Abstract: Team coaching is rapidly gaining traction as a powerful tool for helping leadership teams improve performance. However, it has wider application for all kinds of team, at all levels in an organisation. This article aims to clarify the role and scope of team coaching and make some predictions on how team coaching may evolve in this decade.
Most large organizations have invested in coaching individuals. A typical pattern is to hire external executive coaches to work with the top layers of management (and/ or to develop a cadre of professional executive coaches in-house), and to expect everyone else to be coached by their line manager. Neither of these approaches has proved to be as successful as hoped. Assessment centre data tells us that the less than half of the external coaches demonstrate the required level of competence and awareness of boundaries. Similarly, sheep-dip training of line managers as coaches has relatively little sustainable impact on behaviour.
Increasingly, however, it is becoming recognised that the performance issues of both organizations and individuals are to greater or lesser extent systemic. Focusing on changing the individual tackles only part of the problem. In the work team, for example, the typical reaction when the line manager returns from a course, enthusiastic about applying coaching, is “What pills is he on?” As the manager attempts to do coaching to the team, the team members’ lack of understanding of the process inevitably evokes resistance. Moreover, because coaching, when done well, is initially a demanding and sometimes uncomfortable process, without the active support of the team it is hardly surprising that line managers typically revert to previous behaviours at the first sign of crisis. (Anecdotally, it seems that it typically takes an average of three days for this to happen!)
Philip Ferrar, whose master’s degree examined the difficulties and conflicts faced by line managers acting as coaches, concludes that it is difficult if not impossible to be both. However, there is increasing evidence that taking a systemic approach – in which the manager and the team acquire knowledge, skills and motivation for coaching together and co-develop a coaching culture within the team – can overcome these difficulties. Examples of organizations, which have had success in this approach are University College London and retailers Asda.
Of course, teams are also part of yet larger and even more systems, but it seems that the team provides a bridge between individual and organizational learning. Teams are the most practical unit to integrate the individual and systemic perspectives and to manage the complexity of co-working. It’s not surprising then, that team coaching has emerged as a growing practice.
Nor is it surprising that there is no clear consensus about what team coaching is. In the research for my book, Coaching the Team at Work, I examined dozens of websites of consultancies who referred in their service portfolio to team coaching. Most of them were using the term to describe forms of team building, team facilitation, process consultancy or coaching a number of individuals, who happened to belong to the same team.
It’s always rather painful when someone tries to claim one “right” definition of a term, but it is legitimate to expect the term team coaching to apply to a process that involves both coaching and working with an intact team, collectively. Where the description of consultancies’ services did fulfil those two criteria, there was still a significant variation in terms of both purpose and approach. The descriptions in Table 1 give some flavour of the range of interpretations. For example, some emphasise achieving specific team goals, other improving performance and others the learning process, by which the team builds sustainable capability.
| Source | Definition |
|---|---|
| Hackman & Wageman (2005) | A direct intervention with a team intended to help members make coordinated and task-appropriate use of their collective resources in accomplishing the team’s work |
| Skiffington & Zeus (2000) | Facilitating problem solving and conflict management, monitoring team performance and coordinating between the team and a more senior management sponsor |
| Clutterbuck (2007) | A learning intervention designed to increase collective capability and performance of a group or team, through application of the coaching principles of assisted reflection, analysis and motivation for change |
| Thornton (2010) | Coaching a team to achieve a common goal, paying attention to both individual performance and to group collaboration and performance |
| Hawkins (2011) | A process, by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business |
One thing all these definitions have in common is that they focus on the team as a unit. There are at least three ways, in which team coaching is different in context from one-to-one coaching. Specifically:
- Confidentiality: even with a high degree of psychological safety, team members may be reluctant to disclose to a group of colleagues, or to admit weaknesses to their boss.
- Pace of thinking and deciding: some members of the team may reach a conclusion faster than others. Where the coach in a one-to-one relationship can adjust pace to the speed of the coachee’s mental processing, the team coach needs to be able to hold the attention and interest of the vanguard, while ensuring the rearguard are able to catch up at their own pace.
- Scope of topic: team coaching can only deal effectively with issues, in which all the team members have a stake. Sometimes this involves helping team members recognize the mutual benefits and value of supporting a colleague.
Where team coaching helps
Given the range of definitions, it’s to be expected that team coaching can be applied in a wide range of circumstances. The most common appear to be:
- When a new team is being created and needs to hit the ground running
- When an existing group of leaders needs to evolve into a team
- When an existing team isn’t performing as well as it could
- When a team wants to reinvent itself to meet challenges in its environment
- When the team acquires a new leader or changes membership significantly
- When a team is currently highly effective and successful and wants to keep ahead of the game.
The great majority of team coaching interventions appear to be at leadership team level (though this has not been validated by research). Next most common are project teams, particularly those concerned with major product launches or large-scale technological or cultural change. However, there is no reason – other than cost — why it cannot be equally helpful at any level.
So what does a team coach actually do? The roles described here come from dozens of interviews and workshops with practising team coaches around the world.
Help the team become honest with itself.
At the very basic level, this is about helping them recognise how much of a team they really are. Many leadership teams are only teams in name – a bunch of feisty individuals, who have divergent agendas, little interchangeability of roles and little dependency on each other. Establishing where they need to be a team and when provides clarity and the basis for more effective working together. Team coaching helps the team – as both individuals and collectively – become more self-aware and authentic. As one manager put it: “It’s about helping us to have the courage to see ourselves as we are — and to behave as who we are, rather than feel we have to put on an act.”
Defining the team purpose and priorities
It’s unfortunate that mission statements and other strategic paraphernalia can give a gloss of purposefulness, while underneath there is at best an uneasy consensus. In one public sector leadership team I worked with, everyone had signed up to a strategy document that was about to go public. However, the chief executive was far from sure they were actually aligned as a team in how they interpreted the words. Team coaching helped them open up sufficiently to bring these differences into the open and to gain a much deeper level of agreement about the priorities for each of them personally and for their departments.
Understanding the environment
Much of the work of team coaches relates to helping the team understand internal and external systems. For example, who are the hidden influencers and stakeholders? Managing team reputation is a common theme here. So too is helping the team face up to threats it has avoided acknowledging.
Understanding team processes
Once a team have been together for a while, it’s inevitable that routines develop and gradually these become so ingrained in the thinking and behaviour of the team, that they are never questioned seriously. Team coaching shines a light on how the team functions, on its unwritten rules and behavioural norms, and hence creates opportunities to bring about conscious change.
A good example is the Board meeting, which mostly takes place using a process of dire-logue. By observing and feeding back the processes at work, the team coach can help the team work out ways., in which it can build genuine dialogue and thus improve the quality and outcomes of the meeting.
Identifying and tackling barriers to performance
One of the classic dilemmas for teams is that recognition and reward tend to be based on individual performance, but that a lot of great individual performances can add up to relatively poor collective performance. Groupthink, lack of key skills, dysfunctional behaviours that no-one is prepared to confront – the list of barriers is endless. Team coaching again encourages the honest conversation that allows the team to identify and challenge its performance barriers.
Building the capacity to manage conflict positively
Conflict about task and process can be destructive or productive, depending on how it is managed. Relationship conflict is always destructive. Team coaching not only surfaces and, where possible, defuses hidden conflict. It also equips the team with the tools and skills to use conflict to generate dialogue and hence improve performance.
Building the team learning plan
The team learning plan defines what the team and its individual members need and want to learn, how this will contribute to the business purpose and the responsibilities, each holds to the others in helping achieve the learning goals. It is as important a document as the business plan, because it underpins targets and goals with practical ways of developing capability and capacity.
Building team trust and collective self-belief
High levels of mutual trust and collective self-belief are hallmarks of a high performing team. Neither happen overnight. Team coaching helps people articulate and align their personal values with the team values. It also helps them develop more effective habits of collegial supportiveness.
Enabling the team to coach itself
Whereas facilitation or consultancy tends to focus on solving a specific problem, some forms of team coaching aim to leave the team significantly better equipped to solve future problems without external intervention. A challenge here for the team coach is not to let the team become dependent on them.
Where is team coaching going?
One sign that team coaching is joining the mainstream include the arrival of professional development programmes to help experienced one-to-one coaches step up into this considerably more complex and arguably more demanding arena. Team coaches need to have a good understanding not just of coaching basics, but of team dynamics and team psychology, of collective decision making, of systems theory and a variety of other topics not needed in one-to-one coaching. Another sign is discussion within the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and elsewhere of the requirements to be an effective supervisor for team coaches. A set of competences can be expected for this role before too long.
It is also predictable that companies, which have so far mainly just talked about adding team coaching skills to the portfolio of their professional and lay internal coaches, will take the plunge and invest in relevant training and support. When this happens, team coaching will become much more widely used across those organisations.
Bibliography
Clutterbuck, D. (2007). Coaching the team at work. London: Nicholas Brealey.
Hackman, J.R., & Wageman, R. (2005). A theory of team coaching. Academy of Management Review, 30(2): 269–87.
Hawkins, P (2011) Leadership team coaching, Kogan Page, London
Skiffington, S., & Zeus, P. (2000). The complete guide to coaching at work. New York: McGraw-Hill
Thornton, C (2010) Group and Team Coaching, Routledge, London
© David Clutterbuck, 2015