In a world of rapid change and complexity, the way we develop teams and leaders is undergoing a profound shift. Many organisations have long relied on traditional team coaching – focusing on improving a team’s internal dynamics, communication, and performance. While valuable, this inward-focused approach is proving insufficient against the backdrop of today’s global challenges. Climate change, geopolitical instability, systemic inequality, and disruptive technologies like AI are reshaping the context in which teams operate. These issues are complex, interdependent, and fast-changing, extending far beyond the walls of any one team or company. It’s little wonder that thought leaders in coaching, like Professor Peter Hawkins, Dr. Catherine Carr, Eve Turner and Naysan Firoozmand, argue for a more expansive approach. Enter Systemic Team Coaching® – a methodology fundamentally different in philosophy, scope, and intended outcomes, designed to help teams thrive amid complexity.
“A satellite view of Earth at night, symbolizing the interconnected, global context in which today’s teams operate. Modern challenges like climate change and technological disruption span across countries and industries, demanding leadership approaches that extend beyond any single team or organization.”
Traditional Team Coaching: Focused on the Team Itself
Traditional team coaching (and related team-building efforts) typically centres on the team as an isolated unit. The coach works with team members to improve how they collaborate, communicate, and achieve their goals. This often involves enhancing interpersonal relationships, clarifying team roles, resolving internal conflicts, and aligning on objectives. The emphasis is largely internal – helping the team function better within its own boundaries. As one coaching guide notes, traditional team coaching often “emphasises internal team dynamics” while “without addressing the broader context” in which the team exists (tandemcoach.co). In practice, this may involve a series of workshops to build trust among team members, or coaching sessions to improve meeting effectiveness and decision-making processes. The intended outcome is a more cohesive, higher-performing team – but largely measured on the team’s own performance metrics (sales targets, project delivery, employee satisfaction within the team, etc.), which if done well will directly impact business performance.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach – it can yield better communication, clarity and synergy. However, traditional team coaching tends to have a bounded scope. It usually does not deeply engage with external stakeholders or the wider organisational purpose. The focus is on “how we work together”, rather than “why we exist as a team in a larger system”. Quite a distinction. Moreover, traditional team interventions are sometimes short-term or event-based. For example, companies might do an offsite team-building retreat when a problem arises or a new leader joins (a reactive, one-off fix) (sheppardmoscow.com). Such efforts can bond the team internally, but they often leave “blinkers” on – ignoring the outside world (sheppardmoscow.com).
In summary, traditional team coaching views the team as the client and performance as the goal. It hones how team members relate to each other, but it stops at the team’s borders. In an era when those borders are increasingly porous (think supply chains, remote work, cross-functional collaboration), this inward focus becomes a limitation.
Systemic Team Coaching®: Expanding to the Wider System
Systemic Team Coaching® (STC), as defined by Professor Peter Hawkins (who pioneered this approach over 40 years ago), dramatically widens the lens. Hawkins describes systemic team coaching 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.”
This definition highlights two fundamental differences: engaging with key stakeholders and transforming the wider environment beyond the team itself. In other words, the team is coached as part of a larger system – whether that system is the entire organisation, its network of customers and partners, or even society at large.
Unlike traditional approaches, systemic coaching doesn’t stop at interpersonal dynamics – it explores external forces and stakeholder needs that influence the team’s success. The team’s purpose is examined in light of the organisation’s mission and the expectations of stakeholders (for example, customers, suppliers, investors, the community, other departments). A systemic team coach will help the team ask questions like:
- “Whom do we exist to serve, and what do they need from us?” and
- “How does our work impact the broader system (positively or negatively)?”
This often involves bringing voices from outside the team into the coaching conversation. Indeed, practitioners of systemic coaching “bring critical stakeholders – both internal and external – to offer their insight and opinion”, going far beyond token stakeholder check-ins (sheppardmoscow.com). The team, coach, and stakeholders work together to identify how the team can best add value to the organisation and to the wider community or market it serves.
Another hallmark of systemic team coaching is its long-term, developmental nature. Rather than a quick intervention, it’s typically a journey spanning months or even more than a year. The coach works with the team through real business cycles and challenges, coaching them both “when they are together and when they are apart” (as Hawkins puts it) to embed new ways of working in all that they do. Over this journey, the team not only improves how it functions internally, but also how it learns and adapts with its surrounding environment. Hawkins’ framework for STC includes disciplines like Commissioning (clarifying the team’s mandate in alignment with stakeholder needs) and Connecting (actively building relationships between the team and its external environment). There is also Core Learning, which is about the team continuously learning and reflecting so it can keep pace with change. The effect is a team that becomes more than the sum of its parts – a collective leadership unit that is agile, outward-looking, and purpose-driven.
To illustrate, imagine a company’s executive team undergoing systemic coaching. Instead of only working on their internal dynamics (say, improving meeting etiquette or clarifying roles), a systemic approach would also have them engage deeply with the company’s stakeholder ecosystem. They might hold dialogue sessions with key customers, partners, or community representatives as part of the coaching process. The coach might facilitate the team in “removing the blinkers” and refocusing on the purpose they serve for the organisation and its stakeholders. The team would practice “stepping into the stakeholders’ shoes” to better understand how their decisions impact the broader environment. This could lead, for example, to the team redefining its strategy to better meet future customer needs or to mitigate negative impacts on society. Such outcomes go beyond what traditional team coaching would typically aim for.
In essence, systemic team coaching shifts the orientation from an internal focus (“How can our team perform better?”) to an external and future-oriented focus (“How can our team collaborate with our stakeholders to create value and positive impact in a larger system?”). It’s an expanded mindset.
A concise comparison can be drawn:
- Scope: Traditional team coaching works within the team; Systemic Team Coaching® works with the team in context of its system, including external stakeholders.
- Philosophy: Traditional focuses on fixing or optimising the team’s internal issues; STC assumes the team’s challenges and opportunities are co-created with the wider environment, so the “system” (market, community, organisation) is treated as a co-coach guiding what the team needs to learn.
- Intended Outcome: Traditional aims for improved team performance and cohesion; STC aims for a team that delivers on its purpose and continuously adapts to meet stakeholder needs, thereby achieving not just performance but broader impact through developing high value-creating teams.
- Duration & Process: Traditional often involves short-term interventions or coaching individuals within the team; STC is a sustained, whole-team journey ensuring changes stick and new habits form over time.
- Leadership Model: Traditional coaching can still carry a “heroic leader” bias (developing the team leader or a few talents); STC explicitly moves “from heroic leaders to heroic teams,” emphasising collective leadership where the burden of change is shared.
By broadening the perspective in these ways, Systemic Team Coaching® equips teams to not only execute tasks but to evolve and learn together with their surrounding system. It’s a proactive, future-facing mode of coaching. As one source puts it, systemic team coaching “provides a richer, more sustainable learning experience than other forms of team or group development,” representing an evolution that enables leaders and organisations to develop in more dramatic ways than traditional coaching allows. The team becomes capable of continually creating value for themselves, their organisations and the wider ecology in which they operate. This idea of serving the “wider ecology” – including societal and environmental considerations – is a striking hallmark of the systemic approach.
Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short in a Complex World
Why is this shift happening? Quite simply, the world that today’s teams must navigate is far more complex than before. Many traditional leadership development and coaching approaches were designed for a simpler, more siloed era, and they are not fully equipped for the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) (or BANI – Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible) environment we face now. The challenges on leaders’ plates today are unprecedented in their speed, scale, and interconnected nature. As the World Economic Forum observed in early 2025:
“the world is grappling with geopolitical tensions, a worsening climate crisis, and inefficiencies embedded in global systems.” Moreover, “only radical action and systemic innovation can tackle the scale of these challenges and build a sustainable and equitable future.” (weforum.org)
In other words, incremental tweaks or isolated efforts (the kinds of solutions older approaches often yield) are not enough – system-level problems demand system-aware responses.
Consider a few of the complex global leadership challenges that underscore the need for a new approach:
- Climate Change: Organisations across industries are under pressure to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to environmental instability. This is not a challenge one leader or one team can solve alone; it requires collaborative action across companies, governments, and communities. Leaders must think in systems – understanding supply chains, regulators, public opinion, and long-term ecological impact. Traditional coaching that only focused on quarterly performance or internal efficiency won’t prepare a team to, for example, overhaul its operations for sustainability or partner with external groups on climate initiatives.
- Geopolitical Instability: From trade wars to regional conflicts, geopolitical shifts can upend markets overnight. Teams must be resilient and agile, ready to pivot strategy when a new regulation or conflict disrupts their plans. Cross-cultural understanding and stakeholder diplomacy become crucial – skills that go beyond the scope of insular team-building. It’s no longer enough for a team to hit its local targets; it may suddenly need to manage the fallout of a supply disruption or navigate partnerships in unfamiliar territories.
- Systemic Inequality and Social Change: Issues of inequality, inclusion, and social justice are now front and centre for many organisations. Consumers and employees alike expect leadership teams to respond ethically – whether it’s diversifying their workforce or considering the social impact of their products. A team cannot just focus on its own performance metrics; it must also answer to broader ethical and societal stakeholders. Traditional coaching rarely covered topics like stakeholder capitalism or purpose-driven leadership, whereas systemic coaching prompts teams to consider their impact on society and engage with those affected.
- Technological Disruption (AI and Beyond): The rise of artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies is changing business models and job roles at breakneck speed. Leadership teams are often tasked with driving digital transformation while also mitigating risks (like AI ethics or workforce displacement). This requires continuous learning, foresight, and often collaboration with external tech partners or regulators. A static leadership playbook becomes obsolete fast – teams need to learn how to learn together, again and again. As one review of Hawkins’ work put it, coaches and leaders must figure out “how to navigate change in a complex world” if coaching is to remain useful. Legacy approaches that treat coaching as a one-time skill upgrade simply can’t keep up with the constant evolution of challenges.
Underlying all these is a common theme: interdependence. Problems (and opportunities) spill across boundaries. However, many traditional coaching paradigms (especially those focused on individuals) assumed problems could be solved by honing one person’s competencies or by optimising one team in isolation. Professor Hawkins and others have noted a “growing gap between the increasing and changing challenges for individual and collective leadership and how leadership development is done”. In other words, while the world leapt into a high-complexity, networked 21st century, much of leadership coaching was still operating with a 20th-century mindset.
A clear example is the “heroic leader” model – the idea that a single charismatic leader can steer the ship through any storm. Traditional leadership development often exalted this model, focusing on individual heroics. But today’s challenges tend to overwhelm lone heroes. Solutions emerge from diverse teams pooling their knowledge and from engaging stakeholders outside the formal team. Collective leadership and adaptability out-strip individual brilliance. This is precisely the gap Systemic Team Coaching® addresses by developing “heroic teams” rather than heroic individuals.
Finally, traditional coaching approaches usually defined success in a narrow way: better performance reviews, hitting targets, improved team climate scores, etc. Those are still important, but they are no longer sufficient. A team could hit its short-term targets yet fail catastrophically in the bigger picture – for instance, by pursuing a profitable strategy that harms the environment or by being blindsided by a disruption they never saw coming. Performance divorced from context is unsustainable. The fast-changing, interdependent challenges we now face demand that teams look outward and forward, not just inward. This is where systemic team coaching proves its worth.
The Case for Systemic Team Coaching®: Fit-for-Purpose in Today’s World
Systemic Team Coaching® is emerging as a more “fit-for-purpose” approach for modern leadership because it directly tackles the gaps identified above. It equips teams and their leaders to engage with complexity rather than be defeated by it. Here’s how:
- Broader Stakeholder Engagement: Systemic coaching pushes teams to constantly interface with their stakeholders and environment. This means a team is far less likely to operate on tunnel vision. Instead of making decisions in a vacuum, they proactively seek input from customers, partners, employees at different levels, or even community voices. The result is strategies and solutions that are better informed and more sustainable, because they consider multiple perspectives and needs. Teams learn to see themselves as part of an ecosystem of value creation. As the systemic coaching philosophy stresses, a team’s goal is not just to deliver results for itself, but to deliver value with and for its stakeholders. In practical terms, a leadership team might, for example, involve client representatives in co-creating a new service (to ensure it truly addresses client needs), or it might collaborate with a nonprofit to address a social issue related to its business. The coaching process facilitates these interactions, building the muscle for stakeholder collaboration. This expansive view of success – where success includes positive impact on stakeholders – is exactly what’s needed in an era where corporate responsibility and stakeholder capitalism are in the spotlight.
- Adaptive and Continuous Learning: A systemic approach helps teams become learning organisms. Rather than assuming the environment will remain static or that past success formulas will keep working, the team is coached to regularly reflect, scan the horizon, and learn from its own experience and from changes “out there.” Professor Hawkins includes “Core Learning” as a discipline in Systemic Team Coaching® – meaning the team deliberately cultivates an ongoing learning culture. This could involve after-action reviews, seeking feedback from outside the team, and being curious about trends. One outcome is that teams become more resilient to shocks. They are not easily thrown off course by a surprise (say, a new competitor or a regulatory change) because they have built adaptability into their way of working. Naysan Firoozmand, an experienced systemic team coach and COO at Renewal Associates (founded by Professor Hawkins) has observed that when teams align on a shared purpose and open up to honest dialogue, it “strengthen[s] their resilience and awareness of future challenges”renewalassociates.co.uk. In other words, systemic coaching prepares teams to expect the unexpected and to meet new challenges with confidence rather than fear.
- Collective Leadership and Collaboration: Systemic Team Coaching® inherently promotes a collective leadership mindset. The coach often works with the team as a whole (in group sessions) rather than primarily one-on-one coaching of the leader or members. The team learns how to coach itself, in a sense – surfacing issues, holding each other accountable, and maintaining a strategic dialogue with stakeholders. This flattens the old hierarchy where the team leader alone carries the leadership mantle. It means leadership is distributed across the team and even extended to include voices of stakeholders. Hawkins often emphasises that leadership is a co-created process, not something that “resides” in one individual. When a team experiences this, they become much more agile and innovative. They can respond to challenges like AI disruption or market shifts by quickly tapping the diverse talents within and around the team, rather than waiting for orders from the top. The systemic coach helps the team establish practices for inclusive dialogue and shared decision-making, which are crucial for tackling complex problems that no single expert fully understands.
- Purpose and Impact Beyond Performance: Perhaps most importantly, Systemic Team Coaching® places purpose at the heart of the team’s agenda. Early in the coaching process, questions of purpose, values, and desired legacy come to the fore. The team clarifies “what is it that we, as a collective, can uniquely do, that we couldn’t do apart?” – a powerful question that anchors them in their unique role within the organisational and societal system. This creates a guiding star that goes beyond quarterly numbers. For example, a healthcare company’s leadership team might define its collective purpose as improving patient outcomes in the community, not just hitting financial targets. With that clarity, their goals and metrics of success broaden; success might include things like patient satisfaction, community health impact, or industry influence – not instead of profit and efficiency, but alongside those things. Systemic coaching aligns the team’s efforts with such a higher purpose, which in turn unleashes motivation and commitment. People find more meaning in their work when they see its impact on real human stakeholders. Furthermore, by “integrating the wider organisational, eco and ethical system in which we all exist,” systemic coaching ensures that ethical and environmental considerations are woven into the team’s decisions. This helps organisations avoid costly missteps (like reputational damage from ignoring social issues) and actually turn sustainability and ethics into drivers of innovation.
- Better Performance as a Byproduct: It’s worth noting that Systemic Team Coaching® is not a feel-good exercise at the expense of business results – quite the opposite. Teams that truly engage with their stakeholders and adapt to the future outperform those that don’t, in the long run. By aligning with stakeholder needs, they often discover new market opportunities. By learning continuously, they solve problems faster. By uniting around purpose, they break silos and execute with passion. In fact, Systemic Team Coaching® can be seen as performance coaching for the 21st century – it redefines performance to include adaptability and stakeholder value. When done well, it yields high-value-creating, innovative teams that drive sustainable success (success that can be sustained because it benefits all involved). It’s telling that observers call systemic coaching “a new level” of coaching that challenges teams and coaches to “raise their game” and be an “even greater force for good”. Performance now encompasses doing good and doing well simultaneously.
All these points illustrate why Systemic Team Coaching® is increasingly seen as not just an alternative, but as an essential evolution of coaching. It directly addresses the “who and what is coaching for” in today’s world. Rather than coaching for coaching’s sake or just to tick a development box, systemic coaching is coaching in service of something bigger: healthier organisations, engaged stakeholders, and a better alignment between businesses and the society they operate in.
A Necessary Evolution, Not a Passing Trend
Given the depth of change in approach and mindset we’ve described, one might wonder: is Systemic Team Coaching® just the latest buzzword in the coaching industry? The evidence suggests it’s far more than a fad – it’s a necessary evolution in how we develop leadership and teamwork. In fact, Systemic Team Coaching® has been steadily growing over the past decade, championed by experts like Peter Hawkins (who founded Renewal Associates in 2010 to advance this work) and by organisations like the Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC). It has reached a point where it’s globally recognised and adopted. Programmes to train systemic team coaches are now run on multiple continents, reflecting demand from companies that see the value in this approach. Industry bodies have also taken note – for instance, the International Coaching Federation (ICF) introduced advanced certifications for team coaching, aligning with many systemic coaching competencies, and notable business schools like Henley also now run programmes in team and systemic coaching. In short, the movement toward systemic coaching is grounded in real business needs and is here to stay.
Why is it a necessary evolution? Because the old paradigm (of focusing narrowly on individual leaders or isolated teams) was leaving too many critical gaps. Without a systemic lens, coaching would continue to “fix” one part of the system only to find the larger system still failing. Hawkins and co-author Eve Turner, in their book Systemic Coaching: Delivering Value Beyond the Individual, emphasised that coaches must ask themselves hard questions about their role in this era:
“What and who is coaching for in the face of our huge, complex global challenges? How can coaches help organisations become ‘future fit’ in an interdependent, volatile and uncertain world? … What does it take to deliver coaching value beyond the individual?”.
Systemic team coaching is, in many ways, the answer to these questions. It “breaks open the box of traditional coaching” and lays out a path for coaching to contribute to a better future. Far from abandoning performance and profit, it actually secures them by expanding what we consider and care about when we coach teams.
Another reason this is not just a trend is that it aligns with the direction of leadership thinking in general. Modern leadership theories stress things like systems thinking, shared leadership, emotional and social intelligence, and stakeholder engagement. Systemic Team Coaching® provides a concrete methodology to instil those capacities in teams. As one corporate leader put it in reviewing Hawkins’ work, it “offers a blueprint for the next stage in the evolution of coaching,” blending personal development of leaders with an “eco-systemic vision” and commitment to something larger. In fact, many early adopters of Systemic Team Coaching® describe it in almost transformative terms – not just improving teams but transforming how they see their mission. It’s the kind of deep change that tends to be enduring, because once a team has operated systemically, going back to an insular approach would feel like wearing blinders.
Crucially, Systemic Team Coaching® delivers results that matter in today’s context. Companies that embrace it often find that their teams become more innovative and future-ready, their stakeholders more trusting and engaged, and their leaders more fulfilled because they’re leading with purpose and impact. These are outcomes that any HR professional, executive leader, coach, or consultant strives for. Systemic coaching does not ask us to choose between doing good and doing well – it links them, showing that teams can achieve high performance precisely by attending to their broader responsibilities and relationships.
In an age where, for example, AI is forcing rethinks of entire business models overnight, or a pandemic can reconfigure how we work and connect, the ability for a team, or a team of teams, to reorient rapidly and work with its environment is priceless. Systemic Team Coaching® builds that muscle. It’s an insurance policy against obsolescence, and a catalyst for positive change.
Conclusion: Embracing Systemic Coaching for Future-Ready Teams
The difference between traditional team coaching and systemic team coaching is not just academic – it’s deeply practical. Traditional team coaching gave us a foundation of better teams; systemic team coaching is about teams that continuously evolve and create value in a complex world. The philosophy shifts from “How do we as a team succeed?” to “How do we as a team help our enterprise and ecosystem succeed, and in doing so, also achieve our fullest potential?”. This shift in scope and mindset is fundamental for meeting the challenges of our time.
For HR professionals and executive leaders, this means rethinking leadership development programs. Are we only grooming leaders to manage tasks and people, or are we developing leaders and teams who can collaborate across boundaries and serve a larger purpose? Coaches and consultants, likewise, are recognising that their work must evolve – from coaching in a vacuum to coaching with context. As Hawkins and Firoozmand exemplify, it’s about bringing “depth and wisdom” to coaching conversations, not shying away from the hard questions about why a team exists and whom it impacts.
The world today needs “courageous leadership” and systemic innovation to tackle challenges at scale (weforum.org). By adopting Systemic Team Coaching®, organisations signal that they are ready to meet that call. They are saying: “we want our teams to be not just high-performing, but high-value-creating in the richest sense – delivering results, yes, but also positive change”. This approach is earnest and passionate because it cares about the whole – the team, the organisation, and the wider more-than-human-world. It reflects the wisdom that no team stands alone and that the greatest successes come when teams engage wholeheartedly with the ecosystem around them.
In closing, Systemic Team Coaching® is more than a new tool in the toolkit; it represents a new mindset for leadership development. It is not a passing trend but a necessary response to the complexity we face. As Firoozmand notes in a recent article, “this work is never finished. And that’s exactly why it’s worth doing.” (linkedin.com). By investing in Systemic Team Coaching®, organisations cultivate teams that are never finished learning, never closed off, and never merely serving themselves. These teams are equipped to deliver impact beyond just performance, ensuring they remain relevant, resilient, and responsible in a world that demands nothing less. The journey from traditional to Systemic Team Coaching® is, therefore, a journey to a more enlightened and effective form of leadership – one that we urgently need for today and for the future.
Sources:
- Hawkins, P. (2014). Leadership Team Coaching – Definition of Systemic Team Coaching
- Firoozmand, N. (2025). Profile at Renewal Associates – Emphasising resilience and future challenges for teams (renewalassociates.co.uk)
- Hawkins, P. & Turner, E. (2021). Systemic Coaching: Delivering Value Beyond the Individual – Discussion of global challenges and multi-stakeholder perspective
- Tandem Coaching (2023). Systemic Team Coaching Guide – Difference between traditional vs systemic coaching
- Sheppard Moscow (2023). What is Systemic Team Coaching? – Long-term practice and stakeholder focus.
- World Economic Forum (2025). Why we need radical action… – Highlighting global challenges requiring systemic solutions.
- Coaching.com (2025). Team Coaching Masterclass – Noting shift from heroic leaders to heroic teams
- www.renewalassociates.co.uk
- systemicteamcoaching.com