TOOLBOX VI: System Coaching Tools
Team and Organizational Coaching Techniques

This article simply aims to list and explain a number of team coaching and organizational coaching tools that can easily be implemented during a team-coaching event.  Obviously, some are behavioral tools hat will need to be practiced time and again by the team coaches until they can be naturally and effectively implemented.

Triangulation

Basically, triangulating consists in drawing a third party into a face-to-face situation. It is a communication tool anyone can model when coaching team meetings or larger groups.  It is both part of team coaching practice, and can be explained to the team as a method to develop meeting flow. Triangulation also will create or stimulate “circularity” or fluidity in team or large group interactions. 

Examples: When a team work process gets stuck in any way, such as:

• When one team member is delivering a (too) lengthy presentation or  someone is intensely arguing to sell a personal point of view.
• When two or more team members are battling to convince the rest of the team to choose between one of their “strong” positions.
• When you observe that other team members have become passive observers.

Circularity or energy flow focused on achieving results has disappeared and a “polarity” between competing people as been installed in its place.  In effect, one, two or more people are on stage, and the rest of the team is pushed back into an observer role. 

Polarities are repetitious communication patterns that exclude some of the team members by giving others a dominant position on content or process.  They are considered a less productive type of team interaction and generally reveal a team’s cultural habits and limits.

In team coaching, triangulating consists in gradually involving third and fourth parties by pulling them into the interaction, until all team members become equally active and on stage.  An aware and nimble team coach can efficiently redirect polarities and help recreate circularity with a few simple modeling behaviors.

• Example: “Indirect eye contact” consists in looking at other team members when one of them is talking, presenting or developing an idea. 

Whenever an articulate team member succeeds in “locking” the coach’s (or leader’s) eyes, he or she will feel reinforced and continue developing the same subject extensively, sometimes hogging the floor, thereby creating a polarity while everyone else listens.  A team coach’s circulatory eye contact with other team members will both suggest the speaker address the rest of the group and elicit diagonal interventions from other team members.

• Example: As a team coach, or team member, directly elicit a specific and unexpected team member’s input on a subject, and then pull back and look at other participants to provoke their reactions in turn.  This will help redirect and stimulate the discussion flow: “what do you think Joe (and then look at Jack and Jill while Joe answers).

Note that when the team coach or the team leader becomes the main auditor or “target” of a presentation, other team members are relegated to secondary observer roles, and will often gradually ease into different forms of passivity: fidget or doodle, loose interest, offer a joke, start side discussions, read un related documents, read e-mail or text messages, leave the room, etc.

• Example: Give a completely different and creative point of view on a subject forcefully driven by one person, and then pull out of the discussion by looking at your notes or other team members to leave room for others to offer their participation.

Some team “polarity” is characterized by standardized thinking patterns and single-solution or politically correct approaches to problem solving.  These can be redirected by a team coach modeling “out of the box” proposals, solutions, or thinking patterns. 

• Caution: The danger in that strategy will obviously become reality if the team coach gets emotionally involved in defending a personal original idea in an opinionated way, thereby creating a new polarity within the team, this time focused on the coach’s position.

These polarity “redirecting” or triangulating strategies are most efficient if they are implemented sparingly and fed into the team in a short and efficient way, and quickly abandoned.  The team coach should try to rapidly regain a peripheral position.  It is strongly advised that the team coach stay strategically out of, or on the border of team discussions, keeping a personal noncommittal distance with operational content, and staying on the fringe of the team’s interactive processes. 

The aim in modeling triangulation or energy redirection in a team coaching context is of course to gradually teach the team to manage its own energy direction and circularity.  Ideally, the less a team coach or team leader has to accompany the team, the more all the team members gain in empowerment, freedom and creativity, and the more the team can become really successful.

Geography Management

The above advice for a team coach to always keep and return to a peripheral position in team interactions allows the coach to perceive a good overview of the team configuration.  A system view of the team as a form of mobile hanging from the ceiling or as a sort of human constellation can offer a number of systemic indications concerning preferred relationships, antagonisms, coalitions, clans and clusters.  

The geographic positioning of team members in a team meeting is never to be considered a “chance” happening.  As a matter of fact, the geographical position of team members in a meeting context offers a number of indicators as to the real team network. More often than not, geography reveals the team’s real interactive network.

• Example: Once a team coach made a comment on the seating order in a team meeting, proposing some conclusions as to what that order could mean.  One of the team members responded that her position in the room didn’t reveal much because she had just taken the last seat that was left when she arrived.  It turned out that she was the most recent recruit in the team.
• Caution: While observing geography, never jump to hasty conclusions.  The same geographical layout can reveal a number of different underlying team dynamics.  And once in awhile a cigar is just a cigar.  The most interesting interpretation and discussion on the meaning of a team's geographical layout will always be the one the team volunteers.
  

Who sits close to whom and opposite whom?  Who regularly gravitates next to the team leader, who sits at the front, and who towards the back, who moves about a lot, or evolves around the fringes, who stays out of the circle, Who are glued at the hips? or who hogs the center of the stage? These questions and corresponding observations of team layout both during work sessions and during breaks can give excellent indicators as to the systemic equilibrium and network dynamics within a team.

• Example: No matter the observed network, coaching team mobility in keeping with the “circularity” principle is a good strategy.  For one thing, the team coach can regularly reposition or move around within the team geography. 

Never sit in the same place or by the same people twice in a row. Take every opportunity to exchange seats with team members who happen to leave their position.  Displacing one’s own chair to have a different view of the room is another way to change the room equilibrium and model mobility and circularity.  Another strategy is to openly suggest other team members change seats, or to have the team leader move closer to the center or to the sidelines.  Indeed, simly displacing the leader often changes everyone's perspective on the political layout of the team.

• Example: During team meetings, the best team coach position is often on the outskirts of the team or within the team as a participant.  Except for rare specific occasions such as a short sequence modeling a meeting role, being central by facilitating the meeting or or by leading any other team activity is not a valid coaching stance. 

When, for example, a coach regularly moderates or facilitates a team meeting, this reinforces the team’s dependence on the coach and by transference, on the leader, rather than developing the team’s capacity to moderate itself.  The same goes for time management, focus on goals and follow up of results, decision-making, resource management and individual coaching. 

Consequently, as far as team process-management goes, the best approach for a team coach is to be hands-off.  The best geographical position to illustrate this team coaching position is to be off-center if not on the team periphery.

It may be useful to suggest that different people change their seating position within the team geography.  This may serve to reveal and disrupt an obvious coalition between two team members, to separate a dependent team member from too close a position to the team leader, to pull forward a reserved team member from the back of the room.

Example: As a team coach, it may sometimes be useful to clarify a personal choice of position within the group geography:  “If I sit within the circle, I will be interacting as a participant and expect to be managed by the facilitator, but when I pull back out of the circle, it is because I am choosing to observe your processes, and would rather you didn’t solicit my participation.” 

Modeling strategic positioning and commenting on how the coach uses room geography in the coaching process may help the team become aware of how the relative positions of members affects team interaction.

• Example: A team coach can suggest that the team meetings be organized in different locations from one time to another.  Each new location can be an opportune time to provoke different and more mobile team geography.  Change of geography and location helps to provoke changes in interactive modes. That, in turn, develops team creativity and reactivity.

Again, the circularity principle applied to team geography is an easy way for a team coach to help unravel longstanding relational habits and communication routines.  In that way, a team coach can provoke new and different interfacing channels that can create different team thinking patterns and often help provide new insights and solutions.

Equal Time Principle

In order to offer unbiased information during democratic elections, public medias in democracies have the obligation to provide equal time coverage to all the candidates.  We suggest that team coaches adopt the same stance, and attentively observe preferred coverage demonstrated by different team members.

Note that a number of team coaches will not accept to coach both a team and one of the members of that team, be it the team’s leader.  Should a need for individual coach appear or be expressed, these team coaches will refer the individual client to another coach.

• Caution: Working as a team coach, one can easily become that team leader’s coach or the individual coach of some of the other team members.  From there on, one of the coaching relationships is bound to suffer and the coach may gradually get too involved and loose a healthy strategic “distance”.
  

The best “mobile” position for a coach is to be equidistant from all of the team members.  There is nothing against a team coach being close to client team members, if that team coach is equally close or just as distant with all of the team members.  The difficulty in team coaching will rapidly increase if the team coach is perceived as partial, more interested or less involved with some of the members.  This, of course, does not mean the team coach needs to stay aloof from everyone.  Just equidistant.

• Caution: Preferential relationships work right into the “family metaphor” of parents favoring preferred siblings, creating dysfunctional jealousies and resentment between children.

For a start, it can be interesting strategy for a team coach to consciously find ways to create different but equal and authentic relational coalitions with each of the team member, be it during breaks.  These coalitions can concern very different personal subjects of interest, for example and can be publicly displayed, equally.

• Caution: A perceived preferential coalition between the team coach and the team leader will generally make the team feel that the work is tailored to be at the leader’s advantage rather that focused on unbiased team development.  This occurrence could sometimes be at a cost.

Face to face coaching work on a team leader’s difficulties can be very useful when done in the presence of the team.  This individual work could include the team coach working with the leader and with the team co-responsibility in implementing solutions. It is useful to specifically coach the team on what it can do differently to ease the leader’s difficulties or to facilitate the leader’s progress.  This type of work can be prepared with the leader, and powerfully models continuous development as a work ethic.  The team coach’s equidistance with all the team members is a vital position for that type of work.

Equal time and equidistance as a team coaching strategy is also a model for the team members and team leader to reproduce.  They too can learn how to equally develop all team interfaces within their team’s interactive network without privileging personal preferences.  This team coaching strategy promotes collective growth rather than the development of some of the team members at the expense of others.

Process Delegation

The transference patterns mentioned above suggests that teams often expect their coaches to manage their processes and deliver content in the same way as they expect to be led by their leaders, trainers and consultants.   In a way, teams tend to delegate process and content management “upwards” to the coach in much the same way as they do to their leaders and other external support providers. 

In as much as meeting processes reveal team processes in general, one can assume that if a team delegates meeting process and content responsibility upwards to the team leader, they do the same with most other team process and content responsibilities.  Passive teams are passive during meetings. Active teams also demonstrate their process ownership during team meetings.

Team coaching during a a team meeting context can help implement new and more effective behavioral interactions which will be reproduced within a team following the team coaching event.  If team behavior and interfacing evolves within team meetings, this evolution influences all aspects of the team’s existence, including its relationship to its environment.

Part of team coaching may therefore consist in gradually helping the team members collectively own the process and content management within their meetings as a first step to doing the same with all the rest of their professional activity.  Within meetings, the strategy is to empower teams to manage their own processes rather than have them be assumed by the coach or the leader.

To be able to implement team coaching, a coach needs to be free of other tasks and concerns. During team coaching, the team is to own and manage its own time, its own meeting moderation or facilitation, its own objectives and results, its own decisions and follow-up, its own resources and even its own individual coaching. When a team owns these processes, it can then be coached on how to do it even better on the long term. 

After observing how a team manages its own processes over one or two meetings, a team coach can sometimes model a specific role that will permit better effectiveness, and then delegate that role to the team. 

• Example: In a meeting supervision context, a team coach first helped a team manage their time by announcing on a regular basis the time elapsed and the time left in each meeting sequence.  This role is what is sometimes called the pacer.  The suggested pacing rhythm is every five minutes for twenty to thirty minute meeting sequences. 

During that meeting, the pacing information permitted the team members to keep better track of their time and stay focused on their goals.  At the end of the meeting, the team coach asked for feedback on the usefulness of the pacing role, and then asked the team members how they plan to assume the responsibility for pacing themselves more efficiently in their future meetings.

This simple way of introducing process roles can be implemented by a team coach to progressively input a number of useful meeting roles into any team.  Once a given role is managed by one of the team members, the team coach can question the way it is being done and help the team proceed with gradual improvement.

• Caution: When a role is assigned to one same team member on a permanent basis, we have observed that the team will not get the full benefit of the function covered by the role.  
  

If one person is designated, for instance to pace all the team’s meetings, the team may not heed the pacer and then scapegoat the person for the team’s poor time management.

Consequently, it is useful to observe how meeting roles are attributed by the team, to whom these roles are attributed, and why.  This may give the team coach an indication of how the team owns other processes, how they assign responsibilities to some team members so as to avoid collective responsibilities, or how some team members are designated to carry the weight of the team’s inefficiencies.  A team will not really “own” its time management, for instance, if the team members just assign the role to someone, and then forget to support that person when he or she is doing the job.

To avoid falling into that trap, meeting roles need to rotate among team members from one meeting to the next.  This rotation of roles will help each team member and the system as a whole develop collective responsibility for achieving meeting results.

Beyond the decision-maker role usually held by the team decision maker or leader, some of the key meeting roles a team coach can model in supervised meetings are the following:

• The moderator or facilitator helps the team manages energy circularity during the meeting.  The moderator is more focused on the interfacing processes between team members while other focus on the content of the meeting.
• The pacer illustrated in the example above is focused on efficiently managing team rhythm within twenty-minute time segments.
  
• The decision driver, focuses on managing team decisions.  That role consists in continuously keeping the team focused on making decisions, and then on recording these decisions faithfully and completely on a decision sheet, for follow-up purposes.
• The “meeting coach”, not to be confused with the team coach, delivers individual development or solution-centered behavior options for future meetings, to each of the team members, at the end of the meeting.

The team members that assume the responsibility of each role obviously also need to input whatever content-related comments they should volunteer as professional participants.  The first time they play a role, these process-managers may feel a difficulty in both managing process and professionally participating in delivering content.  This difficulty gradually disappears as the learning advances.

These roles are implemented during meetings by each of the team members in turn.  They are in fact different managerial functions.  As these roles rotate among team members, each gradually learns to implement the functions represented by the roles during team meetings. 

• Caution: Coached teams invariably suggest that their team coach assume the responsibility of the “meeting coach”, and give everyone a feedback at the end of one of their meeting sequences.

Make sure that the progress-centered meeting coach role is also delegated to each of the team members in turn.  Just as for the other roles, and after having modeled it once, it is important that a team coach not assume that role on a recurring basis.  The team coach would thereby keep the team members from an opportunity to internally develop the skills and responsibilities the role permits. 

Having to give each team member individual progress-centered options may also divert the coach’s focus away from “team coaching” and more towards individual coaching in a collective context.

Team Subdivision

In the course of a long-term supervision process of team meetings, it is sometimes useful that the team break up into two or more distinct sub-groups simultaneously working on different issues.

• Example: In the course of a daylong meeting supervision, a team coach proposed the group split into two sub-committees to work on two “hot” issues that each concerned the whole team.  Each sub-group was to work for two hours and come back with a written list of suggested options to solve a series of operational problems on the one hand, and to deal with important discipline issues on the other.  It was understood that each sub group would be working towards listing possible decisions that would affect the whole team.  The team leader and the coach stayed out of both groups.

After the two hours work session, when the team reconvened in a larger group, the written decision lists were distributed to the larger team, and the team leader committed to validate the decisions within a week.

This type of team subdivision process reveals a few underlying principles of some team meetings.  For example, team members often attend team meetings to make sure:

• That nothing escapes their control and
• That no significantly or bold decisions will be made.

Subdividing the work between two sub-groups puts all the team members in a situation where some of the discussions and decisions will escape their control, and in a position to have to trust their fellow team members to consider the total team picture to formulate valid decisions.

• Caution: Teams often suggest that each sub-group be a cross-section of the team with individual members representing all the areas of responsibility.  This approach may in effect have everyone keep indirect control of whatever may happen in the other meeting.

It is much more efficient to have each sub group membership composed of “experts” that are more concerned with the issues and very different from the profile of the members of the other group, to create clear differences in approach and results.

• Caution: From meeting to meeting the team coach should take care to have the team remix sub group membership configurations.  Keeping the same configuration of sub-committees would in effect create two sub-teams, each with own their power structure and standardized thinking and interfacing patterns.  The circularity principle is also useful when constituting sub groups and short-term project teams.

Team subdivision as a team coaching option disrupts routine meeting interfacing patterns.  The disruption creates opportunities for learning, change, and creation of new more productive interfacing patterns.

In as much as the team leader often avoids participating in any sub group, this team coaching option also puts the leader in a de-facto delegating context.  The sub teams must be trusted to do a good job in the leader's absence, albeit in a well framed setting with very precise objectives.  Note that the leader is still the final decision maker, having to validate the decision proposals before these are to be implemented by the whole team.

This team-coaching format also offers the team coach some one-on-one time with the team leader to evaluate progress and plan for future steps.  Needless to say, it is recommended that the team coach and leader openly share their one-on-one process and communicate any decision with the rest of the team following their private coaching time.

Commitment indicators

One of the focuses of team coaching concerns the degree of commitment team members have and display towards their team as a system and consequently towards its results.

As a team coach, a shortlist of “commitment indicators” can help to clarify perceptions of team members’ commitment.  This, shortlist can sometimes be usefully shared with teams to help them clarify and develop member commitment.  These indicators fall into three main team management fields: team time management, team energy management, and team ethics management.

• Time management indicators: Punctuality, Presence, Confidentiality
• Energy management indicators: Reactivity and Pro-activity, Confrontation,  Assiduity
• Ethics management indicators:  Acting out.  Consumption of mind-altering products
  

Team Tracking and Posting

“Tracking and posting” is a team operational follow-up process that can help reveal business processes that need team coaching as well as team support.  Tracking and posting helps develop transversal co-responsibility within teams. To be efficient, team tracking and posting should remain focused on very simple success measures and be light enough to be initiated by a few team members within a week or fifteen days.

Implementing a tracking and posting procedure in a team coaching process is relatively simple.  The team coach can simply give the team members the list of criteria provided on the below and ask the team to define the results they want to achieve.  The next step is to have the team, or parts thereof such as sub-teams work on designing the best tracking and posting device that will motivate them to continuously stay focused on achieving those

The team tracking and posting concept is deceptively simple and extremely efficient when it respects all the following basic criteria:

• Each poster is focused on tracking the progress of a specific action by drawing attention to one significant success measure that concerns all the team members.  If a team wishes to track two indicators, it should design two different tracking posters. Three is a crowd.
• Posted tracking concerns very basic and strategic team business result measures.  Think in terms of client or financial results.  For instance, don’t track meeting punctuality, which is just an indirect means to increase team effectiveness that will help develop long-term competency.
• For example, one poster tracks individual and total sales volume, another individual and total sales profit ratio.  Or one poster tracks individual and total savings. Or one poster tracks individual and total delivery deadline respect.  Any one of these options is enough.
• The title of the tracking poster is simple and self-explanatory.
• The tracking poster is designed as a visible and attractive communication tool, not as an accountant’s Excel spread sheet.
• The tracking poster is publicly displayed in a place where it can be seen by a maximum number of concerned team members and by the team environment.  Get everyone interested in your progress.  Posting can be displayed in the cafeteria.
• Team posted results show comparative results.  It aims to recognize excellence and puts pressure on the team members who need to improve.
• Posted results are scrupulously followed up.  Nothing reveals incompetence or ho-hum lack of constancy as much as a tracking poster that hasn’t been filled for the three preceding months.
• Posted results show progression.  They are displayed in a large enough space that can provide room for the results of each one of the year’s fifty-two weeks.

For most teams, implementing a team coaching process is not an end in itself.  The team is more often than not a management team and each of the team members is also a leader of another team.  In the case of an executive team, the system is a collective leadership system, responsible for the effectiveness and results of a much larger and complex organization. 

Just like any executive in the client team, the team coach is constantly focused on the larger organization represented by the team members.  Coaching an executive team is the equivalent of working on the tip of an iceberg knowing well that every move will have a very real indirect effect on a huge mass of people and resources below the apparent surface.

Taking this into account, coaching an executive team as a system can potentially have a major effect on the whole organizational system.  When coaching an executive team, one is in fact coaching a whole organization “through” it’s D.N.A.  This indirect approach of organizational coaching can be carried out quite consciously and strategically.

• Example: After having learned and practiced the delegated meeting process within their executive team, and after seeing the positive process changes the new meetings permitted, some of the executive team members gradually introduced delegated meeting tools to their own divisional teams.  After some months, these division teams were being run with the same meeting process.  These division team members in turn decided to introduce the meeting process into their departmental teams.  Within a year a large part of the organization management was implementing the delegated meeting process, actually introduced in a slowly spreading viral process.

The same observation goes for a host of subtle “circularity-developing” tools.  In client organizations that have undertaken team coaching within several teams on several levels and in several locations, the natural or viral spreading of the tools is more rapid.

To be able to coach larger organizations effectively, it is useful for a team coach to develop a network of peers that uses the same general team coaching approach and family of tools and that can process an organization with a collective coherent team coaching approach.

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This overview of basic team coaching strategies and tools is coming to a close.  As a concluding comment we would like to remind the team coach that the effectiveness of most of the above tools primarily rest on a team coach’s personal capacity to implement strategic coaching behavior.  All in all, the first team-coaching tool is the coach’s capacity to interact within a team adequately and strategically.  Any tool will become especially useful to a team if it is well introduced, at the right time.