Team Co-Coaching
Even experienced team coaches can lose perspective when they are deep inside a project. A co-coach shadows the team coach, helps reflect on critical team situations and prepares interventions where needed — without ever appearing in front of the project team.an
Bernhard Doll
Business Design Maverick
1. The Role in Brief
A co-coach shadows a Team Coach through a project. They are not part of the Project Team, and they do not appear in front of it: no workshops, no status calls, no messages to team members. The project team may not even know that a co-coach exists. Everything a co-coach contributes reaches the team through the team coach. Co-coaching helps most when a team coach is new to the role, when a team struggles with its dynamics or with sponsor politics, and after every project, when team coach and co-coach review it together (see Team Coach).
2. What a Co-Coach Does
A co-coach is particularly involved in:
reflecting on critical team situations with the team coach, ideally soon after a workshop or status call,
asking the questions the team coach no longer asks themselves — for example: "What did you observe, and what did you conclude from it?",
preparing interventions together with the team coach when the team gets stuck (see Team Interventions),
looking at the team coach's own role: still training, mentoring and coaching, or already drawn into the content?
3. Staying in the Background
Staying invisible is what makes the role work. A co-coach who shows up in the room becomes a second coach, and the team starts asking which one to listen to. Keep the roles clean: the team coach owns the relationship with the team and the Project Sponsor; the co-coach owns the reflection. And like the team coach, a co-coach stays out of the content.