Coming back from the TED 2025 Summit in Vancouver, #HumanityReimagined, it is clear to me that the world has enacted a profound shift driven by radical technology innovation and change in global trade policies. Business and HR Leaders all over the world are in a race to bring their organizations into the future by profoundly reinventing the way they work.
Here’s something you already know: it’s been a turbulent few years, and it’s about to continue to be the case.
Here is what you will get from this read: Transformation is about to accelerate dramatically in 2025, and organizations that are taking advantage of the massive shifts in motion are radically reinventing the way their teams connect, operate, and innovate.
Welcome to the era of Team Transformation.
Even as we see companies imposing RTO mandates, hybrid work and globally distributed teams have reshaped the way we work – forever. And while it has given organizations and workers more flexibility and expanded the talent pool, this profound shift hasn’t come without its challenges: employee engagement and productivity are at an all time low in the history of corporate America.
At present, teams aren’t gelling. They aren’t effectively connected to one another, and the statistics speak for themselves:
This isn’t just a cultural challenge – it’s a massive productivity and performance problem. Teams that are disconnected or misaligned struggle to collaborate effectively, make timely decisions, innovate, solve problems creatively, and drive business outcomes.
Despite this, most leadership development and upskilling efforts still focus on individuals only and often in silos, not the teams – where organization productivity and performance actually happen. In this article, you will learn why this is a mistake, and what is the right way to transform team alignment, dynamics, and performance to successfully bring your organization into the future of work.
The Connection Crisis Impacting Teams Globally
Teams today are navigating a thicket of complexity.
They’re often cross-functional, cross-cultural, and spread across time zones. They’re under pressure to innovate faster, adapt to AI-driven workflows, and manage constant organizational change.
They’re hopping on Zoom or Teams with people they’ve never met in person, both talking in a second language. They only get snatches of time with direct reports, and important conversations happen in choppy fashion in Slack or another platform.
It’s no wonder many teams are struggling. According to Atlassian’s “State of Teams 2024” report:
- 64% of knowledge workers agree that their team is constantly being pulled in too many directions.
- 64% of employees also waste at least three hours per week due to inefficient collaboration practices.
These aren’t isolated issues. They are systemic problems that are dramatically impacting organizations’ productivity and performance.
How this Crisis Hurts Business Performance
When it comes to optimizing employee upskilling and performance to drive business goals, individual development plans and 1-on-1 coaching have long been the go-to solution.
This is perfectly understandable. Individualized support can indeed help leaders build self-awareness, master new skills, and have the clarity and confidence needed to navigate complex challenges – all of which will improve performance and thus drive business impact.
However, picture this:
- A high-potential individual contributor or manager embedded in a team that lacks clarity, cohesion, or direction.
- A staff member with great individual skills and capabilities, who’s not engaged or recognized properly feeling drained and demotivated.
Here’s the rub: No matter how capable that person becomes, their ability to effect change or perform at a high level will be ultimately determined by the team environment around them.
This is why the connection crisis amongst teams is actually a business crisis.
This is why focusing exclusively on individual growth can actually reinforce silos rather than break them down, and enhance organizational misalignment and disengagement.
To create real, lasting improvement, coaching needs to move beyond the individual, and focus on collective transformation tied to strategic initiatives and business outcomes.
A Systemic Approach to Team Performance at Scale
Truly driving business performance means taking a systems-based view. That means recognizing that performance lives not just in individual behaviors, but in the interactions between people, and between teams.
At a practical level, this means aligning three levels of development:
- Individual: Coaching must still meet people where they are, with personalized support to build self-awareness, resilience, and core leadership skills.
- Team: But that development should connect to the dynamics of the team—how people collaborate, communicate, make decisions, and hold one another accountable.
- Organization: And finally, both individual and team progress should be tied to strategic outcomes at the organizational level.
We’ve defined this as a systemic coaching approach to enable ITO transformation: Individual, Team, Organization.
When development is structured this way, we avoid the pitfall of personal growth in a vacuum. Instead, coaching becomes a driver of team cohesion, alignment, and enterprise-wide impact.
Where Team Coaching Comes In
Taking the systemic, ITO view, it becomes obvious why team coaching should be looked at as on the same level of importance as individual coaching.
Why? Because team coaching operationalizes this holistic systemic approach. It meets individuals where they are while helping them grow in the environment where they actually spend their time at work: in groups, in teams, executing together towards common goals, adopting common leadership capabilities and behaviors.
Team coaching shouldn’t be a replacement for one-on-one coaching; it should be a partner and a complement. It should help organizations move from isolated leadership development to collective transformation.
Where 1:1 coaching might focus on personal goals or mindset shifts, team coaching zeroes in on shared objectives, group dynamics, and the patterns that shape how work actually gets done. It helps teams surface misalignments, rebuild trust, and reconnect to purpose.
This is where the real business impact happens. By focussing on both the individual and the groups they’re embedded within, we can actualise a framework and a philosophy that waterfalls all the way up to the organizational level.
Human Connections = Business Performance
What we’re learning – again and again – is that human connection and business results aren’t in opposition. They’re interdependent.
When people feel seen, heard, and valued; when they understand how their role connects to their team’s mission; when they see how their team connects to the broader organization – they show up differently. They engage more fully. They take greater ownership.
That’s not just good for culture. It’s game-changing for business growth and innovation.
And the inverse is true, too: when people feel disconnected from their team or leadership, performance suffers, even if they’re highly skilled as individuals.
Organizations that want to thrive in this new world of work need to scale their leadership development efforts without losing depth or impact.
Instead of thinking only about individuals, think about ecosystems. How do your leaders influence one another? How do teams stay aligned? Where are the fractures between strategy and execution?
The most effective organizations are already starting to answer those questions. They’re adopting approaches that combine personalized coaching with team-based interventions. They’re using data and technology to track progress in real time. And they’re building cultures of connection that can stand up to pressure and change, despite our ever-evolving and turbulent technological and political era.
Because in the end, it’s not just individuals who drive performance. It’s teams. When the outcome is greater than the sum of its parts. When teams are healthy, aligned, and supported – they can achieve things that no single actor can. Let’s thrive together in the new world of work by embracing Team Transformation.
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