INSPIR’ · INTERVIEW WITH ELEANOR BAKER
What if we needed to relearn how to work as a team?
For Eleanor Baker, a company’s ability to adapt also depends on how its leaders and teams question their habits, explore different perspectives and have the conversations they need to act together.
Interview by Matthieu Binder · Inspir’, MEDEF Paris · Preview: publication planned for November 2026
English translation of the original French interview, provided on this website. This is not an English edition published by Inspir’. Read the French original.
Could you describe your approach to corporate coaching?
I am British, have lived and worked in France for many years, and spent fifteen years managing in international environments. That taught me to change the lens through which I see things: a way of looking at a problem that seems obvious to us is never the whole picture.
That is why I look at the whole system, rather than just the management committee. Depending on the issue, it may also be necessary to support particular teams or levels of management. Blockages often arise less within teams than between them: a strategy that becomes distorted as it moves down the organisation, information from the frontline that struggles to reach the top, or different levels each waiting for the other to act.
Where useful, I also work with coaches from different cultures and countries, to bring perspectives into dialogue and make diversity a resource. Our aim is not to provide “the” answer, but to help the organisation become better at observing, questioning, deciding and adapting collectively.
Does working well together take courage? What makes that possible?
Courage in business is often very everyday: daring to express disagreement, challenge a decision, say you do not know, ask for help or raise a subject everyone would rather avoid. My role is not to seek consensus, but to help the team have the conversations the business really needs in order to move forward.
During sessions, teams experiment with different ways of listening, questioning, working through disagreements and deciding together. In doing so, they gain confidence, but also creativity. A high-performing team is not a team without tensions. It is a team that knows what to do with them.
When is it time to change the rules of the game?
At the Rencontre des entrepreneurs de France, several entrepreneurs shared this challenge with me: how can we continue to flourish in an uncertain economic climate?
The temptation is to look outwards and act quickly: find customers, rethink the offering or reorganise. But we also need to look inwards. How can we change our behaviour and the way we work together? How can we release our creativity to meet today’s needs and anticipate tomorrow’s? How can we engage everyone in this collective capacity to learn and adapt?
When we are part of a system, we no longer always see the rules we have helped to establish. Coaching helps us increase our capacity to observe, adjust our behaviour and, in doing so, strengthen collective resilience.
How can you tell whether a team is really collaborating?
The signs are often very ordinary: the same issues keep coming back, decisions are delayed, some voices dominate while others fade away, and the real conversations sometimes take place after the meeting rather than around the table.
The work is then about bringing these perceptions to the surface and enabling the team to experiment with different ways of talking, deciding and working through disagreements. As the team grows in confidence, it also becomes more autonomous.
One question often sums up the challenge: “What conversations should you be having together that you are not having today?” Collective courage means precisely this: bringing into the room the conversations that are taking place outside it.