Team coaching processes include intact teams, that is the direct managers or leaders of participating employees, all of which are direct reports. Although traditional teams are relatively easy to delineate, some modern teams Teams may be network teams or teams belonging to matrix systems where participation and leadership may be less simple to define with precision,
The first four toolbox articles on this website have offered a few foundational principles on coaching and provide precise indications as to what basic posture coaches could embody and what fundamental strategies they could implement when facing teams. Indeed, team coaching principles first rest on coaching principles. Adding the term "team" to coaching does not suddenly obliterate the fact that team coaching is a coaching approcah to accompanying teams.
To further present organizational coaching principles and strategies, it is useful to underline that a large number of the field’s basic tools, techniques, tactics and strategies originate from team coaching. If team coaching postures and skills are similar to individual coaching, at a different level of complexity, the same can be said of organizational coaching compared to working with teams. In effect, organizational coaching is kin to team coaching, with just one or two layers of added complexity.
Consequently, before proceeding with our reflections on organizational coaching, this toolbox provides a preliminary inventory of practical team coaching principles, strategies, tools and methods. These have been developed and experimented over decades and are foundational to understanding and implementing organizational coaching.
This presentation will not go over methods, techniques, strategies and tools used in one-on-one coaching contexts. It is assumed here that the reader is already versed in the action, future and achievement-oriented premises and skills displayed by a professional individual coach. One way to revisit how individual coaching posture and strategies are used in team coaching is to revisit other older team development approaches that are not to be considered team coaching.
What is not team coaching ?
Team building is not team coaching. In different shapes and forms, team building has been on the market for at least fifty years. Team coaching has been slowly and very informally developed as a specific approach in the last fifteen. To give an indication to support this affirmation, the International Coach Federation is the largest professional association for coaches in the world, and it was founded in 1995. Coaching as a specific approach using a precise frame of reference and resting on a number of determined skills is not much older.
- Most team building processes are tailored to develop individual and collective motivation in teams. Coaching rests on the firm foundational belief that clients are fundamentally motivated.
- Team building processes usually rest on applying a number of externally designed extraordinary experiences to a team while coaching rests on the premise that the client and coach co-design the coaching process.
- Team building processes are generally led by experts in different fields, often creating a strong transference in the relationship with that expert, while team coaching focuses on processes that are led by the team members themselves and are tailored to avoid dependency.
- Team building processes are generally organized off property to get the team away from everyday concerns while team coaching is generally undertaken on location, oftentimes in the team’s usual meeting space, to bring change right into everyday work environment.
This is just a short list, but the obvious conclusion is that the frames of reference for each of the two processes rest on totally different foundations. Mind that the object of this differentiation is not to judge that team building work focused on developing team motivation is not useful and sometimes necessary. The object here is just to underline that the two approaches are fundamentally different in nature.
Moderating team meetings as an external expert is not the equivalent of coaching a team. Indeed, coming into a team meeting to help it achieve operational results by leading the meeting to success consists in replacing a shortcoming in a specific team competency with the competency of an external expert. Team coaching in American football does not consist in having the coach replace a key team role such as the quarterback, not anymore than having the coach replace the goal position in European soccer.
Granted, replacing team shortcomings with external process expertise is not exactly the same as coming in as an expert in the content of the team’s work, and providing the team with solutions to its operational problems. This is what an external marketing expert would offer a team who displayed a need to develop marketing savvy. Moderating team meetings to compensate for poor team meeting skills is however, creating a different form of dependency. Creating a team dependency on process skills provided by an external expert is not the equivalent of coaching a team to help it run its own meetings more effectively.
To be sure, it is sometimes very useful for a team to call on an external process expert and have that person ensure that the team be effective in solving its own urgent operational problems. The object here is just to underline that team coaching is a totally different approach, which rests on a different frame of reference.
Team coaching is not training a team on how to develop better relationships. Some would have it that if a team does not achieve good results, the reason lies mainly in the poor quality of relationships in that team. Trust is low, communication channels are faltering, jealousies are rampant, rumors and gossip are paramount, interpersonal coordination is low, anger and different forms of violence are common, etc. This frame of reference positions good relationships as a prerequisite for excellent results.
The observable fact in sports environments is: winning teams never have relational problems. One could conclude that in order to have good relationships in a system, the prerequisite is to help it focus on achieving extraordinary results. When results are above expectations in a team, pride and motivation follow. Indeed, it is commonly observed that performing collective results develop the level of team trust, respect, commitment, initiative, empowerment, high quality and consequently, more results.
Focusing on improving poor relationships in a team sends the message that preserving good relationships is more important than having high professional expectations from peers. Too much concern for good relationships often leads to catering to face-saving strategies and collective complacency.
This is not to say that working on the quality of relationships in a team is not sometimes useful if not necessary. The object of the above development is very simply to position team coaching as a different and complementary approach to other relationship-oriented team-development strategies.
Delivering training on specific tools and methodologies in a team context is not the equivalent of team coaching. To be sure, it is sometimes useful to quickly deliver specific tools for a team to rapidly gain in effectiveness. Most teams, for example, could rapidly gain in learning how to implement an efficient decision-making or a more performing team-meeting process in the course of a one or two-day team-training session. Following a rapid practical training session as a team, the system would know how to implement a new and more effective process to succeed in running it’s daily activities.
Suffice it to say that coaching is not delivering ready-made tools. It is a totally different approach by which teams discover their needs and design new specific processes while working to achieve better operational and measurable results. The way this is accompanied by a team coach is the object of the text below.
Having made this short inventory on what team coaching is not, let us consider what the characteristics of that completely new approach could be in the current team-development environment.
Coaching the system
To individual coaching, team coaching adds the complexity factor that is best defined by Systems Analysis theory. In team coaching, the system or the team is perceived and addressed as one unitary client system. Consequently, beyond coaching each team member during a series of one-on-one relationships within a team environment, a team coach is most performing when coaching the team itself as a single entity or body.
- Example: The function of a basketball team coach is to focus on developing the whole team’s performance as a system. Each individual player in that team could also call on a different personal coach to develop as an individual.
Whether or not a team coach takes into account the systemic effect in a client team, the team as system will have an effect on the coach’s work. This fact makes team coaching necessarily a different art from the art of individual coaching.
To take an example from the world of music, coaching a soloist will lead to developing an excellent soloist, but never an excellent musician who is to participate in an orchestra. Likewise in sports, a successful team wins more when team members have a high competency to interface, or to pass each other the ball, than when each individual has a high capacity as a solitary achiever.
Consequently, team coaching is very different from individual coaching whether it is done one-on-one or in a collective context. This may underline the need for a number of very different competencies on the coach’s part:
- It may be useful to understand different personality profiles to be a good individual coach, but that knowledge may get in the way when coaching teams. Understanding team cultural profiles is much more useful when coaching collective systems.
- Focusing on individual behavior and indicators is useful in individual coaching, just as pinpointing and understanding collective strategies and interface patterns is very useful for a team coach.
- An individual coach may rely on some external tools such as profile inventories and 360° evaluations, while team coaches may rely on team profile questionnaires and diagnostic tools.
- Individual coaches focus on developing more performing internal processes within people, team coaches focus on team internal processes, or what happens between people.
- Team coaches help individuals develop their network for success with other individuals,
while team coaches focus on system to system network development. - Etc.
Having stated some generalities to position the field of team coaching as focused on a very different level of reality than that of individual coaching, consider the specifics illustrated ibelow.
Team-meeting coaching
Team meeting coaching is the one most widespread and practical setting for conducting a team coaching process. Team meeting coaching consists in coaching a client team while it is in the process of running one of its regular team meetings.
Team meeting coaching is a process by which a team coach will be present and coach a team during the whole duration of a specified number of team meetings. During these meetings the coach will input in a given number of coaching ways to help the team progress towards its defined meeting objectives and desired outcomes.
The rationale for implementing team meeting supervision is systemic: teams physically exist or explicitly display their specific processes at times when all team members are present and active together, focused on their collective goals. In most teams, that happens specifically and sometimes only during team meetings. The team meetings are therefore the best and sometimes the only time to undertake efficient team coaching.
- Example: A typical team-coaching contract can provide for six full-day coaching sessions over a yearlong period, every other monthly team meeting. After coaching two or three team meetings, a one or two-day team-coaching session (see below) can be proposed to undertake, for instance, a team culture diagnosis to pin-point specific team development needs.
The predefined rhythm for such a team coaching process, such as every other team meeting, or every third team meeting can be adapted to correspond to specific contract need. Coaching a team through a crisis situation may require a coach to be present at every team meeting while coaching a team on longer term strategic issues could require a coach’s presence no more than every few months, if not just a couple of times per year.
Team Coaching Seminars
A dedicated team coaching seminar or workshop is the most obvious approach and sometimes the least effective way to initiate a team coaching process. It consists in organizing a two or three-day workshop type of seminar during which the team will allegedly be coached. A team coach needs to be particularly cautious when using this approach, knowing there are two significant pitfalls in terms of frame of reference.
- Caution: The team and team leader may expect a traditional seminar type of content and process, both to be managed and delivered by the alleged coach. This process may not so much be the equivalent of team coaching as it may inherit too many aspects of traditional training or team building.
Efficient team coaching sessions takes place when the session process and content is totally owned, organized and managed by the team itself. Ideally, the team coach should not be more central or involved in the process or in the content than any one other team member.
By definition, team-coaching session content should primarily be business-oriented, focused on team projects or team issues. Team coaching is only very partially focused on knowledge acquisition, theory and “extra-curricular” or other metaphorical learning activities. Should training or other activities take place, these should not be organized or managed by the team coach.
- Example: A team of managers once contracted coaches to accompany them in a team-building process organized with other consultants specialized in running outdoor activities. The outdoor exercises were led and debriefed by the outdoor consultants. A team coaching process then followed, in the peripheral presence of the outdoor consultants. The time frame was adapted to the situation, as two-hour outdoor activities were followed by a minimum of six to eight hours of team-managed work focused on achieving organizational results. This indoor work was accompanied by the team coach.
In this particular situation the team and coaches used the outdoor activities as business-oriented springboards for subsequent team coaching centered on the team’s specific business
issues. The outdoor activities were not considered coaching sequences. They just were complementary to the coaching sequences, and served to provoke major changes of perspective for the team.
- Caution: Typically, once a workshop or training session is over, the team may consider the learning process as completed. Coaching is more efficient when it is designed as a continuous process, followed-up in time, integrated in the team’s real business activity, within predefined regular sessions.
We suggest a team coaching seminar is much more efficient if it is included as a specific sequence in a larger regular team meeting coaching process. Consequently and as a rule, we will not start a team coaching process with a workshop or seminar. This is to avoid the frame of reference short cut by which a client team or coach will perceive team coaching as a new fancy term for more common team building sessions.
A formally organized team-coaching seminar can be organized in the course of a continued team coaching process to achieve a team-specific time-consuming goal, such as:
- To undertake a complete diagnosis of the team’s culture, using a specific diagnostic tool or undertake a yearly team “checkup”, or a team 360° inventory,
- To coach the team on a specific process such as its decision making and follow-up process including tracking and publicly posting results.
- To help specify the team’s vision and long-term mission.
- To introduce the team to a needed collective skill, such as designing and implementing a number of delegated processes.
- To define ambitious measurable operational team goals for the coming year.
- Etc.
Homework
Not all team coaching work takes place in the presence of the team coach. It is also the team coach’s role to help a team grow and develop in the coach’s absence. To achieve this, changes in team processes can be co-designed with the coach, to be later implemented by the team in the coach’s absence. The effects of these changes can be measured and reported by the team during an ulterior team-coaching event.
- Example: A management team that met on a monthly basis displayed major difficulties in its management of urgencies while suffering the effects of a critical change in its market context. As a result, unofficial ad-hoc meetings between a few key members of the team were held to deal with the urgencies. Consequently, other team members were kept out of the decision-making loop and felt regularly uninformed.
In this situation and for the duration of their crisis situation, the team decided to temporarily plan for short weekly team meetings that would complement the official longer monthly meeting.
Adaptating the team’s meeting rhythm brought about the expected result of bringing everyone back into the decision making loop. This increased efficiency, re-motivated all the team members, and took some of the pressure off the leader and central members that were taking more than their share of the work load and stress. The result was reported to the coach two months later, at the next coached team meeting.
- Example: Two team members were having difficulties in their work interface and regularly took time and energy away from common team concerns to solve their interpersonal issues during team meetings. They attempted to repeat that process in the coach’s presence. The team asked the two to meet weekly on their own and when necessary with a designated third party to iron out their difficulties. They were asked to report their progress in every monthly team meeting for the following six months.
The strategy to delegate or externalize the interpersonal problem out of the team meeting was a clear message to the two protagonists to get their act together and quit using team meetings as a stage for playing out their relational problems.
Consequently, the more a team coach helps a team prescribe actions or homework between and out of coached meetings, the more the team will integrate the progress it makes during the coached meetings into their everyday activity.
To conclude each coached meeting, a team coach will not hesitate to ask the team and each team member key learning items they will implement or practice in their professional environment before the next coaching session and between team meetings. At the beginning of the next coached sessions, the team members should be asked to share or report their progress.
On a regular basis, it is a good idea for the team coach to ask the team to monitor and report its process-management progress and the effect it has on team or individual operational results. Over a six-month coaching process, it is suggested at least a midway progress evaluation that clearly takes into account team actions that are implemented outside of the supervised coached meetings.
Having set the stage for the basic frame of reference and architecture for team coaching, the next toolbox will present another organizational coaching case study. This will help us move into other dimensions of coaching these large systems.