of vision. They encourage leaders to step back from the now, expand their perspective, and build strategies that are both ambitious and relevant.
The Future-Back Lens
One powerful way to stretch leadership thinking is through a future-back strategy. Rather than building forwards from today’s problems, future-back starts by imagining the long-term future you want to help create — then works backwards to identify what needs to happen along the way. A useful framework comes from Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons model:
Horizon One: focused on ‘business as usual,’ managing today, and incremental improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. He describes this as the managerial mindset.
Horizon Two: innovating for tomorrow, looking at the short to medium-term future, and encompasses the sphere of new opportunities and innovation.
Horizon Three: future foresight, considers what is emerging over the future horizon and might become commonplace in the near to medium term future.
Sharpe’s insight, is that you need to work in the sequence 1 - 3 - 2, starting with reviewing today, what is working well and not working, then think from the ‘future-back’ using horizon three strategic foresight tools and thinking, and only then try and innovate tomorrow. Otherwise, you are trying to innovate tomorrow out of the frame of yesterday’s mindset and assumptions
In practice, future-back conversations often include:
Visioning exercises: “If it’s 2030 and we’ve succeeded, what are our stakeholders saying about us? What impact are we having?”
Scenario planning: exploring multiple plausible futures, not just one “plan.”
Wild cards and black swans: considering disruptive events and how the organisation would respond.
In one recent off-site I facilitated, a leadership team initially focused on immediate operational issues. By using a future-back exercise, they realised that the real question wasn’t “How do we hit next year’s targets?” but “What capabilities do we need to be building now to thrive in a radically different marketplace five years from now?” That conversation shifted their priorities in powerful ways.
The Outside-In Lens
A strategy is only as strong as the value it creates. That means looking outward, not just to customers and shareholders, but to the full ecosystem: employees, partners, regulators, communities, and future generations.
Peter Hawkins, in his Systemic Team Coaching model, calls this commissioning: defining a team’s purpose by looking through the eyes of its stakeholders. Leadership teams don’t exist for themselves; they exist to create value for others.
Asking, Listening, Testing
High-performing teams build strategy through enquiry: asking questions, gathering feedback, and testing assumptions. This can include:
Structured interviews or surveys with key stakeholders.
Reviewing customer data, employee engagement scores, or market research.
Inviting diverse voices into the room — not just the usual suspects.
The aim isn’t to tick the “consultation” box. It’s to test whether the organisation is prioritising the right things, and whether its ambitions resonate with those who matter most.
In one client session, leaders were surprised to learn that what customers valued most wasn’t speed, but partnership and trust. That single insight reshaped their strategy from chasing efficiency to building stronger, more collaborative relationships. How could we improve the way we partner with you?
Considering What You Might Have Missed
It’s easy to focus only on visible stakeholders: customers, investors, and employees. But a resilient strategy also considers those less obvious:
Local communities.
Supply chain partners.
Policymakers and regulators.
Future generations who will inherit the outcomes of today’s choices.
Teams often discover blind spots here, groups they hadn’t thought about, but whose expectations could make or break the strategy.
Looking Ahead with a PESTLE Lens
Stakeholder needs don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re shaped by broader forces. A PESTLE analysis helps teams anticipate how change will affect what stakeholders value.
Political: regulatory shifts in ESG reporting.
Economic: rising cost pressures and shifting investor priorities.
Social: new expectations for flexible work or wellbeing.
Technological: the rapid spread of AI and automation.
Legal: compliance and data privacy demands.
Environmental: growing urgency on climate resilience.
When leaders connect these trends with stakeholder needs, they create a strategy that’s not just reactive but future-ready.
Bringing Future-Back and Outside-In Together
Future-back stretches your time horizon. Outside-in broadens your field of vision. Combined, they create strategies that are ambitious and relevant. The practical sequence looks like this:
Start with today: What’s working, what’s breaking down, and where are the gaps?
Look outwards: Map your stakeholders and gather their perspectives. What do stakeholders value now? What will they need in the future?
Look forward: Where do we want to be in five years? What’s changed in your environment? What will success look like?
Bridge the gap: What shifts are needed to move from today to tomorrow while creating value for stakeholders?
Test priorities: Do these priorities deliver value for stakeholders and move us towards our long-term vision?
This sequence works in any sector and energises people far more than abstract targets.. For one client, it meant realising their strategy wasn’t about chasing market share, but about building trust with regulators to secure their licence to grow. For another, it was about shifting investment from short-term profit to long-term talent capability.
Practical Tools That Help
Horizon Scanning and PESTLE - Looking at political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental changes gives a structured way to consider what might shape your context in the years ahead.
Stakeholder Mapping - Create personas for your key stakeholders — customers, investors, employees, and communities. Test your priorities against their needs.
Scenario Planning - Don’t bet on one future. Explore a range of plausible outcomes and consider how your strategy would hold up in each.
Strategic Narrative - Turn your strategy into a human story that every leader can share consistently. As one client put it: “If someone stopped you in the lift tomorrow and asked where we’re going, could you answer in 30 seconds?” That’s the level of clarity you’re aiming for.
Reflection Questions for Leadership Teams
If you stood in the future and looked back, what would you be most proud of?
Whose voices are missing from your current strategy conversations?
Which of today’s priorities will still matter in three years? Which won’t?
How do your goals create value beyond your walls?
What assumptions might you need to unlearn?
Final Thought
A strategy fit for the future isn’t just a growth plan. It’s a commitment to your vision, to your people, and to the wider ecosystem you serve.
When leadership teams look outward to stakeholders and ahead to the future, they stop firefighting and start shaping. They create strategies that are resilient, relevant, and energising.
That’s the essence of systemic team coaching: helping leadership teams expand their field of vision, align around purpose, and co-create a future worth working towards.
Do you need help with building your strategy?
We help leadership teams across the UK create future-fit strategies through facilitation, systemic team coaching, and leadership off-sites. If you’d like to explore how I could support your team, get in touch
Or get in touch to start a conversation about what might be possible for your team.
Email: hello@growth-space.co.uk or call 07966 475195.
What is Systemic Team Coaching?
You can coach brilliant individual leaders and still have a team that struggles to align, adapt, or deliver together. Here’s why Systemic Team Coaching is the missing link and why I’m training as a Systemic Team Coach.
Why the future belongs to teams that can think and act as connected systems, not just collections of talented individuals.
Picture this: A leadership team of capable individuals, each successful in their own right, sits in yet another strategy meeting that feels like it's going nowhere. They're debating the same priorities they discussed last month. Decisions get made, then somehow unravel in implementation. They're stuck in patterns that limit their collective impact.
Sound familiar? This scenario plays out in meeting rooms everywhere, and it points to a fundamental gap in how we develop leadership capability.
I’ve coached many brilliant leaders, founders and managers; coaching gives them space to pause, reflect, and reorient around what matters most, and it builds self-aware, confident and capable leaders.
But I’ve noticed something vital: traditional one-to-one coaching and leadership development aren’t enough. You can build brilliant individual leaders, and still end up with a team that struggles to align, adapt, or deliver impact across the wider business.
Organisations and teams are part of a complex system: customers, colleagues, board members, investors, stakeholders, and the political or economic climate. So if we want organisations to be successful, we need teams who can lead together, with clarity of purpose, shared ownership, and the ability to engage with the world around them.
The challenge isn't individual capability. It's that modern business challenges require systemic thinking and collective leadership that traditional approaches simply don't develop.
Systemic Team Coaching®
Systemic Team Coaching® shifts the focus from "How can we work better together?" to "What are we here to achieve together, and how do we engage with our wider ecosystem to make it happen?"
Why it matters now
We’re operating in a world that’s volatile, complex and fast-moving. Leaders are juggling competing priorities, navigating constant change, and doing more with less.
Remote and hybrid working has fundamentally altered how teams function. The informal conversations that once created alignment have disappeared. Teams need more intentional ways to stay connected, not just to each other, but to the stakeholders they serve.
Traditional team coaching is often focused on internal dynamics, things like roles, meetings, or communication. That still matters, but it’s not enough. Teams need to be thinking systemically:
Who are we here to serve? (Stakeholders)
Why are we here? (Purpose)
What value are we here to create?
What do our stakeholders need from us right now?
How do we need to work together and with others to deliver that value? (Collective performance)
What is Systemic Team Coaching?
Systemic Team Coaching® isn’t just about fixing team relationships or getting through a to-do list more efficiently. Instead of asking, “How can we get better at working together?” the team begins asking, “What do we exist to do and how can we lead together to do it well?”
It’s a shift that results in clearer priorities, greater ownership, stronger collaboration, and better decisions that are aligned to the needs of the business and the people it serves.
Peter Hawkins defines it as:
“A process by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business.”
Outside In and Future Back Approach
Traditional team development works inside-out: start with team dynamics, then hope better internal relationships create better external outcomes. Systemic team coaching works outside-in and future-back.
Outside-In: Start with stakeholder needs and work backwards to team capability.
Future-Back: Begin with the future you're creating together, then align present actions
This approach fundamentally changes the questions teams ask:
Instead of: "How can we communicate better?" Ask: "What do our stakeholders need from us, and how do we need to communicate to deliver that?"
Instead of: "How do we resolve this conflict?" Ask: "What does this tension tell us about competing stakeholder needs, and how do we navigate that systemically?"
Instead of: "How do we make better decisions?" Ask: "What decisions would best serve our shared future and stakeholder ecosystem?"
The Five Disciplines of High-Performing Teams
The Five Disciplines Model, developed by Peter Hawkins, offers a practical framework for how systemic team coaching works. It supports teams to develop in five key areas:
Commissioning - Clarifying the team’s purpose and mandate, why it exists and who it’s here to serve.
Clarifying - Agreeing on roles, responsibilities, shared goals and success measures.
Co-Creating - Improving the quality of relationships, trust, communication and collaborative working within the team.
Connecting - Engaging with key stakeholders, internally and externally, to understand their needs and create real value.
Core Learning - Reflecting on performance and ways of working, and continuously learning together as a team.
Why I’m training in Systemic Team Coaching®
This year, I have noticed more clients who want to improve team effectiveness because of poor communication, lack of collaboration and accountability, low levels of psychological safety. So I’ve chosen to train in Systemic Team Coaching®, led by Professor Peter Hawkins and Renewal Associates. Although, I’d developed my own framework and programme for working with teams, I’m building on that to support whole teams to be more connected, aligned and impactful.
We support teams to explore their context and system: the organisation, the strategy, the customer, the stakeholders and the outside world. This involves:
Define or clarify their shared purpose and what they’re there to deliver
Strengthen trust, openness, and psychological safety
Surface and explore unspoken tensions or assumptions
Create better ways of working together
Engage with their stakeholders to ensure they’re adding the right kind of value
Hold each other to account in healthy, productive ways
Develop shared leadership, not just strong individuals
Build a team culture that reflects their values and supports results
This might involve a combination of workshops, team coaching sessions, one-to-one conversations, stakeholder input, and practical tools to embed learning between sessions. I draw on systemic team coaching principles, Peter Hawkins’ Five Disciplines model, and years of real-world experience working with leadership and cross-functional teams.
Let’s talk about your team
If you're curious about how Systemic Team Coaching could help your team become more connected, effective, and future-ready, let’s chat.
You can read more about my team effectiveness work here, or get in touch to explore what might be possible.
Email: polly@pollyrobinson.co.uk
Call: 07966 475195
Why Team Coaching Is What Organisations Need Today
Effective Teams create successful organisations. Why Coaching teams, not just individuals, is what organisations need today.
The missing piece in creating truly effective teams
We've become exceptionally good at developing individual leaders. Executive Coaching builds confidence and emotional intelligence, and Leadership Programmes develop strategic thinking. These investments do work for individual development.
But team performance isn’t simply the sum of the individual parts; it’s about how well people work together - how they collaborate, make decisions, and achieve together collectively what they couldn’t do on their own.
And that’s the gap: teams are often left to figure out collaboration, clarity, trust, and accountability on their own. We assume teamwork will just happen, especially if the individuals are skilled.
But what I see is that you can have a group of brilliant people, but they still struggle to function as an effective team.
Individual excellence is important. But team effectiveness is what drives outcomes.
In most organisations, the most critical work is done in teams, whether that’s a senior leadership team, a product or project team or a cross-functional working group. But without being intentional, teams easily find themselves:
Working in silos
Second-guessing each other
Avoiding tricky conversations
Struggling to make decisions
Dropping the ball on shared goals
Complex Systems
Today, teams operate in increasingly complex systems, including balancing the needs of multiple Stakeholders from customers, employees, investors, and communities. The VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Changeable and Ambiguous) environment means teams need to sense, adapt, and respond together faster and under more pressure than ever before.
The Hidden Barriers to Team Effectiveness
Through my work with leadership teams and cross-functional groups, I've identified five critical barriers that consistently undermine performance:
1. Unspoken Assumptions
Teams operate on unstated assumptions about purpose, priorities, and process. A leadership team I worked with discovered they had three different interpretations of their strategic priorities. No wonder they felt fragmented.
2. Reluctance to share ideas and be honest.
Many teams avoid difficult conversations, dance around tensions, and make pseudo-decisions that unravel in implementation. Building Psychological Safety helps teams to engage in healthy and constructive dissent.
3. Working in Silos
This needs no explanation - silos create internal competition and misaligned priorities.
4. Not sharing and collaborating
Teams make decisions with incomplete information because they don’t collectively gather and share knowledge - this is particularly common in hybrid and remote teams.
5. Being Busy Fools
Most teams are too busy moving from one project or task to the next without taking time to explore what went well, what needs improving. This leads to repeating ineffective habits or practices.
Why team coaching?
Team coaching isn't a training programme or team building exercise. It’s a systemic approach that gives teams space, structure and support to:
Align around shared purpose and goals, improving collaboration, accountability and results.
Understand how they’re experienced by stakeholders (customers, suppliers and colleagues).
Navigate complexity and interdependence
Improve psychological safety, trust, feedback, and communication.
Strengthen their impact on the wider system they’re part of.
This is especially important in today’s world, where most challenges can’t be solved by one person, one team, or one department alone.
Organisations are systems.
When we say organisations are systems, we mean they are interconnected, dynamic, and constantly evolving. What happens in one area affects another, sometimes in obvious ways, often in hidden ones.
A decision made in HR ripples into Finance. A tension in one team affects how another communicates. A disconnect between the board and delivery teams shows up in morale, trust, or results.
Systemic team coaching helps teams understand these connections so they can operate more effectively within their team and between other teams and stakeholders. It brings the “outside in” and encourages teams to think beyond their function or agenda.
I’ve worked with teams navigating growth, restructuring, service pressures, or new leadership. Often, they’re not struggling because they don’t care or aren’t capable; they’re struggling because no one’s created the space for honest conversations, shared clarity, and team learning.
Team coaching changes that.
We start with where the team is now. We look at what’s working and what’s getting in the way. And we co-create new ways of working that improve trust, decision-making, and delivery. Over time, I’ve seen teams:
Reset after change
Strengthen cross-team relationships
Improve communication and meeting culture
Clarify roles, purpose, and priorities
Reconnect with the bigger picture and their stakeholders
Do we need Team Coaching?
If you’re part of a team, or managing one, that’s facing complexity, change or growth or if your team is experiencing any of these patterns, team coaching could be what you need.
Individual performance is strong, but collective results are inconsistent
Decisions take too long or get revisited repeatedly
Stakeholder feedback suggests disconnection or misalignment
Team members feel frustrated with collaboration
Change initiatives stall in implementation
There's a sense the team could achieve more together
How Growth Space can help
We have developed a framework for Systemic Team Coaching (inspired by Patrick Leconi and Professor Peter Hawkins). A Team Coaching programme typically involves 4-6 sessions over a few months. It’s a chance for teams to:
Reflect on how they work together
Surface and shift unhelpful patterns
Build trust and psychological safety
Align behind shared goals and behaviours
Strengthen their collective leadership across the wider business
We use practical frameworks including Team Charters, personal user manuals, role clarity tools, and create a safe, structured space for honest conversation and inclusive facilitation where everyone has a voice.
Get in touch to chat about your team and how Team Coaching could help:
Email: polly@pollyrobinson.co.uk
Call: 07966 475195