Team coaching

Team coaching for effectiveness and performance

Creating effective, high-performing teams

Your people are your greatest asset, and it’s crucial they perform well together. Teamwork has always been an essential element for successful enterprises, but with today’s organisations undergoing disruption and digitisation, it is now more important than ever that employees can collaborate effectively across geographical sites, between business functions and within increasingly fluid organisational structures.

A team is more than individual members and their personalities – it’s a dynamic, evolving social structure. Team coaching works with the team as a system rather than a collection of individuals. It supports the team to become more effective to ensure stakeholders’ expectations are met/exceeded.

Triggers for team coaching

When people are thrown together, the outcomes can be surprising. Some teams are consistently greater than the sum of their members’ talents and skills – while other teams may be packed with talent but go nowhere. Our team coaches are practiced in working with the messy reality, complexity and ambiguity of teams as they develop. Triggers that indicate when teams might benefit from coaching include:

• Change of team purpose
• Major changes in team membership, roles or responsibilities
• Dysfunction within the team: conflict; poor decision making; disruptive behaviours; groupthink 
• Change of team leader/leadership
• Insufficient team leadership/lack of direction
• Change in strategy or strategic priorities
• Virtual or Hybrid working team is not aligned
• Lack of engagement/team showing resistance
• Team under-performing against targets and stakeholder expectations
• High performing team unsure how to sustain or improve further to reach their full potential.

Team challenges call for adaptive solutions

Our definition of team coaching

‘Coaching the whole team and its leader over time to increase connections, communication, and collaboration within the team and its wider context and to improve team effectiveness and performance. We work towards agreed outcomes and goals, informed by stakeholder feedback, add or top up skills where needed, and measure success using the teamSalient® discovery tool’.

Our approach to team coaching

We coach the whole team, including its leader, to increase connections, communications, and collaboration. By combining a strong holding presence and facilitative style, we create a safe environment for teams to experiment and learn. We help teams find the confidence and courage to work emergently, allowing any issues to surface and working through any tricky team dynamics. We role model effective relationship building in our approach. Our team coaching is flexible and responsive to meet each individual teams needs.

• Team leadership:  The team leader is an important and determining factor to the team’s effectiveness and success. We actively support the team’s leader, coaching them separately in parallel to the team.
• Team relationships: We look to increase psychological safety in the team, which research has shown is the key to creating high performing teams. We work to build trust and mutual understanding between team members.
• Team dynamics:  We use an emergent approach using live action coaching sessions to coach the team as they go about their usual business. This ensures we focus on what is real and present, and any issues are worked through as they surface.
• Data-led: teamSalient®, our proprietary team assessment tool, measures team effectiveness and reports on the most important actions to take to improve performance.
• Change orientation: Our coaching style is flexible with progress check-ins. The focus is on strengths and development areas. Active tracking is carried out against set goals.
• Whole team focus:  Our coaching methodology focuses on the whole team – including the leader. We pay attention to individual team members needs as well as those of the whole team. This allows the team to draw on their collective and individual strengths.
• Team communication:  Communication is the currency of team connections.  We help create the safety and space for team members to speak freely and feel they have a voice.
• Team collaboration:  We help teams to work together to a common purpose. By identifying and building on what’s working and developing a solutions focussed approach the team can embed their learning into new team processes and norms.
• Building skills:  Our modular development programme can be blended into the team coaching to fill any gaps in skills and to extend capabilities across the team.
• Systemic lens:  We meet with stakeholders at the outset to gather their views and use this to inform the work and development of the team.

Our team coaching methodology

Our bespoke team coaching method, Collab6®, incorporates a six-stage approach that is tailored specifically to every team to optimise the chances of success. Coupled with teamSalient®, our award winning team diagnostic tool, progress can be mapped with tangible results. Delivery is flexible and modular. It can be delivered virtually, in person, or in a hybrid model. The timing and pace is set in agreement with stakeholders.  We can stop and start at different points depending on the work teams have done already.

Teams develop over time, so our team coaching methodology is based upon a development journey. Ideally we work with a team over the longer-term, but when required, we do short-term focused work to help teams re-set and get started, and fill key skills/knowledge gaps.

1. Define: The team coach meets with the team’s leader and sponsor to gain insight into the goals for team coaching.
2. Determine: Chemistry meeting with the whole team, including the team leader, to gauge the team’s readiness to start team coaching.
3. Discover: Data gathering activities to inform the team’s development agenda and goals. We integrate data from a range of methods and tools e.g., team member interviews; teamSalient^® diagnostic team profile; team observation; stakeholder/sponsor input, and organisational team performance data.
4. Design: Design of team coaching programme to meet development goals drawing on insights from the discovery phase.
5. Deliver: Coaching begins with a team kick-start session. Besides live team coaching sessions, team member coaching may run in parallel to support individual development. To build skills, development modules may also be integrated to extend capabilities and fill any knowledge gaps.
6. Deploy: Review of the team coaching journey and progress made. Consolidation of learning. The team moves forward with the lessons learned – extending the benefits of coaching to others in the organisation.

“We were delighted to work with teamSalient® to provide insightful leadership development for our Senior Leadership Team. The analysis facilitated team discussion and subsequent learning led to key actions to further improve a high-performing team with collaboration, innovation, and team ethos. Declan is a thoughtful and impressive leadership coach and hope to work with him again.”  Chief people officer, Fintech organisation.

How team coaching benefits the team

Every team is unique, but most teams face similar challenges. Team coaching helps people understand how to work better with others. Coaching is the quickest way to accelerate and get the results you want from your team and your business. Whereas leadership coaching focuses on the individual, team coaching zeroes in on the whole team and how it works together – or not.

With the support of their team coach the team:

• hear what’s important to their key sponsors and customers. They then use this stakeholder feedback to inform their work;
• co-create meaningful development goals with agreed focused outcomes;
• gain the confidence to talk more openly together, they feel heard, build trust and safety, and strengthen relationships;
• leverage their strengths and preferences while improving their team effectiveness, and adding skills where needed;
• gain practice in working through team dynamics and come out of this with improved team processes; and
• agree how to collaborate better within, and between, teams.

We coach the whole team, including its leader, to increase connections, communications, and collaboration. We help improve team effectiveness and performance. Our coaches work towards agreed outcomes and goals, informed by stakeholder feedback. Let teamGenie®’s experts combine the art of team coaching into a unique and tailored journey for your team. Get in touch today.