What Is Team Coaching?

Team coaching has developed significantly over the past decade, and is now one of the most rapidly growing forms of coaching. Like coaching during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the theory and research in team coaching is lagging behind the practice. In coaching this led some to label the new sector of coaching as the “Wild West,” where there were few agreed rules of engagement and coaches did what they wanted, how they wanted, with little or no accountability (Sherman & Freas, 2004) and with little reference to research or evidence (Grant et al., 2010). At this time Sherman and Freas estimated the value of the coaching industry to be $1bn. Today the value of the industry is in excess of $10bn worldwide, and the frontier has moved to “team coaching.” In this chapter, we aim to review definitions of coaching, explore the definitions of team coaching, how team coaching compares with other group interventions and contribute to the establishment of standards or practice for the frontier of team coaching.