Manfred Kets de Vries, at INSEAD, the French business school, is a veteran of team coaching and an authority on the psychology of both coaching and group dynamics. His latest book, The Path to Individual and Organizational Transformation (Palgrave, 2025) contains many nuggets, but I was particularly struck by a list of 25 key benefits that executive teams perceive from team coaching. These range from identifying hidden conflict to clarifying roles and deeper understanding of team challenges, to aligning team norms with an accountability structure. It’s a valuable checklist to apply when engaging with a team, to answer the question: “What would you like team coaching to do for you as a team?”
From the opening pages, a recurrent theme is that executive leaders are there to bring hope to the organisations they lead. Similarly, the intersection of organisational development/ wellbeing and individual development/ wellbeing.
The subtitle “Confronting the elephant in the room” reminds us that the majority of problems in organisations arise from people being unwilling or unable to address the systems that envelope them. For example, “It is a fact of life that the further up the ladder an executive climbs, the less they may expect to receive honest feedback.” The solution to such deliberate unattention lies in developing a coaching culture, starting at the top.
This is a volume I am pleased to add to our team coaching recommended reading!
©️David Clutterbuck, 2025