By Becca Sweetman and Johnny Hammond ICF PCC

As part of our recent research project into the development of leadership teams from Series A to B [summary article], Johnny Hammond and I (Becca Sweetman) interviewed a mix of 10 European post Series B Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and European Venture Capitalists (VCs) with experience in the A to B transition. One thing we asked about was Executive Team Coaching. We were surprised by the range of responses, with some proactively recommending it:

“An external Team Coach could have pointed out the issues in the team and would have fast-tracked growth” – Lewis Lui, CEO, Eigen Technologies

“The teams that make it to a successful Series B raise are the teams that are likely to have engaged with coaching earlier” – Jay Wilson, AlbionVC

However, another VC investor shared their belief that:

If the team needs a team coach then you’ve got the wrong people on the team.

How can there be such a difference in opinion?

Let’s first take a step back, what is team coaching?

The simplest way to describe team coaching is that it’s about supporting a team to raise their collective performance. However, given the complexity of teams and the systems within which they operate, team coaching can look and feel like a wide variety of different things, covering a breadth of topics from relationships to systems and process; team purpose to leadership. The best team coaches have a deep toolkit that they can draw on to support a team in any given situation and often it’s simply about helping the team to have the conversations they need to have.

Focussing back on the transition from Series A to B, one of the key insights in our research was that collective team performance is essential. From a CEO perspective, they observed that cross-functional connections start forming and team members learn to respect each other’s strengths and support each other’s weaknesses. On the flip-side, as a post Series B CEO shared, “if you have a team with dysfunction you have to fix it as it will bleed into the culture quickly”. This process is complicated by the fact that the team is likely to be onboarding new members, most commonly a CRO and a CFO, and potentially replacing other members who aren’t the right fit for the next stage of growth. As Jonathan Lerner, Smedvig Capital shared “A single wrong hire will make the landing point [getting to Series B] really difficult – everything has to align, everything needs doing all at once and many founders have not seen lots of it before.”

So, given the importance of the team’s collective performance, why wouldn’t you want someone with the skills to help your team to fast-track the onboarding of new team members and help the team to perform at the highest level? In sports nobody would question why a team needs a coach, so why is that the case for an Exec team?

Ultimately, we feel that it came down to the fact that Team Coaching is still a growing discipline. The idea of bringing in support for a team offsite is widely recognised as best practice; and a quarterly offsite is increasingly common practice, particularly in a hybrid or remote-working set up, or for geographically dispersed teams. This support can take the form of a facilitator, but we’d recommend considering a Team Coach who has a wider breadth of skills. To be most effective a Team Coach can expand their support beyond the offsite, into an ongoing series of sessions, to ensure that learning and growth continues.

In conclusion, Executive Teams face a steep learning curve in a VC-backed startup. A Team Coach can act as a partner to the team, helping their performance to grow at least as fast as the rate of growth of the company.

Research: the research was conducted in 2024 as part of Becca Sweetman & Johnny Hammond’s research project for their Senior Practitioner Team Coaching programme with CLUTTERBUCK COACHING AND MENTORING INTERNATIONAL LTD

Special thanks to those involved in the research, including, but not limited to, Jonathan Lerner (Smedvig Ventures), William McQuillan (Frontline Ventures), Jay Wilson (AlbionVC), James Wise (Balderton Capital), Lewis Z. Liu (Eigen Technologies) and Katy Wigdahl (Speechmatics).