Jungian Team Coaching. A Different Way to Work with Hidden Team Dynamics
Photo © Yury Li-Toroptsov
I am currently a training candidate at the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich, and over time this training has changed how I work with teams, not by adding a new “method”, but by shifting what I pay attention to in the room, especially in situations where things feel blocked without a clear reason.
At the beginning, I worked in a fairly classic way, focusing on communication, roles, decision making, which already brings results, but I kept noticing a gap between what teams said their problem was and what was actually happening between them, as if something essential remained just out of reach.
The Jungian perspective helped me take that gap seriously. Instead of taking the problem at face value, I began to ask a different question, what is this situation expressing for the team, beyond its surface form, and this is where images became useful, not as a creative exercise, but as a way to access something less controlled and often more accurate.
In one leadership team I worked with, the issue was described as poor communication, long meetings, slow decisions, nothing unusual, and instead of working directly on processes, I asked each person to bring an image representing their experience of the team. What emerged was simple but telling, a large road, a closed door, a group walking in different directions.
By staying with these images, describing them without rushing to interpret, the team began to see something they had not named before, they were avoiding disagreement, maintaining a surface alignment while holding different positions internally. From that moment, the problem shifted. It was no longer about communication. It was about the absence of necessary tension.
And once this was visible, the work became more direct, creating space for disagreement, redefining what alignment meant, and meetings started to move faster, not because people spoke more, but because they spoke more honestly.
There is an important point here.
This way of working can feel unsettling, especially for managers, because it goes closer to questions of identity, power, and fear, things that are usually kept outside the business conversation, and this is why the coaching container matters.
By container, I mean the conditions that make this work safe enough to happen without putting people in difficulty.
In practice, it relies on:
clear boundaries between coaching and therapy
strict confidentiality
a pace that respects the team
the option for participants to step back
Without this, going deeper creates resistance instead of insight. With a secure container in place, teams often move faster than expected, because they stop working on symptoms and start addressing what drives them.
This is where the Jungian lens becomes highly relevant for business. It improves decision making in uncertain contexts, it reduces hidden resistance, and it strengthens alignment, not by forcing agreement, but by making differences visible and workable.
It is not needed everywhere. If the issue is technical, stay technical. But when a team is stuck, when the same problems return despite clear plans and competent people, then something else is at play, and ignoring it costs time, energy, and often performance.
More companies are beginning to recognize this, even if they do not always name it this way. The question is not whether these dynamics exist. They do. The question is whether you choose to work with them or continue working around them.
