When the Client Is the Team: Moving from Individual to Systemic Work

Sometimes good work with an individual can only take you so far.

A client brings a recurring difficulty from work. You explore it together. They develop greater awareness, try something different and perhaps become clearer about what they need.

Then they go back into the same team - and the same thing happens again.

For coaches this may be particularly familiar, but it can also resonate with therapists, counsellors, supervisors and other practitioners. We are used to paying attention to the person in front of us and to what happens within the relationship.

But sometimes the individual is only one part of what we are seeing.

The difficulty may also belong to the team or organisation around them.

That raises an important question: what changes when the client is not the individual, but the team itself?

A team is more than a collection of individuals

Working with a team is not simply individual work multiplied by the number of people in the room.

In individual coaching, the client is usually clear: one person has contracted with the coach around their own development, goals or difficulties.

Group coaching brings several people together, often around a shared area of interest or development, but each person can still have their own individual focus.

Team coaching is different.

Here, the team itself becomes the client. The focus is not simply on how each person is doing, but on what the team is able to do together: how it functions, how its members relate, how work moves between them and how effectively the team fulfils its purpose.

This distinction can sound relatively small. In practice, it changes where the practitioner places their attention.

Listening to the person and the system

Imagine a member of a leadership team saying:

“We go round and round the same conversations and never seem to make a decision.”

We can hear that as an individual statement.

What is this person's experience? How do they respond when decisions aren't made? What do they need from their colleagues or leader?

But if the team is the client, we also hear something else.

What might this be telling us about the team?

Are roles clear? Does everyone understand who has authority to make which decisions? Are there unclear boundaries between responsibilities? Is the formal hierarchy reflected in what actually happens in the room?

The person's experience still matters. But it becomes information about something larger as well.

One of the disciplines of organisational work is being able to hold both perspectives without reducing one to the other.

Holding three things in mind at once

In her work with teams and organisations, Drs Sari van Poelje describes three areas of attention that a team coach needs to hold simultaneously.

The intrapsychic

The practitioner is part of what happens in the room.

We bring our own expectations, reactions and patterns with us. If we are not aware of these, it becomes easy to take something personally, become drawn towards one member of the team, or understand what is happening through our own familiar frame.

Being able to notice our own responses without assuming they tell us the whole story is a key part of the work.

The interpersonal

There is still a relationship between practitioner and client, and between the members of the team. Listening, questioning, support, challenge and attention to what happens between people remain important. These are familiar skills for many coaches, therapists and counsellors.

The systemic

The additional challenge is to see the individuals and the team as a whole. What is happening across the room rather than only between two people? What does one person's behaviour tell us about the wider team? Where does influence sit? How are roles being occupied? What happens around authority, boundaries and decision-making?

This systemic focus widens the frame.

Resisting the pull towards the individual - the client is the team

For practitioners trained to work relationally, there can be a strong pull towards the person who appears to be struggling most or who is more personable. Perhaps one team member is angry. Another has become withdrawn. Someone seems to be carrying all the conflict while everybody else remains relatively calm. Our instinct may be to help that person.

What if this person is expressing something that belongs partly to the team?

Focusing solely on them may inadvertently reinforce the idea that they are the problem.

The organisational perspective doesn't mean ignoring individual experience. It means asking what relationship that experience has to the system around it.

What different professional backgrounds bring

People come to organisational TA from very different starting points, and each brings useful experience.

A coach may already be highly skilled in contracting, listening, questioning, support and challenge. Organisational work adds a stronger systemic focus: learning to notice when something that appears individual may be better understood at team or organisational level.

An OD practitioner or consultant may already be comfortable thinking about systems, structures, organisational politics and change. Organisational TA adds ways of understanding the relational and psychodynamic processes that can help explain why apparently sensible changes don't always produce the expected result.

A psychotherapist or counsellor may bring considerable experience of relationship, psychological process and sitting with uncertainty or discomfort. Moving into organisational work involves learning to hold those capacities alongside questions about structure, roles, authority, boundaries and purpose - without turning organisational work into therapy.

None of these backgrounds provides the whole picture. The development is in becoming able to move between perspectives and recognise which one the work requires.

And when the client is an organisation?

Widening the frame doesn't necessarily stop at the team. When working across an organisation, we also need to consider the relationships between teams.

Does each team understand how its work contributes to the organisation's wider purpose?

Does one team's output become another team's input?

What happens at the points where responsibility passes from one part of the organisation to another?

Some organisational difficulties sit precisely in these spaces. Each individual may be competent. Each team may function reasonably well on its own. The difficulty appears in the connections between them. At that point, individual coaching alone is unlikely to resolve what is happening.

You may already be noticing this in your own practice

You don't have to be working as a team coach to recognise the shift.

A therapy client may repeatedly bring difficulties from an organisational setting.

A supervisor may hear similar experiences from several practitioners working within the same service.

A coach may realise that the changes an individual is trying to make are repeatedly being absorbed by the team around them. Or you may simply recognise these patterns within an organisation or group you belong to yourself.

Organisational thinking doesn't mean abandoning what we know about individuals and relationships. It asks us to add another level of attention.

Interested in working more systemically?

Physis Scotland works with Drs Sari van Poelje, TSTA(O), EMCC Master Coach, and Intact Academy to offer training in organisational Transactional Analysis and team coaching.

The programme brings together the structural, relational and psychological dimensions of working with teams and organisations, and is relevant to coaches, consultants and OD practitioners as well as TA practitioners interested in extending their work into organisational settings.

Explore our upcoming Organisational TA workshops and training at Physis Scotland.