Why Team Coaching, Why Now? Navigating the Complexity of 2025 Through Collective Change | By Jennifer Britton

As we move through 2025 the nature of work continues to shift beneath our feet. Teams, leaders and individuals are navigating complexity, changing ecosystems, and burnout at unprecedented levels. Traditional leadership models are no longer enough.

The world of coaching is responding—and the call for team coaching has never been louder.

Team coaching offers a vital bridge between insight and impact. It’s not just about helping people perform better. It’s about helping teams think together, grow together, and deliver together in real-time, real-world contexts.

In this article, we explore why team coaching matters right now, what makes it unique, and how coaches can step into this vital space of collective transformation.

The 2025 Landscape: What’s Changed

In just a few short years, seismic shifts have reshaped how teams function. Five years ago, in Reconnecting Workspaces and the Remote Pathways podcast, we began to spotlight the myths and realities of a changing workforce. Today, many of the assumptions of HOW and WHERE we work have become a reality, even if not yet fully embraced.

Here are some of the realities of work in 2025 for many organizations:

• Workspaces are varied in how they work. Many have been ordered back to the office. Others operate in hybrid models, with in-person attendance 3-4 days a week.
• Change is a constant for most organizations.
• Connection is key. In human-centric workplaces, people feel that they can do their best work.
• Pace and overload. Leaders and team members alike are stretched thin. Busyness replaces clarity.
• Trust breakdowns. After years of constant change, trust erosion is a quiet epidemic.
• AI integration is rising. Automation is accelerating—but so is the need for human alignment, emotional intelligence, and collaboration.
• Interdependence is increasing. Results are no longer siloed—they are shared, requiring teams to function as cohesive systems.

In this context, team coaching isn't a luxury—it’s a strategic necessity.

What Team Coaching Brings That Other Modalities Don’t

Let’s clarify: team coaching is not the same as facilitation, training, or group coaching.

Team coaching helps real teams:

• Align around purpose and direction
• Improve how they communicate and collaborate
• Strengthen both RELATIONSHIPS and RESULTS
• Address dysfunctions, silos, and trust gaps
• Learn and grow within the context of their actual work
• Build sustainable practices, not just attend one-off sessions

The Case for Team Coaching in 2025: 3 Critical Reasons

1. Teams Are the Engine of Business and Strategy

Today’s organizations succeed (or fail) through teams. Whether it's product launches, service delivery, or innovation—work happens in teams. Supporting team performance is one of the highest-leverage moves leaders can make.

2. Culture Lives in Teams

While culture might be set at the top, it lives and breathes in team dynamics. If you want to shift engagement, inclusion, or resilience—start at the team level.

3. Collective Intelligence Is Now a Competitive Advantage

The best teams don’t just complete tasks. They think together, adapt together and evolve together. Team coaching builds this collaborative capacity.

What Makes Team Coaching Different (and More Demanding than 1:1)

“You’re not just coaching individuals in a team. You’re coaching the invisible space between them.”

Team coaching requires more than simply “scaling up” your 1:1 coaching. It’s a different set of muscles. You must be able to:

• Fade in and fade out of the team system - our work as coaches is to build team capacity and help them translate WHAT we are doing in the coaching to their work context
• Work with team dynamics in real time
• Support both RELATIONSHIPS and RESULTS simultaneously
• Hold presence with multiple agendas, personalities, and emotional undercurrents
• Facilitate trust and psychological safety for individuals AND the group
• Stay aware of external stakeholders, power structures, and unspoken tensions

Are You Ready to Coach Teams?

The ICF Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC) is the global standard for coaches ready to deepen their impact in this space. Launched in 2022, it requires:

• 60+ hours of team coaching education
• 5+ team coaching engagements (with real teams) over a five-year period
• A minimum of 5 hours of team coaching supervision
• Successful Completion of the ICF Team Coaching Assessment

Even if you're not pursuing ACTC, developing the capabilities to coach teams will elevate your practice and your professional value.

Tools That Support the Journey

As the field matures, so do the tools available. Consider integrating:

• The Six Factors of High Performing Teams model for assessments and coaching (Explore more in my TEDx talk)
• The Pause–Focus–Create–Activate reflection cycle for team learning
• Conversation Sparker Tools like visuals, metaphors, and cards to deepen insight
• Structured debriefs like Ripple Reflection Pages to capture learning and action

Final Thought: Teams Continue To Be the Engine of Change and Growth

“You can’t build the future of work on yesterday’s habits. Team coaching helps us build habits, clarity and connection, together.”

If you’re a coach ready to expand your impact—or a leader wondering how to better support your teams—this is the moment to lean in.

In 2025, the real power isn’t in more answers. It’s in stronger teams that can hold the right conversations for their moment, so that they can chart their way forward.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also like:

• 6 Ways to Feel more Confident in Leading Group and Team Coaching by Jennifer Britton
• Challenging Team or Group? The 5 Team Dysfunctions with Ideas to Build Trust by Julia Menard
• How to Boost Your Confidence in Group and Team Coaching by Jennifer Britton

Contributing Author:

Jennifer Britton, MES, CHRP, CPT, PCC-ACTC, has influenced a generation of coaches in the realms of team and group coaching. You may have read her writing (she’s the author of 7 books), including Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2010), the first book in the world to be published on the topic of group coaching; From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching; or her latest, Reconnecting Workspaces: Pathways to Thrive in the Virtual, Remote and Hybrid World (2021).

In 2025 Jennifer is leading a series of workshops around Coaching and Change, supporting coaches via Experiential Tools Under the Conversation Sparker Experiential Roadshow™. You can bring her in for a half-day or full day workshop.

Since 2006, Jennifer's Group Coaching Essentials (10 CCEs) and Advanced Group and Team Coaching Practicum (10 CCEs) programs have become known as the must-do training in the area of group coaching. The two courses have now grown into ten distinct courses that group and team coaches can take – whether coaches want to work towards the ACTC (Advanced Credential for Team Coaching) or simply want to develop their practice.The two courses have now grown into ten distinct courses that group and team coaches can take – whether coaches want to work towards the ACTC (Advanced Credential for Team Coaching) or simply want to develop their practice. 

Focused on providing coaches with best practices in designing, marketing and implementing group coaching, these programs have helped thousands of coaches launch their own group and team coaching programs in a wide variety of settings (public, corporate, non-profit). These advanced courses dive deeper int the development of the coach, neuroscience of group and team coaching, and coaching a range of diverse clients which naturally exists in group and team coaching

Potentials Realized's ICF-CCE programs are geared for aspiring group and team coaches, especially those wanting to work toward the New Advanced Credential in Team Coaching (ACTC) with the ICF.

Also check out our neuroscience course for group and team coaches (NLE-A), Team Coaching Essentials  and ACTIVATE Your Team and Group Coaching Superpowers. Prefer podcasts? Listen into the Coaching Many Podcast.

Learn more about Jennifer & see all their articles here >>