Team coaching

What is team coaching?

Team coaching is coaching a work group, both as a group, and frequently the individuals of the group. During team coaching, a team coach works in the room with the team while it does its real work.

A team coach:
• Listens to the team, hearing what is being said and what lies beneath what is said
• Reflects back what is being heard, supporting awareness in the group of its own processes and elevating the group’s capacity to work together.
• Probes the team with powerful questions and challenges the team to discover and deeper levels of understanding and meaning of the things that lead to its greatest capability, and
• Supports the group while it becomes aware of and able to manage its own dynamic process.

Why is it so effective?

Diversity of perspectives and breadth of knowledge is a team’s greatest resource, yet history, fear of conflict, cultural norms and other factors often inhibit and limit a group’s ability to make use of all its own richness. In team coaching, a team learns how to use:
• Candor to bring forth the knowledge and ideas of each team member in a neutral and ‘hearable’ way.,
• Inquiry to search for, and verify information, to invite and listen to unique and different ideas and approaches,
• Initiative where leadership is shared, and each individual encourages all others to participate and commit to success,
• Conflict resolution skills to explore disagreement openly in order to surface underlying causes that are barriers and to encourage team members to work through differences in a constructive and respectful way, and
• Decision making practices to explore and compare opinions, work for shared understanding and agreement in order to reach sound choices that reflect the teams values and functions

Teams are more and more essential in the multi-disciplinary knowledge industries of today: Teams are an integral component of effective organizations working towards meeting the demands of an increasingly complex and competitive business environment.