Coaching Pairs
helping each other grow as leaders
More unified top teams to drive forward your strategic priorities
Hello, my name is Pete Ashby and WELCOME to Coaching Pairs!
I work with all sorts of leadership teams as a facilitator and leadership coach.
Over the past few years or so the idea of Coaching Pairs has emerged from discussions with a wide range of Chief Executives and Directors about how best to respond to a world in which leaders' sense of loyalty to colleagues across their wider leadership team is generally becoming weaker as a result of hybrid working.
More and more Executive teams are reporting that key strategic initiatives are falling foul of the gaps between different functional teams that now have less face-to-face contact with each other than ever.
If leadership teams are to turn this situation around, they have to look at what they can do to strengthen cross-functional working.
This is where Coaching Pairs come in. They involve leaders choosing a coaching partner from among peers working in functional teams that they have little to do with on a day-to-day basis.
Then every six months they link up with another member of their wider leadership team, in another function different from their own, as their coaching partner for the next six months.
In the process, Coaching Pairs help with the relationship-building that is key to transforming cross-team collaboration.
They support the wider team in moving away from a culture that is so often about "them and us" to one in which "there is only us".
This create bridges across the gaps between different functions, and helps to reconnect the wider leadership team as one team that shares responsibility for delivering the organisation's top strategic priorities.
If you would like to discuss any of the ideas on this site, please get in touch. My contact details are in the footer below.
Many thanks.
February 2025
Leaders coaching each other: an idea whose time has come
I remember reading Marshall Goldsmith's book "Taking it to the next level" some 15 years or so ago, when he said that the future of leadership coaching will all be about leaders coaching each other. Dead right, I thought!
I had only just started working as an Executive Coach myself, so whilst I liked the idea I decided not to think too hard about it, since it wouldn't do much for my future levels of income.
Even since then, whenever I've been coaching CEOs and Directors I've often thought that what I'm suggesting to them could be offered that much more effectively by a trusted colleague who has seen them in action displaying the sorts of leadership behaviours I think they've been showing, based on the stories they've been telling me.
Time and again, I've thought that if only a way could be found for all of the members of a leadership team to coach each other, this would be so much better than the CEO and one or two others maybe having their own Executive coach and everyone else having nothing.
The idea of Coaching Pairs that is written up on this website has been through lots of iterations with lots of Chief Executive and other leaders across many different sectors over the past three to four years.
It is aligned with what I regard as the best leadership thinking today about top team development. Just to give one example, if you haven't yet read it I would strongly recommend "Never lead Alone" , published by the American entrepreneur and author Keith Ferrazzi in November 2024.
The impact of his thinking on major global corporates in recent years speaks for itself, and his proposals for "ten shifts from leadership to teamship" are brilliantly expressed.
I especially love Ferrazzi's thinking around "co-elevation" , and teams developing their own processes and ways of working that involve team members "lifting each other up" as much as they possibly can.
Everything I have learnt about leadership and coaching tells me that among the very best leadership teams some sort of model of Coaching Pairs will be pretty standard practice by 2030.
In so many sectors the advent of hybrid working has turned it from a "nice-to-have" into more of an "essential-to-have", as more and more evidence comes out about the impact of fragmented teamworking on performance.
If you want to get ahead of the game and embed leader-leader coaching through Coaching Pairs, I hope this site gives you most if not all of what you need.
If I can be of any support, please let me know. So long as this idea is introduced properly, there is every reason to believe that it will become self-sustaining once the second round of Coaching Pairs is underway.
The six elements of working
together in Coaching Pairs
On the next page I set out the key steps involved in establishing Coaching Pairs, together with the different elements involved when leaders work together in Coaching Pairs for each six month cycle.
They bring leadership and coaching together as one:
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Trusting each other
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Championing each other
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Focusing on one or two ways to grow as a leader
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Inviting feedback from colleagues
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Testing out new ways of leading
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Sharing lessons learnt and then choosing a new coaching partner.