The HexHelix Team Coaching Supervision Model
A research-grounded calibration framework for team coaching supervision — developed by Daniela Aneva, Monica Guevara, and Inga Bielinska.
Why Team Coaching Supervision Needed Its Own Model
The established models of coaching supervision were built for a dyad: one coach, one client, one relationship held up to the light. They have served the profession well — for individual coaching. But when a supervisor and supervisee turn their attention to team coaching, they encounter a density these models were never designed to organise: multiple clients with competing interests, a commissioning sponsor who is not in the room, a co-coach whose relationship with you is itself part of the system, external vendors and diagnostic tools shaping the engagement, and an organisational context pressing on all of it at once.
The result, in much of current practice, is that team coaching supervision proceeds by improvisation — borrowing eclectically from individual-coaching frameworks and trusting the supervisor’s experience to fill the gaps. Sometimes it does. Often, the loudest part of the system captures the whole session, and the dimension where the real difficulty lives is never examined.
HexHelix was developed in direct response to this gap. It is not a checklist but a calibration framework: a structured way of tuning the supervisory conversation across the full set of dimensions that shape a team coaching engagement, while preserving the relational depth and reflexivity that supervision requires. Its six dimensions are conceived as strands in a helix — continuously revisited, interwoven, and deepened across the supervision relationship — rather than boxes to be ticked in sequence.
The Six Strands — and the Mindset That Holds Them
The Coach. The supervisee at the centre of the work — who brings a live case, theme, dilemma, or relationship from their practice. Supervision here attends to the coach’s interior: their patterns, reactions, blind spots, and resourcing. What is this engagement doing to you, and what are you bringing to it that you have not yet seen?
The Client. In team coaching, “the client” is never singular. HexHelix deliberately treats the client as multifaceted — the team, its individual members, the team leader, the commissioning sponsor, HR, and the wider organisation — and examines the interdependencies and loyalty tensions among them. Whose interests is the coaching actually serving, and who has quietly fallen out of view?
Context. The encompassing environment that shapes and defines the engagement: industry dynamics, organisational structure, policies, culture, politics, and the specific stakeholders whose gravity bends the work. Context is examined as an active force in the coaching, not background scenery.
Current Moment / State. What is alive right now — the emotions, somatic signals, and systemic constellations moving through the coach, the team, and the organisation, and how they are showing up in the supervision session itself. This strand is where parallel process becomes visible: the moment the system’s dynamic starts replaying in the room.
Co-Coaching. Team coaching is frequently delivered in pairs, yet the co-coaching relationship is almost never supervised — despite being one of the most consequential variables in the engagement. HexHelix gives it a dedicated strand: the dynamics of the partnership, the division of roles, communication and alignment, and the conflicts that arise between coaches while a team watches.
Collaborations. The external actors most models ignore entirely: assessment providers, diagnostic instruments, team-building vendors, event and retreat partners — each shaping the engagement’s data, expectations, and outcomes. HexHelix brings their role and impact into supervisory view.
Around all six runs the Supervisor’s Mindset — the outer ring of the model. It is the disciplined stance of the supervisor: holding the whole helix open rather than collapsing onto the presenting problem, choosing deliberately which strand the session needs next, and modelling the reflexivity the coach will carry back into their teams.
The Research Behind the Model
HexHelix is a published, peer-reviewed contribution to the supervision literature. The model appears in Becoming a Coaching Supervisor and Coach Mentor (Passmore, Abri von Bartheld, Aneva, Stillman & Dierolf, Libri Publishing, 2025) — the professional text on developing coaching supervisors — situating HexHelix alongside the established frameworks of the field and articulating what is genuinely distinctive about a six-dimension, helical approach to team coaching supervision.
The model is also the subject of a multi-year empirical research programme (2023–2026), now nearing completion: a qualitative study of thirty practising team coaches receiving supervision through HexHelix, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), with member checking to strengthen credibility. The study examines how coaches experience each of the six dimensions, the model’s impact on their reflexivity, confidence, ethical awareness, and restoration, and how the strands integrate in practice. A full academic paper is in preparation.
Early analysis points to a finding that captures the model’s value in two words: breadth and discipline. Breadth — coaches report seeing every angle of an engagement, the whole system rather than its loudest part. Discipline — the Supervisor’s Mindset stance helps both supervisor and coach resist the pull to collapse prematurely onto the presenting problem, reviewing the engagement deliberately rather than reactively. Breadth and discipline emerge not as two benefits but as two facets of one experience.
Working With HexHelix
HexHelix Team Coaching Supervision — individual and group supervision for team coaches, delivered through the model by its co-creator
The HexHelix Supervision Cohort — a structured group supervision experience for team coaches and co-coaching pairs, working their live cases through all six strands
Training and speaking — the model is taught within my accredited supervision and team coaching programmes, and available as masterclasses and conference sessions for supervision communities and coaching bodies
Join the research — practising team coaches interested in participating in the ongoing HexHelix research programme are welcome to get in touch
About the Authors
HexHelix was co-created by Daniela Aneva (MCC, ACTC, EMCC ESIA — Founder & CEO of MentorsPro, Co-Founder of EMCC USA, one of three leaders of the ICF Community of Practice for Coaching Supervision, and Faculty at Rice University’s Doerr Institute), with Monica Guevara and Inga Bielinska — bringing together deep practice in team coaching, coaching supervision, and organisational psychology across three continents.
HexHelix © 2023 by Daniela Aneva, Monica Guevara and Inga Bielinska · Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0)