The “Invisible Space”: Why Teams Fail Despite Great Leaders
Research shows that executive coaching can deliver an ROI of 6-8x the investment. While executive coaching focuses on individual empowerment, it often ignores the “invisible space” – the collective dynamics, interdependencies, and systemic “wicked problems” that exist between people. Even the most enlightened leader cannot succeed if the team lacks a culture of mutual accountability or psychological safety.
Studies show that while executive training increases productivity by 22%, adding coaching to the team’s daily workflow boosts that increase in productivity to a staggering 88%.
Integrated coaching (executive coaching together with team coaching) ensures that the leader’s personal growth is mirrored by a shift in team norms, creating a sustainable environment for high performance.
Data-Driven Transformation: The Power of Team-Referent Instruments
You cannot coach what you cannot measure. To bridge the gap between individual leadership and collective output, coaches use “team-referent instruments.” These tools provide a “CT scan” of the team’s health, moving the conversation from subjective opinions to objective data. Further, using a team-referent instrument jump-starts team coaching and provides a road map for what the team should focus on first.
While the market offers various tools, one instrument stands out for those seeking deep, transformational change: the Extraordinary Teams Inventory (ETI 2.0).
Why the ETI 2.0 Is the Gold Standard for Team Coaching
Developed by Dr. Kevin Coray, Kathleen Ryan, and Geoffrey Bellman, the ETI 2.0 (published by HRDQ in 2021) is uniquely designed for the modern workplace. Unlike instruments that focus solely on fixing “what is broken,” the ETI takes an appreciative, growth-oriented approach.
1. It Measures What Truly Matters
The ETI 2.0 evaluates teams across 10 Practices, providing a 360-degree view of both performance and the “human” element:
- Outstanding Results: Ensuring the team has clear goals and hits or exceeds targets.
- Shared Leadership: Team members take mutual responsibility for helping the team to be successful.
- Embracing Difference: Vital for innovation and inclusion in 2025’s diverse workforce. Further, Embracing Difference measures Psychological Safety. Gallup data shows that only 30% of workers feel their opinions count, which correlates with increased stress and burnout and reduced productivity.
- Genuine Curiosity: Members are genuinely curious about each other as human beings. There is an openness to hearing what each person thinks and feels. People pay attention to each other’s well-being.
- Personal Transformation: This practice is certainly unique to the ETI. It explicitly measures how the team experience helps members grow as individuals, directly complementing executive coaching goals.
- Compelling Purpose: An inspiring and shared purpose defines the reason the team comes together. Gallup data shows 50% higher employee engagement, much lower burnout, and turnover.
- Strong Relationships: Trust, respect, collegiality, and friendships grow among team members. Gallup data shows 7 times better engagement, productivity, and well-being.
- Full Engagement: Members enthusiastically and fully participate in the team’s work. Gallup data shows that only 31% of employees are fully engaged. In extraordinary teams, virtually every team member is fully engaged.
- Great Meetings: Members count on their meetings being a good use of their time, where real work gets done, and the team advances toward its goals. No one person dominates the meetings, and disagreements are handled in a generative manner, seen as a strength. Often, in meetings, team member behaviors affect psychological safety. In extraordinary teams, such behaviors enhance psychological safety, rather than threatening it.
- Adaptive Structure: The structure the team adopts to deliver results is flexible, adaptive, just-enough, and just-in-time. This adaptability facilitates higher performance and innovation.
2. Actionable, Not Just Diagnostic
The ETI doesn’t just provide a score; it provides a roadmap. Because the assessment is built on 60 specific behavioral items, it identifies exactly where a team needs to pivot. Whether it is improving “Great Meetings” or refining “Embracing Difference” behaviors to improve psychological safety, the data leads directly to remarkable team discussions and an action plan.
The team discussion is most often facilitated by the team coach. The ETI also enables this discussion by providing an Insights and Action Guide that team members use to guide critical thinking about the ETI results prior to the all-team debriefing. The ETI itself includes coaching questions to dig deeper into the discussion of each of the ten practices. Finally, the ETI includes Suggestions for Improvement for each practice.
3. High ROI and Accessibility
The ETI 2.0 provides enterprise-level insights at a fraction of the cost of other systemic diagnostics. For organizations looking to scale coaching across multiple departments, it offers the most robust data-to-dollar ratio on the market.
As a coach, facilitator, or consultant, you can dramatically increase your own income and practice by using the ETI with an executive client’s team and then turning that into multiple team engagements to teach and coach the team about the practices they have chosen to improve. Then, duplicating that with multiple teams in your client’s organization can create more than 100% ROI.
Learn more about how one Certified ETI Practitioner accomplished that and more in the upcoming HRDQ webinar in which Sally Stamp interviews Maggie Larkin about her experience with one client and how that grew.
The Bottom Line
The days of “siloed” leadership development are over. To thrive in a complex, fast-paced economy, organizations must treat the team as a single, living entity. By integrating executive coaching with team coaching – and powering that journey with the Extraordinary Teams Inventory – leaders can ensure that their personal evolution translates into a collective victory.
