How to Build a Positive Workplace (Part 2) - Team Coaching

Have you ever considered team coaching as a strategic way to increase the effectiveness?

In the previous article regard Effective Teams, we understand how important an effective team is toward the organizational performance. Now you could consider team coaching as a strategic way to increase the effectiveness in this article.

Just as the name suggests, team coaching is coaching delivered to a group of members who collaborate professionally. While it can involve individual coaching sessions, it primarily targets the collective, flexing different ‘muscles’ to enhance their cohesiveness and capabilities.

Benefits of Team Coaching

• Builds collective awareness: giving group members insight into each others’ strengths and weaknesses.

• Increases collective intelligence: when they use that knowledge strategically.

• Improves communication: reducing conflict, bottlenecks, and preventing organizational silos.

• Enhances team culture: allowing for sharing, creative risk-taking, and innovation.

Team Coaching Model

Several team coaching models have been developed for practitioners as the strategy becomes more common. Perhaps the most widely known example, Hawkins’ 5 Disciplines of a Highly Effective Team proposes a multi-disciplinary approach to team coaching, in which five key elements are emphasized for successful team practice.

Under this framework, coaches support teams with:[1][2]

• Commissioning – Helping teams establish a clear purpose, success criteria, and co-working capabilities.

• Clarifying – Supporting them to clarify their purpose, goals, values, roles, and expectations.

• Co-creating – Creating collective awareness about a team’s dynamics and performance.

• Connecting – Coaching a team to collaborate effectively in pursuit of their goals.

• Core learning – Empowering the group to develop, adapt, and support themselves in the organizational and wider business environments.

By helping teams and their members develop these capabilities, coaches empower them to create a sustainable environment for high-performance, creativity, and effectiveness.

Team Coaching Techniques and Methods

Coaching a team is not entirely the same as working with individuals. It involves techniques and methods that account for group dynamics, and which consider key areas such as communication, collaboration, and culture.

There are three extremely useful techniques in practice proposed by the professional team coaches at Henley Business School:[2]

• Developing team purpose and values: Helping members establish a meaningful collective purpose and work processes, as well as clarify their values and strengths.

• Developing relatedness: Facilitating intra-team conversations to share feedback and build trust – ultimately to increase members’ awareness of their individual strengths and development points for improved performance.

• Developing awareness: Here, the focus is a team’s collective strengths and weaknesses in their environment, e.g. by rating their performance against a framework like the 5 Disciplines.

Team coaching can be a highly effective strategy for improving performance and firmly said by ICF that it’s considered as the long-term benefits to an organization’s culture that can really make a difference.

Reference:

[1] Hawkins, P. (2017). Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership, 3rd ed. London: Kogan Page

[2] Henley Business School. Coaching in Action Guide. Retrieve from https://assets.henley.ac.uk/v3/fileUploads/Coaching-in-Action-Guide-Team-Coaching.pdf

Thư Lê (Ivy)

Positive Psychology, APA Certified | ICF 70-hour ACSTH Certified Coach | Career Coach, Life Coach & Healing - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - ivythule.substack.com

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