Andrea Jayatilleka and Inoka Dias earn Advanced Certification in Team Coaching, strengthening capability to support teams and organisations through complexity and change

Sri Lankan leadership development and coaching company, Smart Quest Consultancy is strengthening its Team Coaching offering, bringing advanced, internationally credentialed coaching expertise to organisations seeking to improve how teams collaborate, navigate complexity and work towards shared outcomes.

The expansion follows Smart Quest Founding Director Andrea Jayatilleka and Inoka Dias, a senior leader in human resources and member of the visiting faculty of Coach Masters Academy, earning the International Coaching Federation’s Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC).

The ACTC represents an advanced professional credential specifically focused on coaching teams. Unlike individual coaching, team coaching works with the team as a collective system, examining not only individual behaviours and relationships, but also how members interact, make decisions, respond to challenges and align around a common purpose.

For organisations, this approach can provide a structured way of working with leadership and functional teams as they address increasingly complex environments, strengthen collaboration and build the capacity to adapt together.

Andrea said the learning journey had fundamentally expanded how she approaches coaching, moving beyond the individual to consider the wider system in which teams operate.

“This journey has changed the way I see teams. Team coaching asks us to resist the instinct to immediately fix one individual or one problem, and instead understand the wider system, the relationships within it and what the team is collectively trying to achieve. That perspective is particularly relevant for organisations today, where performance increasingly depends on people being able to work through complexity together.”.

Her ACTC journey included systemic team coaching studies through Renewal Associates, led by Professor Peter Hawkins and faculty, combining theory, supervision, practical application and team coaching practicums. She also said the experience reinforced an important shift in organisational development, from viewing leadership capability primarily through the performance of individual leaders to understanding the relationships and systems that shape collective performance.

Inoka similarly described the ACTC journey as an extension of her existing coaching practice and professional experience, providing a broader lens through which to understand team dynamics.

“One of the questions that stayed with me throughout this journey was, ‘What can we do together that we cannot do apart?’ That gets to the heart of team coaching. It is not simply about developing each person individually. It is about helping the team understand how it operates as a whole, have the conversations it needs to have, build trust and become more intentional about how it works towards a shared purpose,” Inoka said.

Her learning journey through Professor Peter Hawkins’ Systemic Team Coaching programme, offered by Renewal Associates, provided opportunities for deep learning. The expert guidance through theory, practical applications of tools and techniques, structured learning group exercises and supervision for how learning was applied across multiple team situations provided profound and practical experience in team development. She added that this learning was eye-opening, demonstrating that a team is defined not just by its individual members, but by its relational dynamics and the broader ecosystem in which it operates to achieve meaningful outcomes.

Through its expanded Team Coaching offering, Smart Quest will work with leadership teams and organisational teams to strengthen collective effectiveness, facilitate deeper conversations, improve alignment and help teams better understand the systems and stakeholder relationships within which they operate.

The development builds on Smart Quest’s broader leadership development and professional coaching portfolio and its association with Coach Masters Academy, extending its coaching capability from individual leaders to teams and organisational systems. The addition of ACTC-credentialed expertise represents a further step for Smart Quest in bringing internationally benchmarked professional coaching practices to organisations in Sri Lanka and other markets.