Insight

Why leaders need a team coaching approach and what it asks of them

27 July 2026

Leadership development Team effectiveness

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“When we are doing well, we are great. When we are having a hard time, we are terrible. But we are still a group. I just feel so stuck and, at times, so frustrated…”

Helen*, a senior leader in a clinical service, brought this dilemma to a coaching session. Her team was talented, committed and highly capable. At its best, the team worked collaboratively, delivered under pressure and provided strong support to one another.

Yet there was another side to the team. Alongside their capability sat a quiet but persistent demand: that Helen should hold things together, resolve conflict, and always know the way forward. When she stepped back, or when her own capacity to meet that expectation faltered, the mood shifted quickly. The team grew quietly withdrawn and uncooperative, and frustration surfaced as complaints about her leadership. As anxiety increased, so did Helen’s efforts to hold things together. She found herself stepping in to resolve tensions, making decisions on behalf of the group, and carrying responsibility that she felt belonged to the team.

“I feel like I’m constantly rescuing them,” she said. “And the more I do, the less they seem able to do for themselves.”

A different perspective

Many leaders will recognise some version of this experience. Faced with a struggling team, the natural impulse is to do more: provide greater clarity, stronger direction, tighter management or another intervention to get things back on track. Sometimes these responses are necessary. But often they do little to address the underlying dynamics that keep the team stuck and can even reinforce them.

A team coaching approach offers a different perspective. Rather than focusing solely on individuals and their behaviour, it invites leaders to view the team as a whole system, the ‘group as a whole’¹.

Systems psychodynamics² draws on psychoanalysis, group relations and systems thinking to understand how groups function. Central to this tradition is the belief that much of what shapes behaviour in organisations lies outside conscious awareness. Leaders are encouraged to pay attention not only to what is being said, but also to what is happening beneath the surface: the anxieties, assumptions, emotions and patterns that influence how a team thinks and works together.

The practice is highly experiential. Insight comes through what is often described as learning from experience³. Rather than simply applying models or techniques, leaders are supported to develop their reflexivity, the capacity to step back and examine their own experience, the team’s behaviour and the wider organisational context. From this perspective, a team can be understood as an entity in its own right, with its own character, ways of responding to uncertainty, authority, conflict and change. At times these responses support the task; at other times they limit the team’s capacity to think.

Work group and basic assumption

Bion⁴, a psychoanalyst from the Tavistock Clinic and a veteran of the first World War, was interested in what enables groups to stay focused on their task and what causes them to lose sight of it. He proposed that two states of mind operate simultaneously within every group.

The first is the work group: connected to its purpose, able to think realistically, tolerate uncertainty and work collaboratively. Differences can be explored, difficult conversations had, and the group learns from experience.

Alongside it sits the basic assumption group, which emerges when anxiety begins to dominate. Instead of focusing on its task, the group’s energy is directed towards managing anxiety, often in ways that unconsciously take it away from its purpose, so the group behaves in an ‘anti-task’ way even while believing the opposite ⁵.

Crucially, this is largely unconscious. From the inside, the group’s behaviour feels logical and justified. Only through reflection does the dynamic become visible. For leaders, this distinction can be enormously helpful. Rather than viewing unproductive behaviours as the result of difficult individuals, a team coaching perspective encourages curiosity about the condition of the ‘group as a whole’.

Is the team currently able to think about its task, or has anxiety begun to drive its behaviour?

Resistance, dependency, conflict or avoidance may say less about individual shortcomings than about how the group is collectively responding to pressure, opening the possibility of an intervention aimed not at fixing individuals, but at helping the team think together about its experience in the service of the primary task.

Primary Task

A central concept in the Tavistock tradition is the primary task: “The task or tasks which a specified purposeful human system/group must perform at any given time, if it is to survive“⁶ . When anxiety rises, teams can easily lose sight of this purpose. Energy becomes focused on managing uncertainty rather than doing the work itself. Blame, endless discussion, over-dependence on leaders or avoidance of difficult issues can all be understood as attempts to manage anxiety rather than serve the task.

From a team coaching perspective, one of the leader’s key responsibilities is to help the team keep returning to its primary task. A useful question for the leader to ask:

How is the team’s current behaviour helping or hindering its ability to achieve its purpose?

Task, structure and technology

Teams do not operate in a vacuum. Tavistock Institute researchers in the 1950’s were among the first to recognise that performance emerges from the interaction between the social and technical aspects of work⁷. Team dynamics are shaped not only by relationships and emotions, but also by technology, structures, processes and the nature of the task itself. This is even more relevant today. AI, hybrid working and digital technologies have transformed organisational life, creating new possibilities while also generating uncertainty, reshaping authority and influencing how teams collaborate.

The team as a sponge

The emotional life of the client group inevitably shapes the emotional life of the staff group. Francesca Cardona’s⁸ idea of ‘the team as a sponge’ captures something important: teams unconsciously absorb the emotional dynamics of the client groups they serve, as well as projections from the wider organisation and society. Those absorbed anxieties, conflicts and expectations become part of the team’s own emotional life.

It was this idea that began to resonate with Helen’s experience. The clinical service she led worked with highly distressed and vulnerable patients. The feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and helplessness that appeared in the team during periods of pressure were strikingly similar to those experienced by the people they were trying to help. Rather than viewing the team’s dependency and emotional reactivity simply as a problem to be managed, Helen became curious about what the team might be carrying on behalf of the wider system.

Teams can be understood as emotional containers, absorbing aspects of organisational and client experience. The leadership task is to help teams think about what they may be carrying rather than become overwhelmed by it.

Feelings as data

A team coaching approach asks leaders to attend not only to what is discussed, but to what is happening in the relationships between people. Feelings are not distractions from the work; they are data about the work, the group, and the wider system.

In Helen’s coaching, one useful question was not simply why the team had become dependent, but what was happening, in Helen when she was with them. She described feeling increasingly responsible, overwhelmed and under pressure to hold everything together. Initially she read this as evidence she wasn’t leading well enough. Over time, she became curious about whether these feelings belonged solely to her, or whether she was experiencing something on behalf of the team.

Bion ⁹called an individual’s tendency to become available for a particular group role or feeling, ‘valency’. Some people become the organiser, rescuer, challenger or peacekeeper; others repeatedly carry the group’s frustration, anger or hope. These roles are not simply personal traits, they emerge in relation to what the group needs someone to hold, and they are not distributed equally. Race, gender, class, disability, age and neurodivergence all shape who becomes the carrier of particular projections: who is expected to absorb conflict, provide emotional labour, or represent the concerns of the group.

In the coaching conversation, Helen noticed how quickly she moved into helping and rescuing when her team became anxious. As she reflected on this pattern, she connected it to a familiar role she had taken up earlier in life: looking after others and smoothing things over when things became difficult. This is where personal development and leadership development often meet. Helen gained insight into why she was particularly susceptible to being recruited into the rescuer role. What emerged was not simply an individual pattern, but an interaction between her own history, the team’s anxiety and the demands of the wider system. Once she could see the pattern, she had more choice about how she responded.

A different leadership stance

This shift asks for a different stance from the leader: moving from doing for, to thinking with.

Rather than responding to pressure with action, advice or rescue, the leader develops the capacity to pause, and to become curious about what the team is finding difficult to think about, what anxieties are shaping its behavior. It is an active process of containment ¹⁰. Being courageous to get to know the overwhelming experiences that emerge as part of work.

Effective leadership, viewed through a systems psychodynamic lens, is about how leaders take up their role and authority to strengthen the team’s capacity to think in service of its primary task. In doing so, they enable others to take up their own roles and contribute fully.

Healthy teams feel alive, dynamic, vibrant and creative, but also messy. Conflict, difference and uncertainty are inevitable; the leadership task is not to remove them, but to help the team use experience productively. Like the environments in which they operate, teams are constantly adapting to new demands, new relationships and new realities.

Conclusion

Helen’s dilemma is not unusual. Most leaders have experienced moments when a capable team becomes caught in patterns of dependency, conflict, blame or avoidance. The temptation is often to work harder, provide more answers or take on greater responsibility. Yet the more leaders become responsible for the team’s thinking, the less opportunity the team has to develop responsibility for itself.

A team coaching approach offers an alternative. Drawing on systems psychodynamic thinking, it invites leaders to see teams not simply as collections of individuals but as living systems with their own emotional life, patterns of relating and ways of responding to pressure. By paying attention to group dynamics, feelings as data, processes of projection and the impact of identity and difference, leaders can begin to understand what may be shaping team behaviour beneath the surface.

This is ultimately a shift in leadership stance. The task is not to eliminate anxiety, solve every problem or rescue the team from difficulty. It is to create the conditions in which the team can think about its experience, stay connected to its primary task and take greater collective responsibility for its work.

It requires the courage to become familiar with the overwhelming experiences that emerge as part of organisational life. It asks leaders to tolerate not knowing, to resist being recruited into familiar roles and to remain curious about the dynamics unfolding around them. In increasingly complex organisations, the ability to think with a team rather than think for it creates the conditions for collective learning, making it one of the most important leadership capabilities we can develop.

*Composite material used to protect anonymity

References

Bion, W. R. (1961), Experiences in Groups. ↩︎
A. Obholzer and V.Z. Roberts, eds. (2019) The unconscious at work: A Tavistock approach to making sense of organizational life. 2nd ed. London: Routledge ↩︎
Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from experience. London: Heinemann Medical Books. ↩︎
Bion, W. R. (1961), Experiences in Groups. ↩︎
Stokes, J. (2019) ‘The unconscious at work in groups and teams: contributions from the work of Wilfred Bion’, in Obholzer, A. and Roberts, V.Z. (eds.) The unconscious at work: a Tavistock approach to making sense of organizational life (2nd edn). London: Routledge, pp. 19–28. ↩︎
Rice, A.K. (1963) The enterprise and its environment: a system theory of management organization. London: Tavistock Publications. ↩︎
Trist, E. L., & Bamforth, K. W. (1951). Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An Examination of the Psychological Situation and Defences of a Work Group in Relation to the Social Structure and Technological Content of the Work System: Human Relations, 4(1), 3-38. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675100400101 (Original work published 1951) ↩︎
Cardona, F. (2020) ‘The team as a sponge: how the nature of the task affects the behaviour and mental life of a team’, in Work Matters. London: Routledge, pp 27-38 ↩︎
Bion, W. R. (1961), Experiences in Groups. ↩︎
Bion, W.R., 1963. Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: Heinemann. ↩︎