Why Coaching the Leader Alone Isn't Enough Anymore

McKinsey's State of Organisations 2026 research, drawn from 30,000 employees across 30 countries, has a finding that deserves more attention than it's getting: a third of employees are carrying an unresolved traumatic event that's still measurably depressing their adaptability, learning, and engagement.

A third of any given team walking in every day with a lower ceiling on how much change, ambiguity, or pressure they can absorb and no amount of individual leadership development fixes that, because the leader isn't the one carrying it.

Pair that with McKinsey's other headline finding: manager quality is the single biggest driver of team performance and satisfaction, yet managers are spending under a quarter of their time on people management. Put the two together and the picture is uncomfortable. You've got a workforce where a third are operating with reduced capacity, led by managers who are structurally starved of the time it takes to notice, let alone respond to, that reduced capacity. Coaching the manager to be more self-aware doesn't solve this. It just makes one person more aware of a problem they don't have the time, mandate, or system support to address.

This is exactly the gap systemic team coaching is built to close, and why it's worth treating as more than a variation on individual coaching.

Traditional executive coaching works on the leader's internal capability judgment, regulation, self-awareness. That's necessary, but it stops at the edge of the person. Systemic team coaching works the space around them: the reporting structures, the incentive design, the resourcing decisions, the cultural norms that determine whether a manager who does notice a struggling team member has any room to act on it. It treats trauma-affected performance and time-starved management not as two separate problems to coach around, but as one system producing a predictable output and it intervenes at the level where that output is actually decided.

Practically, that looks like naming the manager's time allocation as a system design problem rather than a personal discipline issue redistributing administrative load so people-time is structurally protected, not just encouraged. It looks like building trauma-informed awareness into how a team sets norms and gives feedback, so a manager isn't relying on individual sensitivity to catch what a third of the room is silently carrying. And it looks like making these things visible to the wider stakeholder system the leaders above the team who set the incentives and headcount that determine whether "spend more time on people" is even possible.

That's the real case for systemic coaching here: it doesn't ask a manager to somehow become more perceptive and more present with less time. It asks the organisation to change the conditions that made those two things collide in the first place. Individual coaching can make a leader more capable of noticing the third of the room that's struggling.