Meet our expert: Monique Kavelaars, Director, Assessments & Team Coaching

Monique Kavelaars brings more than 15 years of experience helping high-performing teams thrive — first in elite sport and now in corporate environments. An Olympian and Canadian National Team épée fencer, she competed at the Olympic Games, World Championships, and Pan Am Games. As Third Factor’s Director of Assessments and Team Coaching, Monique designs and facilitates leadership programs and workshops for global organizations, bringing an energizing, practical approach that helps teams build trust, communicate, and align around shared goals.

When I first moved to Sweden after four years in Paris, I went from feeling fluent and capable to being a complete beginner again. There I was, sitting in a classroom for foreigners learning Swedish, fumbling through sentences a five-year-old could manage.

The room was full of strangers. We had nothing in common. A dentist. Engineers. People who’d come for love, for work or for school. A few had no choice but to leave home. But inside that room, we were all beginners.

That shared confusion did something: we became friends. A man from Ghana and I bonded over feeling completely lost. And because of that shared experience, it got easier for us to speak Swedish badly out loud. We took more risks with the language because neither of us feared looking foolish in front of the other.

When I first walked into that classroom, I didn’t know anyone’s story. What I saw was a room of adults mangling their introductions. What was actually there were decades of careers, entire identities – all set aside to start over for reasons I’d never have guessed sitting next to them.

That’s the part of coaching nobody tells you about. At work, what you see in others is only a small slice of their day. What’s actually shaping it is usually invisible.

So how do you make space for all of that without making it awkward or overstepping? The answer isn’t to automatically know everyone’s full story. It’s to coach as if there’s always more beneath the surface that you can’t see. Here’s how to get started:

01. Get Curious About the Iceberg

You only ever see the tip. Don’t fill in the rest with guesses.

I saw this most clearly when I was fencing at the World Cup. I was competing alongside a teammate from Algeria.

It was Ramadan. She was fasting. That meant she had to be up before dawn to eat enough to carry her through the day – which could stretch to 12 hours if her results were good enough to keep her in the competition longer.

To most of the room, she just looked a little quieter than usual and slower to warm up. A few competitors assumed she was having an off day. Our coach knew better, and so did the rest of us on her team. So we adjusted around her without making it a production: quieter check-ins, no unnecessary chatter before her matches, and extra time built into her breaks.

Nobody outside our circle saw any of that. They just saw the tip of it, a fencer who seemed a little off. The rest – the fasting, the fatigue, the discipline it took to compete at that level while managing both – was entirely beneath the surface.

This shows up in offices, too. If someone’s gone quieter lately, replies slower, seems distracted, don’t start with what you think is going on. (“You’re upset you didn’t get to lead the project.”)

Ask something genuinely open instead: “I’ve noticed you’re a bit quieter lately. How are things landing for you this week?” You won’t get the full picture on the first question. But if you stay curious, you’ll be able to keep the conversation going until you actually start to understand what’s happening.

02. Build Real Psychological Safety

Safety isn’t niceness. It isn’t a shield from accountability. It’s a pattern people can predict.

The Swedish classroom built safety in the way that any team environment can. People admitted what they didn’t know without it costing them. (None of us knew the language, after all.) That’s what Harvard leadership professor Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety. It’s the belief that speaking up won’t get you punished or humiliated.

Safety isn’t announced; it’s demonstrated. Naming your own mistake plainly (“I misjudged the timeline on the client deliverable last week. I should have flagged it two days earlier.”) teaches people more than any values deck. They calibrate their own willingness to take risks based on what leaders do, not what’s written on a wall.

03. Balance Support and Accountability

Curiosity isn’t softness. It’s finding out what someone needs and still holding the line.

Safety and standards aren’t a trade-off. They work as a pair. Without both, you get either comfort or anxiety, not real performance.

When someone’s struggling to hit a deadline, keep the standard and the support as two separate moves. First, state the standard plainly: “This needs to ship Friday.” Then ask a separate question: “What would help you get there? More time, fewer meetings or something else?” Keeping those distinct means the bar doesn’t move; the support around it does. That’s what stops flexibility from quietly becoming a lowered standard.

Nobody lowered the bar for my teammate at that World Cup. The standard never changed. What changed was the support around her, which allowed her to meet the standard.

The iceberg doesn’t disappear because you ignore it either. It just keeps shaping what you see without you knowing why.

Stay curious. Build safety as a pattern, not a policy. Coaching across differences isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about coaching the person who’s on your team.