More than twenty years ago, some of the pioneers of Australian alliancing recognised something profound.
If project outcomes depended on collaboration, trust, alignment, collective accountability and high-performance leadership, then technical excellence alone would never be enough.
The emerging alliance model required a new role. A role focused not on engineering, project controls or contract administration, but on helping teams function as teams.
In Australia and New Zealand, organisations such as PCI, Alchimie and later AECOM played a significant role in defining and operationalising what became known as the Alliance Coach or Team Coach. Their work helped shape many of the alliance practices that are now considered foundational to collaborative contracting.
At the time, this was leading edge.
Today, however, there is a growing disconnect.
The harsh reality is that the discipline of Team Coaching has evolved significantly. The alliance industry has not always evolved with it.
The Profession Grew Up
When alliance coaching first emerged, there was little formal structure around the practice.
Since then, Team Coaching has become a recognised professional discipline with established ethical frameworks, competency models and accreditation pathways.
Globally, the two leading professional bodies are the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), both of which now provide dedicated competency frameworks, ethical guidelines and accreditation pathways specifically for team coaches.
Importantly, both organisations recognise that team coaching is not simply a scaled-up version of individual coaching.
It is its own discipline.
It requires specialised capabilities that sit beyond traditional coaching qualifications, facilitation skills, leadership experience or psychology degrees.
Professional team coaches are expected to understand group dynamics, systems thinking, team development, behavioural patterns, stakeholder systems, power dynamics, conflict, psychological safety, ethical practice and the ability to intervene appropriately at individual, team and organisational levels.
That is a specialist capability.
Not a by-product of another profession.
What Team Coaching Actually Is
One of the challenges within the infrastructure sector is that many different activities have become grouped under the banner of team coaching.
They are not the same thing.
Facilitation is not team coaching.
Team building is not team coaching.
Advisory services are not team coaching.
Communications support is not team coaching.
A facilitator helps a group have a conversation.
An advisor provides expertise and recommendations.
A team building practitioner creates shared experiences and strengthens relationships.
A team coach works with the team as a living system.
The objective is not simply to improve a workshop, a meeting or a relationship.
The objective is to improve the team's capacity to perform over time.
Professional team coaching focuses on how a team learns, adapts, collaborates, manages conflict, distributes leadership, makes decisions, holds accountability and delivers outcomes together.
In the alliance environment, this often means working simultaneously with:
- the Alliance Leadership Team
- the Alliance Management Team
- project leadership cohorts
- organisational interfaces
- stakeholder systems
- cultural and behavioural dynamics
The work is systemic rather than event-based.
The intervention is developmental rather than transactional.
Yet, this is not typically how the role is procured by project teams.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
The original alliance model was built on the understanding that project outcomes are heavily influenced by human systems.
That understanding remains just as relevant today.
In fact, it is arguably more relevant.
Alliance and collaborative contracting models now sit within increasingly complex stakeholder environments involving government, delivery partners, community interests, regulators and operators.
Projects are expected to demonstrate not only technical excellence but also social licence, innovation, leadership and collaborative behaviours.
The stakes are higher.
The environments are more complex.
The need for capable team coaching has increased.
Not decreased.
The Risk Nobody Talks About
Most procurement processes rigorously assess technical qualifications.
Engineers are expected to demonstrate engineering competence.
Lawyers must demonstrate legal competence.
Environmental specialists must demonstrate environmental competence.
Yet when it comes to the team coach role, standards are often inconsistent.
The industry regularly accepts individuals into team coaching roles based primarily on:
- engineering backgrounds
- communications backgrounds
- project management backgrounds
- facilitation experience
- previous alliance involvement or leadership
These experiences can be valuable.
But they are not team coaching qualifications.
Experience participating in a team does not automatically create competence in coaching teams.
The distinction is important.
Because team coaching interventions influence leadership behaviour, conflict management, psychological safety, trust, decision-making quality, accountability and culture.
Done well, the impact can be profound.
Done poorly, the impact can be equally significant.
At best, the investment is diluted.
At worst, the intervention creates unintended consequences that reduce performance.
A Government Perspective
For government owners, this should be considered a capability and risk management issue.
Public sector organisations would not appoint someone to design a bridge simply because they had spent years working around bridges.
Nor would they appoint an unqualified psychologist to deliver specialist clinical interventions.
The same logic should apply here.
Team coaching is not merely a project support function.
It is a specialist professional discipline with recognised competencies, standards and ethical requirements.
Government agencies should therefore ask the same questions of team coaches that they ask of other specialist providers:
- What formal qualifications do they hold?
- What recognised accreditation do they maintain?
- What ethical framework governs their practice?
- What supervision and professional development requirements apply?
- How do they demonstrate competence in team coaching specifically?
These are not unreasonable questions.
They are basic governance questions.
The Procurement Trap
There is a second challenge that receives far less attention.
Even when organisations engage highly capable team coaches, they often procure and manage the role in ways that significantly reduce its potential value.
In many projects, team coaching is commissioned as a series of pre-defined activities rather than as a professional capability.
Work is often scoped as:
- facilitate the kickoff workshop
- develop a team charter
- administer behavioural surveys
- run quarterly team sessions
- provide leadership workshops
- support periodic reviews
On paper, this appears reasonable.
In practice, it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of team coaching.
A professional team coach is not primarily engaged to deliver a pre-defined sequence of events.
They are engaged to observe, diagnose and intervene in the dynamics of a complex human system.
The moments that create the greatest value are rarely visible at the start of a project and rarely occur according to a workshop schedule.
They emerge when trust breaks down between alliance partners.
They emerge when key leaders enter conflict avoidance.
They emerge when accountability weakens.
They emerge when stakeholder pressure creates defensive behaviours.
They emerge when a project team becomes trapped by patterns it can no longer see for itself.
By definition, these moments are unpredictable.
Yet many procurement models only allow team coaches to deliver the activities specified months earlier in the project plan. Coaches are typically being asked to pull a team out of their work, and into a workshop.
The coach becomes a provider of workshops rather than a steward of team performance.
Coaching Requires Both Competence and Authority
Effective team coaching requires two conditions.
The first is capability.
The second is authority.
Even the most qualified team coach cannot create meaningful impact if they are only engaged to facilitate predetermined events and have no mandate to identify and respond to emerging opportunities and risks.
The original alliance philosophy recognised that human dynamics sit at the centre of project performance. Early alliance coaches were often positioned close to leadership teams and were trusted to challenge assumptions, surface difficult conversations and intervene when team effectiveness was compromised. (Hutchinson and Gallagher, 2003; Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance, 2006)
Increasingly, however, coaching roles are being contracted as service packages rather than strategic capabilities.
The result is that coaches are often held accountable for team outcomes while having little authority to influence the moments that matter most.
If We Want Different Outcomes, We Need a Different Model
If government and industry genuinely view collaboration as a critical success factor, team coaching cannot be treated as a transactional support service.
It should be procured and governed in the same way we engage other specialist professional expertise.
Not by prescribing every activity in advance.
But by engaging qualified practitioners, establishing clear outcomes and providing appropriate authority to diagnose, prioritise and respond to the risks and opportunities that emerge throughout the life of the project.
The greatest value of a team coach is rarely found in the workshop that was planned.
It is found in the intervention that nobody knew was needed until the moment arrived.
A Call to Action
The alliance industry has always been willing to innovate.
It pioneered new ways of contracting, leading and delivering complex infrastructure.
Perhaps it is time to apply that same thinking to the team coach role itself.
If we genuinely believe teams are critical to performance, then the people entrusted with coaching those teams should meet recognised professional standards.
Not because a qualification guarantees excellence.
But because professional disciplines exist for a reason.
They establish minimum standards.
They create ethical accountability.
They promote continual development.
And they reduce risk.
Twenty years ago, the alliance industry helped create the role of the Team Coach.
Today, it has an opportunity to help mature it.
The question is not whether team coaching matters.
The question is whether we are setting the same standards for the people coaching our teams as we do for the people designing our assets.
Because if collaboration is genuinely critical to project success, then coaching capability is no longer a nice-to-have.
It is a professional capability that should be required to live up to its own professional standards.
Sources: Foundational alliance concepts and the evolution of alliance practice are discussed in Alchimie Project Alliances An Overview and Complete Project Alliance Guide. These documents describe the development of alliance principles, high-performance team concepts, alliance leadership structures, and the importance of the human and behavioural dimensions in alliance delivery.
- Hutchinson, A. and Gallagher, J. (2003) Project Alliances: An Overview. Alchimie Pty Ltd and Phillips Fox Lawyers, Melbourne.
- Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance (2006) Project Alliancing Practitioners' Guide. State of Victoria, Melbourne.