INsight/ Team Coaching Works
Photo by Krakenimages on Unsplash.
Manila, 27 September 2023 — Leading positive changes wider and faster with more people.
Story
It happened last week. A leading thinker on management, leadership, and the future of work was challenging the status quo when she wrote that team coaching might make more sense than focusing on the performance of individuals. While noting that team coaching was still nascent and “probably 15-20 years behind executive coaching,” paying for whole teams to be coached would give employers better results by getting “the best from every senior person in the organization and have departments working harmoniously rather than in competition.
Those insights come from Isobel Berwick, the work and careers editor at the Financial Times and I think that they make a lot of sense. Berwick makes the case for teams to be coached on collaborating instead of competing and also explains why team coaching is more powerful than the conventional one-off team-building activities that feel so great yet are quickly forgotten afterward. In the absence of coaching, when tension and competition in and among teams are allowed to continue, she wrote that we “end up with people not really communicating with each other, duplicating work, things getting lost.” Does that sound familiar?
From my own experience coaching teams as well as individual leaders, I know that Berwick is right to advocate for more space for team coaching. While both approaches work, team coaching has several advantages that are frequently overlooked. First, it will likely generate systemic changes that multiply results. Second, it has the potential to produce outcomes faster. And third, more people will be empowered to thrive and flourish, thereby transforming the way work is done. Where I disagree with Berwick, however, is on team coaching being far behind individual coaching, and on limiting coaching to senior people. Let’s look at the challenge that organizations face to invest more in team coaching.
Challenge
Traditionally, as Berwick reminded us, the benefit of receiving coaching in the workplace has been a privilege reserved for executives and the senior staff selected to grow into manager roles. Is that still the case in your organization? I hope not. Meanwhile, to solve our 21st-century leadership challenges in the workplace and beyond, new ways of working are being invented—often called the Future of Work. We can lean into that, and it includes team coaching. However, in practice, it’s much easier said than done.
Introducing change in organizations is usually harder than you think. While talking about change for innovation and higher performance is ubiquitous, the actual practice of introducing change often runs into rapid resistance. Investing more resources into team coaching will, therefore, require conscious decisions by senior leaders who are led, or backed by the management team. That’s the number one challenge I see when it comes to introducing team coaching as part of the Future of Work.
Because of that challenge, team coaching won’t fit into every organization out there. When businesses are still favoring top-down control over an inclusive and collaborative leadership style, they are unlikely to buy into team coaching for the time being. Yet even in those organizations, the pressure is on executive leaders to find new ways to get better results with their increasingly younger Gen Y and Z staff, many of whom have new and different ideas for how best to work. Keeping in mind that change almost never happens across the board all at once, executives are well advised to look and learn from what their most enthusiastic leaders in the organization are already doing to help their teams grow as leaders.
Question
As Berwick suggested in her column, the time is right for more team coaching! Compared to the tradition of executive coaching, the benefits of team coaching can lead to positive results that spread wider and faster, and involve more people in the workplace. This includes higher engagement and better performance within teams, among teams and departments, and right across the business. It’s becoming part of a healthy 21st-century workplace culture that supports wellbeing, thriving, and flourishing in work and life. Of course, the spread of team coaching requires access to coaches who are specifically trained and certified for this work, which is different from one-to-one coaching.
What, you may ask, are popular areas for teams to work on during the coaching process? In my experience, there are as many areas to select as there are problems that teams face. No team and no situation is the same. To discover the team’s unique strengths and problems, the team coach will usually start by building a connection and exploring the team’s vision, values, and strengths. Surfacing the tension they experience will then provide essential energy for change to work. As part of the process, teams often opt to work on behaviors to communicate more effectively, embrace new ways to overcome the tension together and influence the desired change in the team, between teams, and across the business.
In all of this, working on leadership behaviors is a key to success. This week, if you act fast, you have an opportunity to get coached and learn the basics of team coaching yourself. Join us in a learning Challenge where you can practice essential leadership behaviors together in a small team (Collab) that you lead by inviting three colleagues to join you. We look forward to welcoming your Collab in Grow3Leaders, our international community of practice. In this community, our vision is to grow more water and sustainability leaders around the world. We value practicing leadership behaviors and learning out loud together in a safe space by sharing and reflecting on our experiences in our workplaces and lives. Receiving coaching and learning to coach is part of the Challenge. It’s an expression of the Future of Work that you can experience today.
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