What is Team Coaching used for?
Team coaching is the art of facilitating and challenging a real team to maximise its performance and enjoyment in service of meaningful organisational goals.
Increasingly recognised as a transformational high-impact methodology, team coaching supports divisional teams, functional teams and top teams to navigate complex environments and deliver extraordinary results.
How does Team Coaching work?
In a fast-paced business world, teams often fall short of operating at their best because of:
- Uncompelling goals or targets unaligned with the wider organisational strategy and culture
- Unclear or obsolete decision processes
- A lack of effective communication guidelines and team facilitation routines
- A lack of a coordinated stakeholders' management strategy
- Insufficient trust among the team members, resulting in a poor capacity of handling difficult conversations – and an increased level of unnecessary anxiety, stress and discomfort in the working environment
Stumbling blocks like these can create a dramatic impact on business performance. And when they involve boards or directive teams managing entire businesses, functions or divisions, team coaching becomes vital to the health of the organisation.
Team coaches support teams by increasing their awareness of the current patterns and by challenging its members to leverage their resources, strengths and life-giving forces to enhance team processes, relationships and performance.
Getting the right coaches for Team Coaching
We are proud to offer our clients an outstanding global faculty of senior coaches, recruited and quality-assured through a rigorous international process.
Our coaches draw on a wealth of experience across a wide range of disciplines (education, business science, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience) to support clients all over the world. They can provide expertise in the following areas:
- Team foundation – establishing trust and solid processes for a newly formed team
- Team transition – supporting teams through period of change and transition
- Top team coaching – supporting CEOs and their teams to develop performance, envision the future and deliver extraordinary results for the organisation
- Navigating complexity - supporting senior teams to successfully navigate change, complexity and turbulence
- Strategic direction – facilitating high level teams in creating a compelling vision, strategy and culture for the future
- Managing conflicts – supporting conflict emergence, management and transformation to liberate team potential
Each team coaching programme is bespoke to your unique context, goals and needs. In general, it includes a mix of the following steps:
What does a typical team coaching programme look and feel like?
During this initial phase we gain an initial understanding of your requests and needs. We scope out the programme, identifying key indicators and measures for success.
We hold a kick off meeting with your team, briefing everyone about the aims and scopes of the programme.
Depending on the context, we can undertake a qualitative and quantitative team performance assessment. This will identify strengths, motivational forces and areas for further development. Diagnostic methods can include online assessments, stakeholder interviews and focus groups.
We may undertake interviews with individuals in the team to build rapport and trust with the coaches. Participants will learn about the methodology and aims of team coaching, then we will support them to identify personal learning goals.
As a way to directly tackle the main goals and priority needs of a team wanting to develop its performance and relationships, we often open the team coaching programme with an intensive 1 or 2 day Team Development workshop. In this meeting, which can be face to face or online, team vision and goals are clarified and aligned, and the team starts action planning the priority initiatives to enhance its processes, navigate conflicts and develop positive relationships and working culture.
Sessions are of variable length (2, 4 or 8 hours) and aim to facilitate the team in delivering results while developing effective processes and functional relational dynamics. During the sessions, the coach provides feedback, observations and reflective space to build team awareness, challenge unproductive dynamics and leverage unused strengths.
We run a final team evaluation session at the end of the team coaching programme, where the team reflects on its learning and achievements, celebrates successes and maps out the road ahead. After this stage, we can also undertake an ROI (Return On Investment) analysis to ensure we have met or exceeded your success measures.
Let's talk
Our global team of partners has over 200 years' experience of working with individuals, teams and organisations.
We'd be happy to talk to you about your own requirements and goals, and craft a solution that is specific to your situation.
