Are we excavators or stewards? A research-based challenge to one of team coaching’s deepest assumptions

What if one of the most widely held beliefs in team coaching is actually getting in the way of meaningful change? The belief that our job is to uncover what lies beneath a team’s stated goals may be doing more harm than good.
This session presents findings from an original qualitative research study conducted with 30 experienced team coaches across multiple countries, as part of the Team Coaching Studio Diploma program. Through semi-structured interviews and questionnaire data, we examined how teams move from stated wants to deeper systemic needs and what actually enables that shift.
The findings challenge technique-centric cultures, romanticised notions of courageous depth-seeking, and unexamined assumptions about coach authority. They point instead toward a different kind of competence: attunement, the ongoing calibration of pace, scope, and containment to what the system can genuinely hold.