Most executives who've hired a coach have hired one to work with them individually. Which means that when they're thinking about bringing someone in to work with their leadership team, they're picturing individual coaching, just with more people. That picture is wrong in a way that matters.
Individual coaching and team coaching are genuinely different work. Not bigger and smaller versions of the same thing. Different mechanisms, different targets, different definitions of what counts as progress. Understanding that distinction before you hire someone is one of the most useful things you can do to make sure you get what your situation actually needs.
The sharpest line I can draw between them is this. When I'm coaching an individual leader, my client is that person: their thinking, their patterns, their development, their growth. I'm trying to change how they see themselves, how they make decisions, how they show up in the situations that challenge them. The organization benefits indirectly when the leader grows. The leader is the unit of change.
When I'm coaching a leadership team, the team is the client. Not the individuals within it: the relationships, the norms, the patterns of interaction, the quality of thinking that emerges when the group works together. I'm not trying to help each person grow individually. I'm trying to change how the system operates. A team can be full of capable individual leaders who, together, produce mediocre collective outcomes. The team-level dynamics create the drag, and that is what team coaching addresses.
The practical implication of this is significant. If your leadership team is struggling because there are specific individuals who have development needs, a COO who can't delegate or a VP who can't have a direct conversation, individual coaching might be what's called for. Get them working with a coach on their own. But if the problem is the way the team operates together: the decisions that never get made because the conversation for making them doesn't happen, the conflict that everybody knows is there and nobody addresses, the alignment that exists in the meeting and evaporates in the parking lot. That's a team problem. Individual coaching won't touch it.
I've seen organizations buy individual coaching for all their senior leaders and still have a leadership team that can't function. Each person comes back from their sessions sharper, clearer about themselves, better at their individual role. And the team still doesn't work. Because nobody was working on the team. The assumption was that better individuals would automatically produce a better collective. That assumption is wrong often enough that it's worth examining before you write the contracts.
The work of team coaching involves things that individual coaching doesn't have to handle. Creating a shared framework for how the team talks about its own functioning. Building the capacity to have the hard conversation in the room, in real time, rather than after the meeting. Establishing norms that the group owns rather than standards handed down from the top. Working through the actual conflict that's sitting in the room between two or three people, not as a personality issue but as a team issue. None of that work happens in one-on-one sessions.
There's also a sequencing question worth thinking about. In my own practice, I typically do both. Individual coaching with the CEO or the person with the highest leverage for the team's functioning, alongside team-level work with the group. The individual coaching makes the team coaching more effective because the leader can take what they're learning in their one-on-one work and apply it in the team context. The team coaching makes the individual coaching more grounded because the leader isn't just doing development work in isolation. They're trying things in real time with the people they actually work with.
The thing that buyers usually don't know is that not everyone who describes themselves as a team coach is doing team coaching. Some practitioners call it team coaching when they're running facilitated group sessions, or when they're delivering individual coaching to each team member and then bringing the group together occasionally. Those can be useful things. But they're not team coaching in the sense I'm describing, and the distinction matters when you're trying to decide what your situation needs.
What your situation needs is probably both, at different ratios depending on where the dysfunction lives. If the problem is an individual, coach the individual. If the problem is the system, work on the system. If, and this is more common than people think, the problem is both, you need someone who can move between those contexts intentionally and tell you clearly which one they're in at any given time.