Team coaching is essential in today’s work environment. How do you improve team effectiveness? Team coaching is the answer that is effective in terms of time, investment, and effort.
Teams have become more important than ever – team coaching should too.
To deal with rapid change, organizations have become flatter and leaner. Power and decisions are decentralized. The days of a single “heroic” leader are gone. Networked team leadership is taking the place of hierarchical leadership.
Teams have become an integral part of getting work done. Most organizations get the work done through projects that involve multiple people working in teams.
An article, published in The Harvard Business Review in Jan-Feb 2016, title “Collaborative Overload,” states that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades.
To quote Michael Jordan – Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.
Synergy vs. Dysfunction on teams
It is true in sports and business. In cohesive teams, the whole is a lot greater than the sum of its parts. When teams work in synergy, they achieve extraordinary performance.
In dysfunctional teams, it is vice-versa – the whole ends up being a lot less than the sum of the parts. Egos, personality clashes, individual agendas cause a delay in work and result in the team’s underperformance. You can put a group of 6-10 high performing individuals on a team, and their performance together may be less than optimum or just downright disappointing.
More often than not, teams don’t live up to their expectations. A majority of the work teams fail to harness their full potential or utilize their team members’ collective intelligence.
Read another article – Poor Leadership Behaviors & its Collateral Damage.
Common team problems
Teams are plagued by common problems listed below.
- Lack of trust
- No alignment or commitment to goals
- Individual agendas
- Big egos and personality conflicts
- Silo mentality
- Unclear or fuzzy goals
- Unclear roles and responsibilities
- Lack of accountability
- Gossip and talking behind people’s back
- Lack of commitment
- Difficulty making decisions
- Lack of psychological safety (link to PS article)
Optimizing individual performance is not enough.
For decades, talent management has focused on measuring, managing, and optimizing individual performance. Performance management focuses on assessing, developing, and rewarding individual performance. But it is not enough.
Individual performance seldom translates into the performance of teams or workgroups.As more and more work is now done through multi-functional teams, talent management professionals need to understand and focus on measuring, managing, and optimizing teams’ performance.
What is a team?
There is a difference between a group of people vs. a work team. We all intuitively know this fact. Let’s define what a team is to clarify it further.
Here is a popular definition from Jon Katzenbach
“A small number of people with complementary skills, who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals
and approach, for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”
There are a few keywords that differentiate whether a group of people is a team or not.
- Small – It would be not easy to manage a team of 50 people – then it will have to be subdivided
- Complementary skills – diverse and complementary skills are essential.
- Common purpose – purpose fuels and drives the team members.
- Performance goals – everyone is ultimately measured against the performance goals.
- Mutual accountability – they hold one another accountable.
Let’s take the example of a soccer team. A small number of players, who have complementary skills, have a common purpose of winning the match or the championship, have performance goals (individual and team goals), and hold one another accountable for achieving the goals. A soccer team fits Katzenbach’s definition of a team.
On the other hand, if you have a group of high potentials in an organization, they will not be considered a team. They may or may not have complementary skills, nor do they have a common purpose and performance goals, and they don’t hold one another accountable.
Google spent 2 years and enormous amounts of resources studying over 180 teams to figure out the answer to the question – What makes teams successful? Read the article.
Team coaching vs.Team building
“Team building” activities get a lot of attention from learning and development professionals. When do I say the word teambuilding, what immediately comes to mind? Most people start thinking about activity-based indoor or outdoor gatherings of colleagues.
Almost everyone has attended such an activity that has a picnic-like atmosphere. These activities are fun and a welcome relief from the otherwise boring classroom training.
Participants involve themselves in indoor or outdoor games and competitive activities. Rope courses, tree climbing, races, fire walking, and dozens of other adventurous activities challenge the participants. A resort setting and a picnic atmosphere engage the participants.
All in all, it is a fun experience for the participants. The level 1 feedback (on Kirkpatrick’s scale) from such activities is usually excellent. The participants, the HR or L&D department, and the training agency are all happy doing such activities once or twice a year, especially around winter months when outdoor weather is conducive.
Do these outdoor team building activities really improve the team’s behavior and performance at work?
So here is the question. Do these outdoor team building activities really improve the team’s behavior and performance at work? The simple answer is no.
Despite the good feelings outdoor team building generates, hardly anything changes at work in terms of better behaviors conducive to developing a cohesive and high-performance team.
Singing songs, walking or fire, climbing trees, and holding hands have little to do with teams’ real-life work and behaviors. All in all, they are a waste of time and money.
Outbound team building, although popular, has done little to bring in the behavior change that can transform team cohesion and performance.
Holding hands, singing songs, climbing trees can be entertaining. But it has little to do with actual work.
Read my article on How to build psychological safety on teams.
What is team coaching?
David Clutterbuck defines team coaching as follows.
Helping the team improve performance and the processes by which performance is achieved through reflection anddialogue.
When most people think of team coaching, they think of sports teams! Very few managers and talent management professionals know about team coaching.
The above definition serves both sports teams and work teams very well.
Unlike team building, team coaching, on the other hand, is a comprehensive approach to manage team interactions at work.
It is time and resource-efficient, which is very well suited for teams who are too busy to go to training programs or indoor/outdoor team building activities.
Team coaching without time-wasting!
The popularity of individual coaching across the world acts as a testament to coaching’s effectiveness as a developmental tool.
Can team coaching also be as effective for teams, as individual coaching is for individual performance? The answer is a resounding yes!
Read my article on individual coaching or executive coaching.
Our TEAM Coaching – Year-long Executive Coaching program using Stakeholder Centered Coaching
TEAM coaching engagements create measurable leadership growth for the leader and the team as a whole using Marshall’s unique Stakeholder Centered Coaching process. The team coaching approach has several benefits.
Resource-efficient
Since one executive coach works with all team members supporting each other in this TEAM coaching process, the whole coaching program is very time efficient. It reduces coaching fees per team member while still delivering a majority of the benefits of 1:1 coaching for the leader.
Changing leaders and teams at the same time
The team articulates one leadership growth area, and each team member defines their own leadership growth area that relates to the team focus. This creates an interdependent team effort with a common focus on producing results for their individual effectiveness and team productivity simultaneously.
Create a Team Culture of Openness to continuous change
When team members collaborate as stakeholders in the TEAM coaching programs, it creates an open culture for leadership and team culture change. Furthermore, team members feel comfortable using feedback and feedforward to drive change for themselves and their teams.
Insider expertise
Team members should be able to provide expert advice and an insider view of each other as it relates to their business, their people, and their team culture challenges. They become de facto coaches.
Coaching is a leadership skill.
Some organizations use coaching as an ‘executive intervention’ or to ‘fix a problem,’ but this is a suboptimal approach to coaching. Coaching is a leadership skill, and leaders in organizations should be skilled coaches to help their teams develop and grow. As we expect effective leaders to be highly skilled in, e.g., communication, decision making, and empowerment, leaders should be highly skilled in coaching others. TEAM coaching is a great program to instill coaching as a leadership skill in the organization.
In the TEAM coaching process, team members supporting each other as stakeholders and coaches while implementing their action plans to make change visible. This program is ideal for leaders and their (cross-functional / project) teams to measurably change their individual and collective effectiveness. This happens while they lead and develop their teams, and at the same time, develop their coaching skills further to roll out this coaching process with their direct reports.
TEAM coaching can be a very effective and cost-efficient way to grow leaders, change teams, and develop the organizational culture.
Read our other article Organizational Culture Change Example – Alan Mulally Ford Turnaround Story.
Reference: Coaching the team at work by David Clutterbuck
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