Reflections on 2025: Working With Procurement Teams

As I reflect on my work with Procurement leaders and their teams this year, one pattern has become clear: there's a significant difference between what happens in a workshop and what unfolds in team coaching. Both have their place, but understanding when you need which can be the difference between surface-level alignment and genuine transformation.

Two Different Conversations

Most Procurement teams I've worked with have been through plenty of workshops. Strategy sessions. Stakeholder mapping exercises. Influence training. They're valuable, they create shared understanding, generate ideas, and build alignment on direction.

But then there's the work that happens in between. The moments where brilliant strategies or skills meet messy reality. Where the team knows what they need to do but something keeps getting in the way of actually doing it.

This is where I've seen the difference become clear: workshops are brilliant for creating shared understanding and alignment on what needs to happen. Team coaching is where you work through why it's not happening yet, and what's really getting in the way.

Four Common Themes In Procurement Teams In 2025

1. Influence That Actually Works

In workshops, we talk about stakeholder management frameworks and communication strategies. In team coaching, we examine the moments where influence is already working well and where it breaks down - when a Procurement leader hesitates to challenge the CFO, when the team defaults to compliance language instead of strategic dialogue, when fear of conflict trumps the need for honest conversation.

In team coaching, we seek to establish where there is already team capability and lean into that strength even more. We identify the mindset that might be holding a team back and seek to reframe it into opportunity.

2. Moving Through Tension, Not Around It

Every Procurement team has tensions. Between speed and compliance. Between relationship and commercial discipline. Between what a stakeholder wants and what the business needs. Between different categories within the same Procurement team.

Workshops might identify these tensions. Team coaching creates the space to sit with them, understand what each person brings to them, and find a way forward that doesn't require anyone to be wrong.

I've watched teams discover they have far more common ground than they initially thought. The turning point often comes when they realise that beneath different perspectives on the "right" approach, they're actually aligned on what matters most. Having open and honest conversations with the support of a team coach can create a breakthrough and an agreed way forward.

3. Rebuilding Unity After Restructure

This year, nearly every Procurement team I’ve worked with had been through some form of reorganisation - merged functions, new reporting lines, people brought in from different parts of the business, roles that disappeared or changed beyond recognition.

Workshops can help clarify the new structure and align on objectives. But they don't always touch the underlying fragmentation: the loss of trust when teammates suddenly became competitors for roles, the resentment when someone "from outside" was brought in to lead, the grief for ways of working that no longer exist.

Team coaching creates room for what's often unspoken. It acknowledges that you can't simply mandate unity – a message of “One Team” isn’t enough to move the team forward - you have to rebuild the trust and live and breathe the vision of one. That takes time, honest conversation, and a willingness to address the elephants in the room.

The teams that do this work become stronger than before, because they've learnt how to work through fractures and come out the other side.

4. From Perfectionism to Excellence

This has been a powerful shift for Procurement teams.

Procurement professionals are often brilliant at compliance, analysis, and getting things right. These strengths can become constraints when they tip into perfectionism - the need to have every answer before speaking up, to eliminate all risk before moving forward, to wait for the perfect moment.

Team coaching surfaces these patterns gently. It creates permission to be excellent without being perfect. To be strategic even when you don't have complete information. To lead even when you're still learning.

The teams that have made this shift haven't become less rigorous. They've taken strides forward in becoming more influential.

So What's the Difference?

Workshop facilitation is about creating insight and alignment. It's time-bound, focused, and outcome-oriented. You leave with clarity, plans, and renewed energy.

Team coaching is about building capability and shifting dynamics. It's slower, more exploratory, and relationship-focused. You leave with different questions, deeper understanding, and new ways of working together.

Neither is better. But if your team keeps having the same conversations, hitting the same obstacles, or struggling to translate good ideas into different behaviour, you probably don't need another workshop.

You need the space to look at what's really happening - and the support to work through it together.

How Coaching For Procurement Ltd Can Help In 2026

Coaching For Procurement Ltd offers a full suite of coaching solutions designed to empower and support Procurement leaders and their teams; from Procurement team coaching and 1:1 coaching through to coaching qualifications using the unique P.R.O.C.U.R.E® coaching methodology and frameworks.

Want to unlock the full potential of your Procurement team? Let’s discuss how coaching can drive impact in your organisation: contact me today:

www.coachingforprocurement.co.uk/contact-me