Team coaching is at a stage of evolution where individual coaching was a couple of decades ago, plethora of interpretations and definitions are going around but there is really no standard as such. Just because there is no precise definition or standards about team coaching, should not undermine the value team coaching adds to teams and organisations.

Organisations have now warmed up to coaching and have realised its potential to develop leaders, as compared to other forms of development. They now understand that coaches add tremendous value to the leaders by getting them to think and build intrinsic motivation to make desirable changes. The relatively long duration of a coaching engagement gives the leader an opportunity to practice, reflect and refine the new behaviours, which is not possible in any other intervention.

In an effort to create larger impact, organisations have been looking at interventions with larger teams, which could be through team building, team facilitation, group coaching or team coaching. While the objective may be similar, but it is not the same; each of these are very different processes and hence lead also to different outcomes.

• Team Building is essentially focussed on team bonding, team members understanding each other and relating better to each other. These are primarily focussed on the forming and norming stages of the team development. These are usually conducted as outdoor team challenges, social activities and experiential engagements, in one of sessions.
• Facilitation is about someone from outside the team facilitating the process, with the intention that the team can completely focus on the task at hand. Facilitation is usually event-based, and the usual focus areas are a specific conflict or reviewing the way the team operates or a strategy session. The facilitator is detached from the outcomes or team performance and focusses only on the process.
• Group Coaching is coaching a group of individuals who may or may not be part of the same team. The focus here is on the individuals. You can either have an external coach managing the process and coaching one individual at a time or the process can also be managed by the members of the group, where each member gets a challenge that he or she is facing and is coached on the same by the rest of the group.
• Team Coaching essential differs from the other intervention since the focus here is the entire team, both at an individual and a collective level. It is also focussed on the combination of performance and processes. Team coaching focusses on interventions that inhibit the process by which the performance is delivered. Mainstay of team coaching is reflection and dialogue and focussing on the interconnections, so that the team as a whole is able to do more than what each team members would have been able to do by themselves.

In the continuum of team coaching, systemic team coaching sits right at the top. Systemic team coaching moved beyond the traditional approach of team coaching which is more inwardly looking as it is focussed on the internal aspects of the team. Systemic team coaching takes a more ‘outside-in’ approach focussing on connecting and engaging with stakeholders to create larger shared value for the entire system.

Peter Hawkins defines systemic team coaching in the most comprehensive way when he says “Systemic team coaching is a process by which a team coach works with the whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to effectively engage with all their stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business”

With organisations warming up to team coaching as they have to one-to-one coaching, it is time that coaches look at upskilling themselves.  The worse thing that you as a coach can do is to take your skills of one-to-one coaching sessions to a team coaching engagement, it is not likely to work!