When Leadership Teams Co-Create Change, Results Follow
Healthcare leadership teams don’t usually struggle because people aren’t trying.
They struggle because smart, committed leaders are often working in silos. Priorities compete. Communication gets fragmented. Change keeps coming. And even strong teams can start to feel like they’re pulling in different directions.
That was the reality for one acute care hospital leadership team before an eight-month co-coaching engagement helped them reset how they worked together. Instead of a top-down plan, the work focused on alignment, trust, and shared ownership. The CEO recognized that traditional consulting wouldn’t create the realignment needed, so the team chose a co-coaching approach instead.
The engagement combined individual executive coaching, twice-monthly team coaching, a two-day off-site, live coaching during leadership meetings, and structured dyad/triad work to build trust and accountability across departments. In other words, the focus wasn’t just on strategy. It was on how leaders showed up with each other while doing the work.
And it worked.
Within six months, the team created a unified strategic focus around a shared stretch goal: Connecting Through Communication. They strengthened executive presence through intentional rounding and active listening, improved cross-department collaboration, and adopted peer-to-peer coaching as a leadership norm.
The biggest shift? Ownership.
This wasn’t buy-in. It was ownership. The team built the plan together, and that changed how they led it.
The impact was measurable, too. Team effectiveness moved from 47% of optimal performance at baseline to 85% after six months, using an evidence-based assessment.
Just as important, leaders reported stronger self-awareness, more trust and psychological safety, a clearer shared purpose, and more confidence in having difficult conversations directly. Those are the building blocks of lasting culture shift.
This case study reinforces something we see again and again: healthcare transformation doesn’t fail for lack of effort. It stalls when teams are misaligned and disconnected. But when leaders co-create the path forward, alignment grows, trust deepens, and results follow.
