Executive Team Coaching To Succeed: Why Talented Leaders Still Underperform as a Team
Book 4, the closing title in the Leadership & Business series after New Manager To Succeed, First Lead To Succeed and Coach Anyone To Succeed, turns to a problem those three books deliberately don't cover: what happens once a group of individually capable leaders is expected to function as a genuine team, not just a collection of strong individual performers.
The Gap Isn't Individual Competence
According to Bain & Company research, only 17% of executive teams describe themselves as truly high-performing — and only 44% of leaders believe their own team is equipped to manage the pace of disruption most organisations now face. Executive Team Coaching To Succeed starts from the position that this gap is rarely about any one leader's individual skill. It's about what happens, or fails to happen, once that group is expected to operate as a unit — which is a distinct discipline from one-on-one executive coaching, and a different scale of problem to the everyday coaching skill covered in Coach Anyone To Succeed.
Diagnosing Before Intervening
The book opens with real diagnostic tools: the difference between a genuine team and a working group that merely reports to the same person, psychological safety, the specific interview questions worth asking before any intervention begins, and three recurring dysfunction patterns it names plainly — the shark tank, the petting zoo, and the mediocracy.
Real, Credited Frameworks
Rather than inventing a proprietary model, the book draws on and credits by name the actual research it's built on: Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, applied stage by stage; Peter Hawkins' Leadership Team Coaching; and Ruth Wageman's research on senior leadership teams. Alongside these sit practical tools any team can use directly — the team charter, explicit decision rights, ways-of-working agreements, and conflict norms.
Running the Engagement, and Sustaining It
Later chapters cover the actual mechanics of the work — contracting, designing a facilitated session, coaching the team's own leader, and working with resistance, including three labelled, explicitly illustrative composite scenarios — through to what happens after the engagement ends: accountability without micromanaging, meeting redesign, succession and composition changes, and an annual team health check.