The Defence Forces Team Coaching Story: Building a Culture of Collective Leadership

This session features Brigadier General Brendan McGuinness, offering an inside look at the Irish Defence Forces’ multi-year journey of embedding one-to-one and team coaching as a strategic leadership capability. Through real organisational experience, McGuinness will explore how a coaching mindset took root within a complex, mission-critical and highly hierarchical environment. Insights will highlight the conditions, design principles, and leadership behaviours that enabled cultural shift and collective leadership to emerge across the system.

Objectives:
– Provide insights into how coaching can be scaled across a large, complex organisation
– Facilitate reflection on the conditions that enable sustained cultural and leadership transformation
– Explore how coaching mindsets and practices can be adapted for diverse operational contexts

Topics:
– The Defence Forces’ coaching journey: strategic design, leadership sponsorship, and cultural embedding
– Adapting team coaching