Common Ground.
You can't navigate from different maps.
Structured, diagnostic-led team coaching programmes for senior leadership teams navigating a new strategy, new membership, or a broader context that's asking them to operate differently.
Leadership teams in transition
Your challenge has changed.
Change amplifies the condition of the team.
It often calls for both realignment and re-formation to be successful.
Common Ground is for leaders who lead other leaders (at divisional, functional, or organisational level) and whose situation is placing demands on the team that individual performance alone can't meet. The capable people are already in the room. The question is whether they're operating as a team, or as a coordination mechanism held together by a shared reporting line.
That distinction matters most when the ground is shifting.
New direction. Existing team.
The strategy has changed, the structure has changed, or the demands of the context have changed; but the team is still operating from the patterns and assumptions that suited the previous situation.
Individual members may be clear on what's expected of them. What's less clear is what this moment requires of them collectively: what needs to shift in how they work together, where genuine joint accountability begins, and what they can only do if they do it as a team.
New composition. Unsettled ground.
The team has changed (a new leader, new members, or both). The formal structure is in place. What hasn't yet formed is the collective identity: a shared sense of what this group is jointly accountable for delivering.
Strategic alignment on paper rarely translates to coordinated action in practice. That gap isn't a failure of intent. It's the natural result of individuals who haven't yet built a shared picture of the terrain they're navigating together.
The challenge
The natural ceiling of individual intervention.
Individual coaching works. Leadership programmes work. But they work on individuals; and individuals go back into teams. When a leader grows, they carry that growth back into a system that hasn't changed around them. The team continues to operate from the same patterns, the same unexamined assumptions, the same collective habits.
The leader may have moved. The team hasn't. Moving faster doesn't help if you're moving alone.
The constraint is rarely individual capability.
Most leadership teams aren't real teams. They are a meeting: people who report to the same person, come together regularly, represent their function, and leave to lead their part. That works well enough; until the strategy requires something that no single function can deliver on its own.
At that point, the team needs to operate differently. Not as a collection of individual leaders, but as a group with genuine joint accountability for something none of them owns alone. That shift (from functional representative to co-owner of something greater) is one of the hardest transitions in senior leadership. It requires more than commitment. It requires a shared picture of where the team actually is.
The approach
The instruments surface the picture. The team, in its own right, is the client.
Common Ground works with both the data and the people in the room. The diagnostics surface what we work with; the sessions work with what they mean.
The same diagnostic instruments and framework run across all three tiers. What changes is the depth and duration of the engagement. The rigour doesn't.
OrgBarometer™ Composite
Completed by every team member and the leader. Measures conditions across the four responsibilities: Define, Align, Engage, Enable. The composite result gives the team a shared read of its own terrain, often for the first time. Individual results remain confidential. The picture belongs to everyone.
Autopilot™
Surfaces the habitual patterns in how each team member responds under pressure. In a composite view, it shows how those individual patterns combine; and where the collective defaults of the team may be working against its intent.
5Ps & the Practice
The 5Ps of Leadership Authority (Purpose, People, Place, Presence, Pace) provide a shared language for the work. Sessions run through the EADA practice (Explore, Analyse, Decide, Act) grounded in the team's real strategic challenges, not exercises.
Tiers & Investment
Three levels of depth.
One consistent approach.
The diagnostics and framework are the same at every tier. What varies is the duration, the intensity of the coaching process, and the depth of the individual work alongside it.
All pricing is based on a standard team of six plus the leader (seven people in total). Additional team members can be accommodated; 1-1 coaching sessions are priced per person.
Foundation
Common View
6 weeks
- OrgBarometer™ completed by every team member and leader
- Leader briefing before the workshop
- 3-hour team workshop on the shared view of the organisational conditions required to implement strategy in your context
- Confidential 1-1 coaching session for each team member
- Follow-up session with the leader
A complete diagnostic and shared baseline. The right starting point for a team at the beginning of a transition, or before deciding on the depth of engagement required.
EnquireCore
Common Practice
12 weeks
- Everything in Common View
- Autopilot™ diagnostic for all team members
- Individual 1-1 coaching on Autopilot patterns and the 5Ps
- Second 3-hour team workshop on collective patterns and ways of working
- Additional coaching session with the leader after the second workshop
The diagnostic work plus the first practice of operating differently. For teams that need to move from shared understanding into shared ways of working.
EnquireGold
Common Implementation
24 weeks
- Everything in Common Practice
- Three 90-minute facilitated team coaching sessions over 12 weeks, spaced 6 weeks apart
- Individual coaching session for each member after sessions 1 and 2
- Final OrgBarometer™ re-run to track and evidence movement
The full programme. For teams navigating a significant or sustained transition where progress needs to be embedded and evidenced over time.
EnquireFree diagnostic
Want a clear view of your team transition?
Team Strategic Capacity Scorecard: free, 10 minutes
Take the short scorecard to get a clear picture of the conditions your team is currently operating in across the four responsibilities (Define, Align, Engage, Enable) and what that means for your ability to deliver.
At the end you'll have a profile of your team's current strategic capacity, with a personalised interpretation and a clear indication of where the work needs to begin.
Scorecard launching shortly.
You'll get
- A clear view of your team's current strategic capacity
- A profile across Define, Align, Engage, Enable
- An indication of where the collective constraints are
- A personalised interpretation connecting the picture
10 minutes. Free. No sign-up required.
The practitioner
Paula Broadbent
Paula Broadbent is an organisational consultant and coach with over 25 years working at the intersection of leadership, strategy and organisations in transition. She works with leaders of leaders (at divisional, functional and organisational level) and with the teams they lead.
She brings the same rigour to team coaching as to individual coaching: shared diagnosis before prescription, and honesty about what's actually happening before any conversation about what to do about it.
The diagnostics she uses (OrgBarometer™, Autopilot™, the 5Ps) are instruments she has developed and refined through this work. They exist because the right shared map makes the difference between a team that moves together and one that merely meets.
Paula also serves as Programme Director for General Management at Cranfield School of Management, and works with leadership teams across sectors both in person and remotely.
You ask, we answer
Questions worth asking.
How do I get my leadership team genuinely aligned, not just agreeable in the room and pulling in different directions the moment the meeting ends?
Most leadership teams are busy. What's harder to see from inside is whether they're doing the work that only they, collectively, can do: the strategic decisions that cross functions, the trade-offs no single leader can make alone, the direction that has to be set and held at the top before anyone else can act on it. If the team doesn't do that work, no one else will. It simply won't happen.
The pull in the other direction is strong. Each leader has a function to run, a team to lead, results to deliver. That work is visible, measurable, and immediate. The collective work is none of those things. Without the right conditions, even committed, capable leaders gravitate back to what they own individually; and the team becomes a coordination mechanism rather than a force in its own right.
Getting a team off that default requires more than a shared plan or a good away-day. It requires a clear, honest read of what the team is actually operating in: where the conditions support collective work and where they don't. Once the team can see that picture together, the conversations that weren't happening tend to start. That's what Common Ground is designed to create.
Common View (six weeks) gives you a complete shared diagnostic and a clear baseline. It's the right place to start if you're at the beginning of a transition, or if you want to understand the picture before committing to a longer programme. Common Practice and Common Implementation build on that foundation: the right depth depends on what the situation is asking of the team and how much time you have to work with it. If you're unsure, start the conversation and we'll work it out together.
Yes. If you begin with Common View and want to continue, the investment carries forward into the next tier.
The diagnostics take around 20 minutes each. Team workshops are three hours. Individual coaching sessions are typically 90 minutes. In the Foundation tier, that's the full commitment for team members. Deeper tiers involve additional sessions, spread across a longer programme and scheduled around existing commitments.
That's the right question to ask, and the honest answer is: it depends on why it didn't land. If the previous work was disconnected from the real strategic context, or relied on exercises rather than the team's actual challenges, Common Ground is built differently. The diagnostics surface what the team is genuinely dealing with before any facilitation begins. The team, in its own right, is the client; not a collection of individuals who happen to be in the same room. If you want to talk through what happened previously, that's a useful conversation to have before committing to anything here.
If the real issue is one person's behaviour and its effect on the team dynamic, that's not a team coaching problem; it's a leadership one. The right starting point is individual coaching with the leader (Land Well exists for exactly that). Common Ground works when the leader is genuinely open to the collective dynamic being part of the picture, and when the work required is something none of them can deliver by operating as individuals. If the leader believes the problem is everyone else, the diagnostic will surface that; the programme can't do the work for them.
Some scepticism is normal and doesn't prevent the work. What matters is whether the team leader is genuinely committed and whether the resistant members are willing to engage, even if unconvinced at the start. The diagnostics often do useful work here: seeing a shared picture of the conditions tends to open conversations that individual opinions can't. If you're concerned about a specific dynamic, it's worth raising in the discovery call.
Over 25 years I've worked with leadership teams across financial services, construction, pharma, mutuals, hospitality and more. There's a reasonable chance I've worked with a team navigating something close to your situation, and where that experience is relevant, I'll bring it. At the same time, Common Ground isn't off-the-shelf advice, and it isn't a solution that worked somewhere else being shoehorned into your context. Everything is grounded in your diagnostic data and worked through with your team. The picture we're working from is yours; the insight that shifts things comes from within the room.
When a leadership team is operating from different maps at the moment a strategy needs collective delivery, the cost shows up quickly: stalled decisions, failed execution, exhausted leaders, initiatives that generate cynicism rather than momentum. Against that, the programme fee is modest. What you're investing in is professional team coaching with a structured diagnostic framework, grounded in your specific data and worked through with your team. Not a workshop, not an away-day, not advice that worked somewhere else. The question worth asking isn't whether the fee is significant; it's what the current misalignment is already costing you, and what a failed transition would cost on top.
At the Gold tier, the OrgBarometer is re-run at the end of the programme, giving you a direct comparison to the baseline. That's useful evidence where you need to demonstrate progress to a board or sponsor.
The real measure tends to be more visible than that. You notice it in the conversations the team starts having: the ones that weren't happening before, the ones that used to stay polite or stall. You see it in decisions that get made and stick, in frustrations that had been running for months suddenly breaking through, in the leader's impact landing differently. When the work is doing what it should, the team isn't waiting for the next session to move; they're moving between them. We'll agree at the start what that looks like in your specific context, so the measure is yours, not a generic one.
A clear shared picture of where the team started and where it has moved to, and a shared language for continuing the work without external facilitation. The intention is to build capacity that stays in the room, not dependency on the programme.
Often, the team has what it needs. It just hasn't focused its attention.
Get in touch
Let's find out if this will work for you.
A short conversation to understand your context, your team, and what this moment is asking of you collectively. No obligation.