When management assigns a coach without team consent, the team perceives it as surveillance, not support. This immediately creates resistance and undermines the trust necessary for effective coaching, starting the relationship from a deficit.
Staying with a team that consistently resists change and makes no progress sends a negative message. It signals to the organization that the coach is content to 'cash a paycheck' without delivering value, undermining the engagement and damaging their professional reputation.
When team dysfunction stems from organizational problems like unstable team composition, applying coaching is a form of meddling. It pathologizes the team and absolves leadership of their responsibility to fix the underlying systemic issues they created.
A coach's impact is limited if they only focus on the team. To create lasting change, they must transition into an advocate who identifies organizational impediments and holds leadership accountable for solving problems that are outside the team's control.
Resistance is critical information, not just a barrier. It often reveals a team's fear of losing something valuable, such as autonomy, their established identity, or a sense of expertise. Understanding what they're protecting is key to making change less threatening.
Coaching executive teams is fraught with power dynamics. To be effective, a coach must align exclusively with the person who hired them and their specific objective. Addressing other visible problems will only create opposition from other executives and derail the engagement.
To avoid becoming a permanent fixture in a failing engagement, a coach must establish a 'product strategy' for their work. This involves setting an explicit timeframe and success criteria with their sponsor upfront. If goals aren't met, it provides a clear, blameless path to walking away.
Giving teams full autonomy to select their coach can be counterproductive. They might choose someone who makes them feel comfortable and validates their existing habits, rather than a coach who will challenge their dysfunctions and push for necessary, but difficult, transformation.
Teams often don't believe they have problems. A 'perception mapping' session, using anonymized surveys to compare a team's self-perception with how others perceive them, can provide objective data to surface blind spots and create a neutral starting point for coaching.
Instead of pushing advice, the most effective initial strategy with an unwilling team is to simply observe. This 'pull-based' approach builds trust and rapport, making the team more receptive when they eventually ask for your input, rather than feeling like you're forcing changes on them.