Team coaching
Team coaching is a process of work with the team, together and individually with its members, on the team’s cooperation, collective leadership, purpose and goals, stakeholder management and business transformation. It is not a one off activity, but more a series of activities and interventions tailored for each specific team depending on their needs.
Team coaching
Some of the challenges teams typically face, as a result of their dysfunctions:
- Teams with a newly appointed leader, struggling to build trust and respect amongst the team members
- Team members putting their individual goals before the team goals and have more loyalty to their direct reports than to the team they belong to
- There are conflicts which surface or are hidden and they block the team from functioning
- Your team meetings are just operational and agenda focused and rarely generate a fruitful debate, some team members dominating the space and constantly speaking and others always stay silent
- You are the only one taking responsibility towards the stakeholders and your teammates always stay “in the tent”
- As a team, you rarely look back and reflect on successes and learnings
- You know your overall team goals but never really dig deep enough to understand what they really mean for each individual so your teammates continuously complain they still don’t understand what they need to do
- There are subgroups in the team working against each other
- Or you simply would like to get external help and views and build an even stronger and more efficient team
Some team coaching projects completed:
Team coaching project for a newly merged middle management team
I was contracted by the team leader and the CEO of the company to coach a newly merged team with a new leader. The team leader wanted to set up foundations for the new team functioning, define a new team’s purpose, clarify mutual expectations of team members from each other and start building trust.
The process started with a diagnostics phase (individual interviews with all team members). The diagnostics revealed that the team had a very good understanding and acceptance of the goals they need to achieve, but a bit less clarify over the new roles and relationships within the new team. Additionally, management of external stakeholders and team learning needed some attention as well, which is what the two-day team workshop focused on.
Post the workshop, the team got the workshop records, commitments, purpose and values. Additionally, they got advice on how to set up their meetings and communication post the workshop.
As in many cases, relationships between some members needed more attention, so those members were advised to focus on that outside regular team interactions, with the help of the team leader
The coach also supported the team a few months after the workshop, to give the team feedback on how they’re progressing with what they set out to achieve as a team.
A team coaching project for a senior management team of a large manufacturing company:
The CEO wanted to continue the team development that started a year ago when he took over the team management. The workshop was to focus on silos in the team and how to break them. A one day workshop was structured so as to help the team understand how they behave when they are separated, how they actually implement team decisions once they agree on them and what happens when they do not really commit to team decisions with the members of their teams below in the organisation. Post the workshop, the team's understanding of each other’s specific roles and positions deepened, as well as their awareness of how destructive the lack of real commitment to a decision is for the rest of the people in the organisation. They understood the value of building trust, openly showing disagreement but then committing genuinely, once the team reached their decision.
The team will continue working on this as a part of their regular interactions, in order not to lose momentum in between the workshops facilitated by the external coach.
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