In conversation with David Kesby

David Kesby, organisational coach, AoEC faculty member and part of AoEC Switzerland, shares his perspective on developing leaders and teams within complex organisational systems. Drawing on a diverse background spanning the military, academia, corporate environments and voluntary work, he brings a distinctive systemic approach to his practice. Here, he reflects on his journey into coaching, the evolution of his work, and his original thinking on extra-dependent teams – challenging conventional assumptions about what makes teams effective. Through his work and writing, David offers fresh insights into leadership, team dynamics and the role of coaching in navigating complexity and change.

Can you please tell us more about your professional background and who or what introduced you to the wonderful world of coaching?

After I left the Army, I went on to do a Master’s degree in management and organisational learning. While the course did not focus explicitly on coaching, it was underpinned by a coaching mindset. It was constantly questioning, with critical thinking at its core. We made extensive use of action learning, which is often used within team coaching as a way of learning together. There were also some key principles, such as nobody being the expert and everyone being able to contribute.

Because of that, when I was later introduced to coaching, it felt very familiar. I had also learned about facilitation, where the art is not about knowing the answers, but about working with the process rather than the content. Those experiences meant that when it came to one-to-one coaching, it felt like a very normal thing to do.

I then worked with a consultancy that delivered leadership programmes, where one-to-one coaching was typically built in alongside things like leadership programmes. That was really where the opportunity for coaching began for me. Interestingly, my journey started from a group perspective rather than an individual one.

In the early noughties, individual leadership development became the dominant trend, which drew me more towards one-to-one coaching. Then later, in the 2010s, I returned to teams. Team coaching was on the rise and it felt much more familiar to me as a space for coaching.

I also had a formative experience while working for a large telecoms company during a period of constant downsizing, when the learning and development function was being reduced again and again. There was one colleague who was hugely popular and she gave me a copy of Coaching for Performance by Sir John Whitmore. I read it and later put it back on her desk, assuming I had borrowed it. Someone then said, “Oh, she’s left.” I realised that she had actually given everyone a copy of the book as a parting gift - it was not a loan at all.

That was around the year 2000, so it has been quite a long journey into the wonderful world of coaching.

What was your own personal coach training journey?

I realised that I needed development as a coach while working in a consultancy, so I volunteered to find a good coaching provider to train all of us consultants in the art of coaching. I put forward three options, with the AoEC as my top choice because it was the highest quality - but also the highest price. I also found some much cheaper options. I said at the time, if you really want to take this seriously, you would go with AoEC. I already suspected they would not want to invest that much, and in fact they decided they were not really interested in using the budget.

They ended up buying a programme and then telling me to design and run it. So, I found myself co-designing and delivering a coaching programme that I was actually desperate to learn from, which made absolutely no sense. I gained a qualification from that, but it did not really mean anything to me because it did not develop me in the way I needed.

When I left that organisation, within a year or so I had signed up for the AoEC’s Practitioner Diploma in Executive Coaching. It was by far the best coaching programme I could have chosen. I learned a huge amount. It was incredibly rich - not just in learning how to coach, but also in watching the faculty at work and how they practised. There was a wide variety of people on the programme, both in-house and external and that really helped me to affirm what I was doing well and to improve the areas where I was not so strong.

Soon after that, I began moving more into developing teams through coaching, understanding the difference between individual and team work. I attended the Systemic Team Coaching® Certificate in 2013. In those days it was three days in person, with John Leary-Joyce and Hilary Lines. Once again, it was a very rich environment, and I learned as much from observing the facilitators as from anything else. I actually gained two clients at the same time as the STCC and started working in team coaching straight away, building more and more from there.

Later on, I completed the Systemic Team Coaching® Diploma. More recently -over the last couple of years - I moved into supervision and completed my organisational supervision training at Ashridge. That was fascinating and really interesting, and I got a great deal from coming from a very different tradition. Ashridge starts from a different place to the AoEC and while it would have been easier to stay with the same provider and the same mindset, I found the transition both difficult and eye-opening. Many people there were very Ashridge through and through, with a shared language, shorthand and assumptions about what was already known.

Experiencing that difference helped me see more clearly what I was bringing, but also what it means to move between traditions. Ashridge comes from a very strong therapeutic tradition - much more rooted in psychoanalysis - whilst AoEC is more practical in nature. It has been really interesting to experience both angles.

You have gone onto be credentialled with the ICF at PCC level and EMCC Global at Senior Practitioner level. Why was becoming accredited important to you and what value has it brought your practice?

I think, at the time, I was becoming aware that people with less experience than me were overtaking me in terms of credentials. They were using those credentials to leverage access within just a few years of moving into coaching, and I started to feel that there was a possibility of missing out. By that point, I had been coaching for something like 17 years, so I went straight in at PCC level.

Since then, I have come to appreciate the value of accreditation much more deeply. I have taken part in local ICF circles and made a range of connections, as well as becoming involved in global interest groups and communities. Those have all been valuable, but another important aspect has been staying abreast of changes within the coaching industry.

Interestingly, the difference between the ICF and the EMCC is quite subtle, but also significant. Through Ashridge, I gained automatic membership of the EMCC, and being a member of both bodies has helped me to understand their different approaches more clearly. The ICF is a very large, global institution with a particular model and way of thinking about coaching. If you only operate in that world, it is easy to believe that this is the only legitimate way of coaching. It is not. There are other valid approaches, just as there are things the EMCC might overlook too. Spanning both organisations has really opened my eyes to those contrasts.

The reality is that coaching is not a protected profession, so anyone can legitimately call themselves a coach. There are a lot of people out there, particularly on LinkedIn, who do not really know what coaching is. I have even worked with clients who have completed significant coaching qualifications and still do not truly know how to coach.

A qualification is one thing - you demonstrate competence once and that is it. A credential is different. This is something I say often, including to people I supervise. With a credential, you are committing to maintaining a professional standard over a period of time, typically three years or more. That level of ongoing commitment is something many people are not prepared to make.

Having a credential does not stop someone from calling themselves a qualified or professional coach without one. However, when organisations are buying coaching services, there is increasing recognition of the need to differentiate between providers. It remains a very competitive marketplace, and there are people entering it with credentials, qualifications and senior executive experience, but relatively limited depth in the actual practice of coaching. Supporting the development of another human being, or a team of humans, is a very different discipline from being an executive, and accreditation helps signal a serious commitment to that practice.

In your own coaching work, who are you working with and what type of coaching services are you offering?

In my own coaching work, I do some one-to-one coaching, but the majority of my work is team coaching, alongside supervision. My primary focus is on organisations. The organisation I run is called Organisational Coaching Hub, and we specialise in coaching within organisations. It is very much a B2B model rather than B2C, which brings its own challenges, but also a lot of opportunity.

Working in that space creates more possibilities to be part of internal coaching and team coaching pools, as well as opportunities to support senior leaders working with their teams. Increasingly, I am also being approached for supervision, largely because of my team coaching credentials and my reputation within the team coaching world.

While I still do a fair amount of one-to-one work, I find myself moving more towards team coaching supervision. It is a particularly rich and challenging space, and one that really benefits from strong supervision to properly support practitioners working in it.

Drawing on your work with systemic team coaching®, what do you see as the biggest challenges teams are facing today - and how can coaches help teams become more resilient and connected?

I am going to take my own preferred route here, because this is something I have been banging the drum about for decades. At its heart, it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of teams.

Typically, people think of a team as a group of individuals who all report to the same line manager. That is both the starting point and, often, the end point. Everyone colludes with that mental model: if someone calls it a team, it must be a team. You then see a lot written about this - Harvard Business Review is a good example - trying to solve the problem of the line manager who feels responsible for everything and wants to delegate more, get individuals to think and act more, and take weight off their own shoulders.

The issue with that model is that it completely misses the collective. The power of the collective is reduced to something that simply cascades down the hierarchy, and that way of thinking is deeply entrenched in organisations across the globe. Reading Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, with its ideas about amber, orange and teal organisations, was a real eye-opener for me. It helped me see that a solution in one context is not necessarily a solution in another, because the organisational context is so different.

From a systemic team coaching perspective, what I keep coming back to is helping people recognise that not all teams work in the same way. If you want a team to exist as a living, functioning team, you need to understand the natural dynamics at play. Most people default to an inter-dependent team model, which absolutely can work, and when it works well, it is incredibly powerful for achieving shared goals. But it is not the only dynamic through which people can experience belonging, fulfilment and effectiveness.

Often, those experiences come from teams of similarity, which is where my work on extra-dependent teams comes in. In reality, all organisational systems contain a mix of these dynamics all of the time. One of the real challenges is that similarity can be hard to see from the inside, because everyone appears different. From a systemic perspective, however, people outside the team often see the team members as essentially the same. Perspective changes what you notice.

One of the hardest things for team coaches, therefore, is recognising when a group that wants to be inter-dependent actually needs to be extra-dependent, because that is its natural dynamic. We often rely on simple questions such as “What’s your first team?”, “What’s your primary team?” or “What’s your home team?” All of those are really asking which team is most important. Unsurprisingly, the ‘right’ answer is usually assumed to be the team the leader or coach is currently working with. But this kind of leading question does no justice to the complexity of organisational systems.

In systems made up of inter-dependence and extra-dependence, value is being created in many places at once. There is not really a first or second team. All teams have value. The more useful questions are: what is the value of each team, how does it contribute value elsewhere, and which team are we focusing on right now? I often find the idea of rigid prioritisation frustrating because it quickly becomes about power and hierarchy rather than systemic contribution. The key thing is to make these dynamics visible - once people can see them, they can do something with them.

That is where resilience and connection come from. Connection is not just inside the team; it is also very much outside it. Resilience, too, comes from both directions. I talk about this as ‘in-teaming’ and ‘out-teaming’. Teams need to team effectively together, but they also need to team well beyond their own boundaries. That can sound counterintuitive, but if they do not do both, the wider system starts to buckle. Disconnection appears, and some teams begin to see themselves as more important than others.

Helping teams understand and work with these dynamics is one of the most powerful ways coaches can support resilience and genuine connection in organisations today.

In your book - Extra-Dependent Teams - you challenge some common assumptions about what makes teams effective. Which misconception do you think leaders most need to unlearn today - and why?

The biggest misconception leaders need to unlearn is the belief that every team should be an inter-dependent team. Too often, leaders see a group that looks messy or dysfunctional and assume the answer is to force it into inter-dependence. I have seen this many times, and I have experienced it myself.

What often gets labelled as ‘dysfunction’ is not dysfunction at all - it is a team operating exactly as it should. Extra-dependent teams behave more individually by design, and when people view them through an inter-dependent lens, they assume something is wrong. They say things like, “It’s like herding cats.” And that is fine - but they are cats. You cannot force them to behave like a pack of dogs. Cats need to be worked with differently.

That does not mean there is less performance, collaboration or contribution. The uplift is still there, but it shows up in a different way. The difference is that the value comes less from working together and more from learning together.

Once leaders understand that distinction, it can be genuinely eye-opening. They start to see the real potential in teams they previously thought were broken, when in fact those teams were functioning exactly as they needed to within the wider system.

As a faculty member on both the Systemic Team Coaching® Certificate and the new Practitioner Diploma, what excites you most about the development of coaches coming through these programmes?

I love developing people. Working with coaches from such different backgrounds, starting from different places and working in very different organisations is something I find incredibly exciting.

A good example of this is people on the Systemic Team Coaching® Practitioner Diploma. One person might be working with a team in a factory in one part of the world, while another is working with a volunteer religious group somewhere else entirely. On the surface, those contexts can look like chalk and cheese, but the systemic and relational dynamics are very similar. That allows a team coach to support the team in the act of being a team, rather than focusing on the specific work that they do.

I find that really exciting because it moves us away from the idea that team coaches need consultancy experience or deep industry knowledge to be effective. Instead, it shows that coaches can work in any walk of life because of their expertise in understanding teams and in supporting leaders, team members and stakeholders to work better together.

Seeing that potential emerge is what excites me most - watching participants develop, have their eyes opened, find their feet, and discover their own enjoyment of the process.

What do you currently see emerging in the team coaching landscape, and how do you see this shaping the team coaching marketplace?

One of the most significant things emerging in the team coaching landscape is a growing recognition that team coaching is not the same as team development. That distinction is still evolving, but organisations, coaches, leaders, buyers and sellers are slowly starting to see it.

Team development often looks like someone coming in with expertise - running diagnostics, feeding back profiles, using exercises they know will “work”. That approach is driven by the knowledge and authority of the person in the room. Team coaching is fundamentally different. It is about using yourself as an instrument, responding to what is actually happening for the team, and supporting the team to work with its own knowledge, power and responsibility. That is a much more subtle and challenging practice, and one that takes time to master.

At the moment, there is still a mismatch between suppliers and buyers of team coaching. Coaches often understand what true team coaching is, while buyers lag behind. That gap is starting to close, but it means much of the work labelled as team coaching is still really team development. The opportunity is significant, because when you work with the team as a team, the potential impact far outweighs expert-led interventions. When you position yourself as the expert, you can only see the team as you want it to be, not as it actually is - and that makes coaching impossible.

Another key trend is the increasing professionalisation of team coaching, with more qualifications emerging. In many ways, this mirrors what happened in one-to-one coaching. That is broadly positive, but there is tension here too. Many practitioners have been doing this work for years, grounded in organisational behaviour and systems thinking, without ever calling it coaching or holding formal qualifications. At the same time, newer practitioners gain credibility through qualifications and credentials. How that balance plays out is still unfolding, much as it did in individual coaching.

I am also increasingly aware of a push towards objectivity in coaching practice. While this has value, there is a real risk of losing something essential. Coaching is inherently subjective. There is chemistry, emotion and something that sits beneath the surface that you can sense but not fully observe or measure. If we become too focused on clean, objective models, we risk overlooking what is actually happening between coach and team. We also risk privileging external observation over the client’s lived experience, which would be a mistake.

Finally, of course, there is AI. It is already reshaping the marketplace and raising profound questions. AI will dramatically increase access to support in places where human coaches are scarce, and its capabilities are advancing rapidly. The real challenge may not be whether AI replaces coaching, but whether buyers choose it instead. For emerging coaches, the bar will be clear: you will need to be at least as good as AI. For supervisors and senior practitioners, there is an urgent need to engage with this reality, otherwise they risk being unable to support the next generation effectively.

All of this makes the current moment in team coaching complex, challenging - and genuinely fascinating.

Looking back, what advice would you give yourself when you were starting out?

Don’t wait. Get on with it. I think there is something in there about confidence and about getting your voice heard. You have a voice and it is worth saying something. I think that really does sum it up: don’t wait. I still suffer from a bit of trepidation even now. So, I think the advice would be to be more confident, recognise that you have a voice, and get on with it.

What would you like your professional legacy to be?

My purpose in my organisation is simple: everyone deserves to be led well. I fundamentally believe that my coaching is not about coaching everyone; it is about ensuring that everyone deserves to be led well. The world would not need coaches if everyone were led well. If leaders were genuinely leading well, there would, of course, still be an element of coaching within leadership and being coached would remain part of that act. But if everyone could be led well, the world would be a better place. If I can make even a small contribution to more people being led well, that would be a fantastic legacy for me.

Our huge thanks to David for sharing his expertise and insights into team and executive coaching.