Kate Nicholroy

I’m a team and executive coach working with senior leaders and leadership teams, and most of what I do sits under systemic team coaching: coaching a team as a team, in the system it actually operates in, rather than developing its members one by one and hoping the group changes.

Stuck tends to look much the same from the outside whatever’s causing it. Underneath, it’s usually either how a team works together or how the work itself is structured, and often both at once, tangled up in things like history, unclear expectations, half-made decisions, and roles that have shifted so often that nobody’s quite sure who’s deciding what. So I diagnose before I design. That means a structured team diagnostic and a confidential conversation with everyone on the team before I put a session together, so what gets designed answers the problem the team actually has rather than the one it’s easiest to run a workshop about.

The teams I work with are usually at a particular moment: a leader who’s inherited a team they didn’t build, a restructure or merger that’s left people unsure where they stand, a newly formed executive team, or a group who can feel something’s off but can’t yet name it. Nothing is on fire, but not much is moving either.

Alongside team coaching I bring in design thinking, the Thinking Environment (Nancy Kline) and Liberating Structures, and I run leadership development programmes and strategy, innovation and problem-solving workshops.

Before coaching I held director-level roles in higher education, leading innovation, change and organisational development, and I started out at Transport for London. That’s shaped what I pay attention to: the structures around a team as much as the relationships inside it.

ICF ACC, EMCC Senior Practitioner, Advanced Practitioner Diploma in Executive Coaching from the AOEC, and a professional certificate in coaching from Henley Business School. I also have a certificate in systemic team coaching from the AOEC. I work with clients UK-wide and online.