With ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity in the environment, what keeps organizations safe is its culture! Creating a coaching culture through team coaching is an ensured way to build strength in your teams and organizations.

There are several assumptions around team coaching. Countless confusions are damaging the results for organizations due to untrained professionals trying to coach teams by using random approaches of facilitations. This blog is an attempt to clarify some of them.

Team coaching is becoming critical and essential due to the complexity of environment and rising issues on business, diversity, leadership, well-being and relationship contexts.

One of the myths in the organizations is that coaching supports only individuals to make change. What is less known fact is that coaching as a skill not only supports leaders to grow individually but also supports teams and organizations to make systemic/cultural changes in a sustainable way.

If you are finding it challenging to work with diversified teams, people, generations, multi-cultures, locations, individual preferences and aggressive business aspirations, Team coaching can be an extremely essential tool to deliver results with minimum burnouts and maximum engagement.

Effective Team coaches have the ability to mindfully integrate skills like deep reflections, creating thinking, relational intelligence,action,goals, emotional intelligence, powerful questions, psychological safety to shift mindsets and building capability and capacity for performance.

Understanding of systemic thinking, supervision, coaching mastery, team dynamics, relational intelligence, adult development, collective leadership and human dynamics are some key competence for Team Coaches.

Referring to Robert Kegan’s five stages of adult development, the understanding of stages of adult development while coaching teams become extremely critical. While we think we are dealing with adults of similar age and experience, the stages can make a huge difference in the way they interact and respond with/to each other.

• Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood)
• Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population)
• Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)
• Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)
• Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population)

Imagine a team has mix of stages 3,4 and 5, which is inevitable, the conflicts are not only logical but fundamental to mindsets and mental models.

David Clutterbuck very simply puts it to say that: Coaching is not done to team; it is done with team!

As per Peter Hawkins: The real challenges in organizations are not in the parts or the people but in the connections!

Team coaching is a discipline distinct from consulting, team building, team leading and other roles. Its more complex, not least because it deals with the systems that influences teams and those teams interact. Team coaching evolves with the team and so becomes a part of team’s systems.

As per David Clutterbuck, Team coaching is:

Partnering with an entire team in an on-going relationship, for the purpose of collectively raising awareness and building better connects in the team’s internal and external systems and enhancing the team’s capability to cope with current and future challenges

What is Team coaching NOT?

• Coaching Individuals, who happen to belong to the same team (although a team coach might do this additionally)
• Coaching only part of a team
• Coaching a group pr a reporting team (except where the intention is to support the group in becoming a team)
• Team building (although this may be a side-benefit of the team coaching activity)-there has to be an outcome focus
• Process facilitation (aimed at solving specific problems)
• One-off interventions such as an off-site workshop, but it is a partnership overtime focused on a joint purpose.
• Training and consultancy
• Focused on a fixed methodology

A process of coaching the whole team together and apart, over a designated period of time to enable it to:

• Align on common purpose
• Collaborate and learn across diversity
• Develop collective leadership
• Achieve performance objectives
• Effectively engage with their key stakeholder groups
• Jointly transform the wider business

What Team Coaches do?

• Be proficient to create psychological safety for everyone in the team and the stakeholders
• Not become part of the problem by being proficient in the process of effective team coaching
• Act as a role model for qualities the team needs to develop

The responsibility as a team coach is not only to focus on the team but also to its “system/s in which it is nested and the systems it is nesting”. As Peter Senge articulates in the 10^th law of systemic thinking that “Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants”, similarly converting individual coaching to Team coaching is not the same thing.

Watch this space for more on Team Coaching!