Team coaches’ experiences of coaching to develop conditions for shared leadership

Abstract

This paper explores how team coaches make sense of working within shared leadership situations. Adopting an interpretive research lens, an under-developed area of research within team coaching literature, the study reported captures team coaches’ experiences of coaching amidst decentralised hierarchies. The findings draw attention to how coaches work with two mutually independent and compatible dynamics of unity and energy in fostering conditions for mutual influence. To conceptualise the findings a ‘Unity and Energy Matrix’ has been developed, depicting four emergent team states: tentative, eager, functional and conscious. Each state reflects significant in-practice moments of coaching and offers insights regarding adopted interventions in response to the emergence of unity and energy.