Advanced Principled Team Coaching Certification

Develop your practice as a team coach

The Advanced Principled Team Coaching Certification is for coaches who want to develop their ability to work with teams and the wider systems in which they operate. You will explore the relationships within a team and how organizational culture, stakeholders, competing priorities, and external expectations influence its work.

Team coaching involves more than coaching several individuals together. It requires you to work with the team as a whole—recognizing patterns in how people relate, make decisions, and respond to challenges, while supporting their shared purpose and goals. This whole-team and systemic perspective is central to the program.

This program brings those elements together through a practice-oriented approach. Each model or tool is followed by team coaching application and feedback. Every participant is also matched with a team through our Coaching for a Better Society program, with opportunities to bring their experiences and questions to coaching supervision.

What you will explore

Module 1: Team Coaching Foundational Skills

This module establishes the foundations for working with a team, guided by the ICF Team Coaching Competencies and Code of Ethics. You will explore how to build trust, clarify team purpose, and establish coaching agreements when team members, leaders, and organizational stakeholders have different interests or expectations.

This includes navigating multiple relationships while maintaining confidentiality. You will also review team coaching models, explore the wider context in which a team operates, and distinguish team coaching from group coaching, facilitation, training, and consulting.

Module 2: Working with Team Dynamics

This module explores the patterns, relationships, and shared history that shape how a team works together. You will practice approaches that help teams consider different perspectives, develop resilience, and take greater responsibility for their ways of working.

Topics include stakeholder relationships and developing team charters that clarify mission, vision, and values. You will also examine your own role as the coach—recognizing bias, managing your energy and responses, and remaining present when the unexpected happens.

Module 3: Understanding Neuroscience in Working with Teams

This module explores neuroscience concepts related to stress, resistance, and self-regulation, considering how they can inform your work with teams. You will practice questioning approaches and ways to support conversations about conflict and difficult topics, while attending to both individual needs and the team’s shared purpose.

The emphasis is on applying this understanding thoughtfully: helping teams recognize their responses, build resilience, and consider more productive ways of communicating and working together.

Module 4: Facilitating Team Growth

This module focuses on helping teams turn awareness into action and sustain progress when setbacks occur. You will explore how to bring the team’s internal dialogue into the conversation, support shared reflection, and enable the team to draw on its own resourcefulness. Through practice, you will work with ways to co-design actions, establish accountability, and identify meaningful milestones and opportunities to celebrate progress. The aim is to support team autonomy, so the team takes ownership of its learning, decisions, and continued development.

Learning through application and feedback

Models and tools are introduced as resources to work with, not simply material to learn. Each introduction is followed by team coaching practice and feedback, giving you opportunities to examine what you noticed, the choices you made, and how the team responded.

You will develop your ability to select and adapt approaches while remaining attentive to the team, rather than allowing a model to determine the conversation. This repeated movement between understanding, application, and reflection supports the development of your skills and judgment.

Real-team experience through Coaching for a Better Society

Every participant is matched with a team through our Coaching for a Better Society program, working with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) to build team coaching experience while contributing to its work.

This gives you an opportunity to apply the learning in a real organizational setting, where team relationships, stakeholder expectations, and practical challenges become part of the coaching experience. You can bring cases from this work to supervision to explore questions, consider your responses, and identify what you want to develop in your practice.

Coaching supervision to deepen your practice

Working with an accredited coach supervisor, you will have space to reflect on your team coaching experiences and explore situations that can be difficult to make sense of while you are in them.

Supervision looks beyond the use of a particular tool or technique. Through reflective dialogue, you will examine your own responses, assumptions, and impact, alongside the team’s relationships and wider organizational context. This supports greater self-awareness, thoughtful professional judgment, and continued learning from your practice.

Deepening the learning between sessions

The Learning Management System (LMS) supports preparation, reflection, and further exploration between live sessions. You can revisit models and tools, engage with videos and selected research, test your understanding, and use reflective activities to make sense of your practice.

It provides a place to return to the learning as your experience develops—and to identify questions you want to explore in practice, feedback, or supervision.