In many ETIs, the difficulty is not deciding. It's deciding together.
Rapid growth, business diversification, internationalisation, transfer, organisational change: decisions are taken across the board, arbitrating between conflicting interests, time horizons and risks, and there is less and less obvious single person in charge.
However, the places where these decisions are really taken collectively are rare. Formal bodies do exist - COMEX, CODIR, various committees - but they are often overwhelmed by operational matters.
What is at stake is not just the effectiveness of decisions, but the ability of the management team to remain a point of support for the company, rather than a factor of ambiguity. When these issues cannot be addressed, they do not disappear: they shift and fragment, and end up affecting managerial consistency, team commitment and the sustainability of the strategy over time.
One of the best places to work on leadership today is the in-company group coaching.
Contents
When governance quietly goes wrong
Governance of VSEs: when the management team becomes an issue
In many VSEs, governance malfunctions rarely take the form of open crises. The signals are discreet, gradual and often rationalised as the normal effects of growth, workload or context. They settle in quietly, until they become structural.
Decisions, for example, are frequently prepared in advance and then ratified at meetings. Disagreements do exist, but they take place outside official forums, in bilateral or informal exchanges which are sometimes reconstituted in silos of parallel discussions. Alignments are displayed, while operational translations diverge.
These situations are well known but rarely treated as governance issues. They are attributed to pressure, to the communication style or personality of some or others, to the corporate culture. This gradual trivialisation of governance malfunctions reflects what Weick describes in Sensemaking in Organizations (1995) as a process of normalising meaning: as long as a situation can be interpreted as «acceptable», it ceases to be questioned as a problem in its own right.
The way the management team operates then becomes a blocking factor... without ever being named as such. And the more informal and effective governance appears to be in the short term, the more politically costly it becomes to expose its weaknesses, because it calls into question tacit arrangements and non-formalised areas of power.
Cross-functional decision-making and implicit governance: fertile ground for collective coaching
Most of the executive and management teams in the small and medium-sized businesses I know are experienced, committed and loyal. When everyone is competent but nothing is really decided, the problem is generally not competence but the collective. Who really bears the decision-making risk? Who can say no to what, and in front of whom? At what point does disagreement become legitimate, and when does it become an obstacle? As long as these questions remain implicit, they are tolerable within the management team. Until the moment when growth, an acquisition or the departure of a key figure makes them visible - and costly.
What is lacking are legitimate forums to discuss the issues at stake between decision-makers.
The limits of conventional responses
Collective leadership and grey areas of responsibility in VSEs
Faced with the discreet but persistent dysfunctions in governance that I observe, companies most often mobilise known responses.
- Training managers individually improves their attitudes and develops useful skills and valuable managerial know-how, but provides few answers to the dilemmas shared at the top of the company.
- Training managers individually enhances their ability to take a step back, but does not transform the collective dynamic at the point where decisions are actually made.
- Clarifying processes and formalising certain managerial rituals secures execution, but does not address the grey areas of responsibility where the real trade-offs take place.
- Adding ad hoc committees increases synchronisation, but does not create genuine cooperative processes where disagreements can be worked out.
Traditional HR systems vs. group coaching: what are we really regulating?
The people I talk to in HR regularly observe that the quality of our systems is improving, but that there is still no place for certain key issues to be dealt with collectively. Conventional HR systems (interviews, commitment surveys, social barometers, etc.) document the effects of these tensions: managerial fatigue, misalignments, misunderstandings and sometimes a lack of recognition faced by managers. They rarely shed light on the causes, which are often to be found at the level of governance itself. Even with experienced, well-trained managers and well-defined processes, it is still difficult to ensure that leadership is genuinely shared over the long term.
The accumulation of systems can produce a paradoxical effect: the more tools we provide, the less we dare to ask the structuring questions. The problem lies in the absence of a place to regulate collective leadership, separate from the decision itself, and at the service of its quality.
Corporate coaching and collective leadership: a strategic blind spot in SMEs
Collective leadership and trade-offs in SMEs
Leadership lies in a team's ability to sustain useful disagreements, to arbitrate in the face of uncertainty, and to take imperfect but necessary decisions together, in the service of a shared strategic vision. This is where strategic coherence is built - or undermined - over time.
This collective dimension of leadership is often confused with the team cohesion, The quality of the relationship. An effective management team is not a team without tensions, but one that is able to accept the sometimes uncomfortable nature of strategic choices. It's a team capable of putting tensions to work and knowing what to do with them. Because what makes a collective fragile is not disagreement, but the impossibility of keeping it open without rupture. This distinction is rarely made explicit, even though it conditions the quality of arbitration, as Heifetz shows in Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994) when he talks about decisions without an optimal solution, which require collective work on tensions, renunciations and responsibility.
In an ETI, this issue is particularly sensitive. The size of the organisation means that the management team is both highly exposed and highly structured: a few people are responsible for most of the decisions, compromises and tensions between the short term and the long term. Operational proximity further reinforces this exposure. Managers are in direct contact with employees, teams and customers, which sometimes blurs the line between making decisions, executing them and «catching up» with what the organisation fails to do.
This is often compounded by hybrid governance: family shareholding, investment funds, salaried management, independent directors. The legitimacies are not exactly the same, nor are the time horizons. These differences are not problematic in themselves, but they become so when there is no place for them to be worked out collectively, outside the usual meetings.
From individual to collective leadership: the role of group coaching
What makes the difference is the collective's ability to make its dilemmas explicit - growth versus risk management, subsidiary autonomy versus group control, shareholder time versus team time - to make decisions without exhausting the system, and to channel collective energy into taking decisions, even when they are unpopular. Collective leadership is a key strategic asset, directly linked to the company's ability to implement a common project that is clear and sustainable over time.
Coaching: a place to work on leadership, not a turnkey solution
Why collective coaching is no substitute for decision-making or governance
It is in situations where governance struggles to deal with certain issues that group coaching comes into its own. Not as a universal answer, and even less as a system to be deployed as a matter of principle, but as a possible working space for collective leadership issues that formal bodies deal with poorly, or too quickly.
Group coaching does not “solve” anything in itself, and requires a form of collective humility on the part of managers in the face of complex decisions. It creates a temporary framework in which a management team can work on sensitive issues with confidence and rigour, fully mobilising the group's collective intelligence resources. In particular, it makes visible mechanisms that are often implicit: unofficial decision-making circuits, silent coalitions, unspoken notions about power-sharing or real priorities.
This conception of collective coaching is in line with the systemic approach developed by Hawkins in Coaching for the Human System (2015): it is work that serves the system as a whole, and not a development mechanism focused on motivating individuals. This work is therefore less about individuals than about the way in which interactions within the collective produce trade-offs. How does disagreement circulate? At what point does it become an obstacle or, on the contrary, a lever for decision-making? How is a decision reformulated and then passed on to the teams? These are all questions that are rarely addressed explicitly, even though they determine an organisation's ability to take responsibility for its choices.
What group coaching enables you to work on
Group coaching also makes it possible to explore the grey areas of responsibility: which subjects clearly belong to no-one, which to too many people, and how this indeterminacy affects the quality of decisions within the management group. It involves working on the way in which the organisation's management regulates multiple and sometimes contradictory trade-offs: time tensions, divergent representations, conflicts of legitimacy.
The HR managers I know are often among the first to spot unresolved tensions, discrepancies between decisions and implementation, and the weak signals of managerial misalignment. But they need to be able to translate this insight into a clear order, given at the right level, and linked to the challenges of governance. This is an uncomfortable position: supporting management without replacing it, creating frameworks without being at the centre of them, contributing to collective maturity without managing it directly. This position is made all the more delicate by the fact that HR departments have to deal with political issues that go beyond their formal remit. It is precisely this positioning that makes HRDs players in collective leadership.
From this perspective, team coaching acts as a revealer. It brings to light what governance provides - or does not provide - as a framework for collective leadership. Based on what emerges, the company can choose to change its rules of the game, its decision-making bodies or its decision-making practices. There is no obligation to do so: the system opens up possibilities, but does not prescribe anything.
This demanding positioning explains why team coaching cannot be standardised. It only makes sense if it is tailored to a specific context, at a given time, and driven by a clear, assertive mandate.
Why business coaching starts at the top of the organisation
Why collective coaching with managers is not enough
In small and medium-sized businesses, there is a strong temptation to work on leadership at middle management level, in the hope that this will have a knock-on effect upwards. Experience shows that this rarely works.
The collective leadership of management is the key to clear arbitration, It's all about the coherence of messages, and the ability of managers to mobilise and motivate their teams to cope with the tensions of everyday life. Confusing these levels is tantamount to asking managers to compensate for what is not being compensated for by the company's management: unresolved disagreements, unstable priorities, grey areas of responsibility. The resulting managerial overload is often interpreted as a problem of skills, values or commitment, when in fact it is primarily a matter of complex governance.
Collective leadership: the starting point for business coaching
For an ETI, the question is not whether or not to “set up group coaching”. It is more fundamental, and sometimes more uncomfortable: to what extent does the management team agree to look at its own operations as a subject of governance in its own right, in the same way as the capital structure, the strategy or the organisation?
This is precisely where team coaching becomes an interesting lever. Not because it provides a turnkey solution to crises, but because it offers a workplace where this issue can be explored with sufficient seriousness and creativity to enable real choices to be made, if the leaders so decide.
To conclude,
Group coaching is the symptom of a wider question: where do you really work today on decisions that involve structuring trade-offs between priorities, risks and responsibilities and that have no obvious good answer? As long as this question remains without an explicit place to be addressed, companies will continue to multiply systems, adjust roles and strengthen individual skills, without addressing the heart of the matter. Posed lucidly and at the right level, it opens up a demanding area for reflection, commensurate with the challenges of governance, leadership and sustainable performance facing small and medium-sized businesses.
