What is team coaching?
Systemic Team Coaching is a process by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them both improve their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business. (Hawkins, 2011)
Team coaching is different from team development, which tends to focus on the here and now internal dynamics and processes of a team; team coaching focuses on the future and what will be necessary to thrive in that new environment and considers the stakeholders outside of the team as well – bringing the expectations of all stakeholders into the room to work with.
The myths and reality of team coaching
(From Hawkins, Supervision with Teams and Organizations in Mind):
What does team coaching address?
A team coach works with an in-tact team over a period of time to create sustained performance improvement, focused on Hawkins’ five disciplines of high performance:
- Commissioning – being clear about the commissioning of the team by its stakeholders, and contracting/re-contracting the shape of that commission
- Clarifying – the team clarifying and committing to their own mission, purpose, strategic aims, values, goals, roles and processes
- Co-creating – the team being more effective in how they collectively work together to co-create generative thinking and action, which is greater than the sum of their individual efforts
- Connecting – engaging with all the stakeholders that the team serves, and those it relies on to do its work; building relationships to inspire, motivate and align those wider parts of the system to transform the contribution of the team
- Core Learning – learning and unlearning at a rate equal to or greater than the rate at which the environment is changing
How do we know which of the five disciplines needs focus in team coaching?
We start any team coaching conduct with a contracting, inquiry and diagnosis/design phase.
Contracting – discussion with team leader/sponsor to understand why team coaching, and why now.
Inquiry – collecting data about the team, their performance, dynamics, relationships. This might include:
- virtual conversations with each team member, and team stakeholders, all 1-1
- a questionnaire sent to all team members about what they see is needed
- a 360-questionnaire sent to all the stakeholders with whom the team works
- how the team is performing – balanced scorecard if there is one, team’s objectives and progress towards those, employee engagement survey results, existing feedback from customers and other stakeholders.
Diagnosis and design – develop the focus of the team coaching. Draft a map of the possible team coaching journey (though this will need to be co-designed with the team).
Follow this link to view our Team Coaching Case Studies.
