Why Fixing Individual Executives Rarely Fixes the Executive Team

A familiar sequence plays out in large organisations. The executive team is not performing. Meetings are slow, decisions get relitigated, and the chief executive concludes that two or three individuals need development. Coaches are engaged. Each of those individuals genuinely improves. Twelve months later, the executive team performs almost exactly as it did before.

This outcome is common enough to be worth taking seriously as a pattern rather than a series of unlucky engagements. Individual coaching improves individuals. It does not reliably change what happens when those individuals are in a room together, because most executive team dysfunction is a property of the group rather than the sum of its members.

The unit of analysis is wrong

Arvid Buit, an executive coach working with boards and leadership teams across Europe, frames the distinction in terms of perspective. A leader can reason from the individual perspective — what is best for this person, in this situation — and that reasoning is humane and often correct at the level of one relationship. It also has almost no steering power at scale.

He describes coaching the newly appointed chief executive of a large listed conglomerate who had absorbed years of contemporary leadership advice: serve everyone, be endlessly available, address concerns publicly. Within six weeks he had town halls, a commitment he could not keep, and an internal talent market that let high-variance performers migrate toward whichever manager praised them most.

His operating reviews had become collections of anecdotes. One business head could not close a failing unit because a named colleague was going through a difficult period. Another could not move a warehouse because two people had recently been ill. Each individual case was real and sympathetic. Collectively they had made the organisation ungovernable, because exceptions had quietly become policy and the collective had dissolved into curated individual pain.

No amount of coaching those business heads individually would have addressed this. The problem lived in the group’s shared operating logic.

What group-level dysfunction actually looks like

Executive team problems tend to present in a small number of recognisable forms, and none of them are visible from a one-to-one conversation.

The most common is a team where disagreement has become expensive. Buit recounts observing a leadership meeting where, over ninety minutes, only two of the attendees spoke more than twice. The chief operating officer’s reading was that his team agreed with him. The alternative reading — that they had learned disagreement carried a cost — fit the same evidence and was considerably more consequential.

A second pattern is a team that has never established why it exists as a collective. Buit argues that this question is rarely asked directly. A leadership team knows its targets, but frequently cannot articulate what connects this particular group of people beyond the fact that they report to the same person. Without that, there is no basis for resolving genuine trade-offs between functions, and every conflict becomes a negotiation about status.

A third is a team confusing its stated direction with its actual one — an immaculate strategy deck, and a set of daily decisions pulling steadily in another direction. Buit borrows a navigational metaphor for this: the course drawn on the map is not what you steer. Between the two sit inaccuracies inside your own vessel, the ways your situation differs from what works elsewhere, visible forces you cannot change, and invisible ones you cannot even see. Leaders who set a heading and then take it personally when the sea does not comply are describing a group problem, not a strategic one.

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Why the group format changes what is possible

Working with the team as a unit makes these dynamics observable while they are happening. The coach is present for the silence, the deferral, the moment a difficult topic gets reframed into something more comfortable — none of which can be reconstructed accurately afterwards from individual accounts. Professional bodies including EMCC Global maintain distinct competence frameworks for team coaching precisely because the discipline is not individual coaching delivered to several people at once.

It also changes the accountability structure. When a behavioural commitment is made in front of the group, the group becomes the mechanism that sustains it. In individual coaching, the leader returns to an unchanged environment that quietly reasserts the old pattern.

When individual coaching is still the right call

This is not an argument that team coaching should replace individual work. A leader with a specific behavioural pattern that is damaging their effectiveness needs focused, confidential attention, and doing that work in front of colleagues is neither kind nor effective.

The judgement is diagnostic. If the same dysfunction appears regardless of which individuals are present, it belongs to the group. If it travels with a particular person across contexts, it belongs to that person. Most organisations default to the individual explanation because it is easier to act on — and then repeat the cycle when the pattern reappears with the next set of people.

For chief executives weighing where to invest, the useful question is not who on the team needs development. It is whether the thing that needs to change would survive a complete change of personnel. Where the answer is yes, coaching executive teams as a single unit addresses the actual mechanism rather than its most visible carriers.

The alternative is a well-developed group of executives who continue, collectively, to behave exactly as they always have.