We’ve looked at how the principles and skills of 1-1 coaching transfer into team coaching; but there are differences.
The most obvious? There are multiple people to work with. That adds complexity to work with group dynamics, as people try to survive and belong so are careful about what they say and who they say it to. Relationships can be riddled with unspoken bias, unspoken perceptions, unspoken beliefs. The team coach needs to be hyper alert to the unspoken to enable it to be spoken. I’ve found that in team coaching, it’s useful to have two coaches in the room. One to create the environment within which the learning and thinking can take place; the other to notice what is going on within the group.
Learning in the moment
In team coaching, there is a huge opportunity to learn from the here and now, making shifts in the room. The emphasis is on learning in the moment.
However, the “coachee” is the whole team, not multiple individuals, as they work within their system. That’s tricky, treating a group of people as one! Ideally, if individuals in the team are to be coached as well, that would be with someone different from the team coach.
The team is also part of a bigger system, which itself is part of a bigger system, which is part of a bigger system, and so on. These bigger systems all need attention to be paid to them for the team to be successful. The coach will be helping the team to work from the outside in.
Contracting
The contracting stage is different too, whereby we need to do some pre-contracting before establishing the coaching agreement with the team itself. Hawkins talks about:
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:
- 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).
So team coaching is more complex than 1-1 coaching. It requires the same skills, and more. If you are looking for a team coach, let’s have a conversation.
Here are the links to my previous blogs in this series:
