Developing Your Own Team Coaching Journey: What Happens Next?
With Georgina Woudstra and Allard de Jong
Episode 30 of the Teams Transformed Podcast
About Teams Transformed
Teams Transformed is the podcast for courageous coaches, curious leaders, and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of teams. Hosted by TCS Founder and Senior Faculty Georgina Woudstra and Allard De Jong, listen to explore transformational insights on how to coach teams with presence, depth, and emergence, diving into not just the tools, but the art of team coaching itself.
About this episode
In this look-back episode of Teams Transformed, Georgina Woudstra and Allard de Jong round up key insights and reflections on our third series.
They revisit how a team coaching engagement can unfold from initial contact and discovery through to team launch, coaching sessions, individual coaching, live-action coaching, and review.
Rather than presenting one fixed model of team coaching, Georgina and Allard emphasise that every coach needs to develop their own approach. The different elements of a team coaching journey should be coherent with the coach’s philosophy of teams, learning, development, and what is needed in the world.
The round-up closes with an invitation to put that approach into practice, reflect on what works, notice personal learning edges, and continue developing the art of team coaching through experience.
Key Themes Explored in this episode
1. Start with Curiosity and Co-Design
Coaching begins with an open mind rather than rigid assumptions. Meeting the team early allowed Georgina and Allard to observe regular dynamics, understand what the team actually wanted, and collectively introduce the coaching approach.
2. Discover and Diagnose Before Intervening
Conducting upfront discovery work, such as team assessments, stakeholder feedback, and individual interviews, can help. These tools raised individual awareness and help coaches form initial hypotheses about the team’s strengths, systemic blind spots, and learning edges...however…
3. Transition from Data to Relational Experience
…while diagnostic tools and individual profiles (like MBTI or the Enneagram) provided useful baseline data, the true learning happened in the relationships that were observed. An emergent approach moved the team beyond words on a page to confront and explore their actual, real-time relational experiences.
4. Anchor the Journey with a Team Launch
A formal team launch or relaunch created alignment before deep coaching sessions begin. It provided a dedicated space for the team to establish working agreements, build mutual buy-in, and clarify their learning agenda.
5. Balance Task with Relationship
High-performing teams must navigate the polarity between strategic task execution and relational intimacy. Because individual tasks can be done independently, true collaboration relied entirely on the quality of contact and meaningful connection between team members.
6. Blend Complementary Interventions
An effective engagement integrates multiple modalities alongside core team coaching. In this engagement, this included individual coaching for leaders, targeted skill-building workshops, observation, and systemic stakeholder feedback to address how the team functions within the wider organisation.
7. Coach in Live Action and Real Time
Coaching should not be restricted to isolated, structured sessions. Integrating live-action coaching allowed practitioners to observe and engage with the team during their actual operational meetings, responding directly to behaviours as they emerged.
8. Use Iterative Experiments to Extend Learning
Rather than following a rigid blueprint, interventions should emerge organically throughout the journey. The Team was supported in designing real-world experiments, such as changing how they intentionally showed up and engaged with larger corporate audiences, to test new behaviours in real time.
9. Treat Reviews as Continuous Starting Points
The final review with the team was a springboard rather than a conclusion. It functioned as part of a continuing developmental cycle, allowing the team to reflect on progress, identify emerging needs, and seamlessly transition into the next phase of growth.
10. Develop a Coherent, Personalised Philosophy
There is no single correct team coaching blueprint. Master practitioners must intentionally weave discovery, reflection, and intervention into a coherent approach that reflects their own philosophy, while continuously practising, reflecting, and experimenting to sharpen their own edge.
Key Takeaways
🌱 A team coaching journey can begin with curiosity and exploration rather than a predetermined intervention.
🔎 Discovery work can help reveal a team's strengths, needs, and potential learning edges.
🤝 Diagnostic information becomes more meaningful when it is explored through the team's lived relational experience.
🧭 A team launch can create clarity, agreements, and shared ownership of the learning agenda.
💬 The themes that become the focus of coaching often emerge through the team's interactions.
⚖️ Effective team coaching pays attention to both task and relationship, action and contact.
👥 Individual coaching can complement team coaching by supporting each person's contribution to the collective.
🎯 Team coaches can draw on a range of interventions, including stakeholder interviews, observation, workshops, diagnostics, and experiments.
🌍 The wider organisational system can provide important opportunities for team learning and experimentation.
🔄 A review can become the starting point for another cycle rather than simply marking the end of the work.
🧩 There is no single definitive team coaching journey; different teams require different approaches.
🪞 Coaches are encouraged to develop an approach that is congruent with their own philosophy of teams, learning, and development.
✨ Mastery develops through practice, reflection, experimentation, and paying attention to your own learning edges.
Why listen?
This episode provides a recap and reflection on all episodes in this series. We encourage you to listen to the whole ACME team journey in its entirety.
About your hosts
Georgina Woudstra is the Founder and Senior Faculty of Team Coaching Studio, an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) with over 20 years of experience. Georgina is recognised globally as one of the leading lights in team coaching and was among the first coaches to receive ICF's Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching.
Allard De Jong is a seasoned leadership development expert with two decades of experience solving organisational 'people problems' and accelerating leadership development. He brings a unique perspective on transformative inquiry and divergent thinking to team coaching practice.
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