Team Coaching

The Approach & Method

The team itself is a living system, that is it operates within your organisation’s context and construct; and interacts with other systems that are both completely external to your organisation.

This proposed approach for your team’s development is designed to be an outside-in, future back view of the team’s whole environment and focuses on the five disciplines of successful team practice.

A differentiator of this approach and model of team development is the “activities” and order in which activities are undertaken is co-designed by the team with the support of the coach. This means the team’s learning agenda is set by them and the team coaching, supporting the learning journey, is about the team’s performance AND team process. It uses the team’s and the organisation’s need for performance as an opportunity to reveal the processes at work. Team coaching improves team performance and team processes by which performance is achieved through reflection and dialogue.

The Five Disciplines

The five disciplines of a highly functioning team are:

• Commissioning; for a team to be successful it needs a clear commission from those who bring it into being. This includes a clear purpose and defined success criteria by which the performance of the team will be assessed.
• Clarifying; having ascertained its commission from outside itself and assembled the team, one of the first tasks for the new team is to internally clarify its collective endeavour.
• Co-creating; it is one thing to have a compelling collective endeavour, clear purpose Strategy, process and vision that everyone has signed up to; living it is a completely different challenge. If the mission is not going to just stay as a well-constructed group of words, but have a beneficial influence on performance, the team need to constantly attend to how they creatively and generatively work together.
• Connecting; being well commissioned, clear about what you are doing and co-creative in how you work together is necessary but not sufficient. The team only make a difference through how they collectively and individually connect and engage with all their critical stakeholders.
• Core learning; this fifth discipline sits in the middle and above the other four, and is the place where the team stand back, reflect on their own performance and multiple processes, and consolidate their learning ready for the next cycles of engagement.

The sequence and domains is shown in the diagram below

Cycling through the five disciplines

The high-performing team needs to be effective in all five of these disciplines. Although there is clearly an implied progression for moving through these disciplines, they are a continuous cycle. As the context in which the team works changes, the team and particularly its leader have to engage in re-commissioning with those that provide their legitimacy to operate. This then requires re-clarifying their internal mission as a team and co-creating new ways of working effectively together to deliver the new agenda, while re-connecting with the stakeholders who need to be aligned and brought into the change. The model is cyclical rather than linear and requires internal flows that move it beyond the sequential.

To Begin

As already outlined there is no “one way” to achieve this, nor is there a ready mapped pathway that will over time permit the team to maximise its learning opportunities. As all ready hinted at, Team Development is situational, it will be driven by some of the urgent day to day needs of both the organisation and the team, and the longer term requirements of the team’s development to meet and achieve the team’s mandate.

The team coaching model used is the CLEAR model (Contracting, Listening, Exploring, Action and Review).

There are two phases of work, in order to form the basis of the co-design piece ahead of the ongoing team learning, a prologue phase is undertaken and involves:

• initial exploratory discussions, with you and any team leader/s and possibly the team sponsor. This piece needs to be kept to a minimum as the focus is on the team as a whole and any perceptions that the “development” is going to be done to them needs to be minimised.
• some form of inquiry process about the team's current functioning, aspirations and coaching needs. This step involves an introduction of the coach to the team either face to face or via email, and explanation of what’s to come; followed by a meeting with the team for a conversation to clarify the aspirations and team goals.
• some form of discovery and diagnosis co-created with the team about their current state and development objectives, and a co-design of a possible coaching journey. To do this the team completes a questionnaire which is collated and the results played back to the team.

The ongoing team development phase contains: Contracting; Listening; Exploring; Action and Review.

As already outlined this flow is never just linear, since we cycle back into contracting before and after the listening phases and again throughout the repeated cycles of exploration and action. Often the review stage is also the time when re-contracting may happen.

This phase is undertaken within the team’s normal work activities, with the coach sitting in on meetings, away days and so on, to coach the team’s growth and learning processes. The coaching emphasis is to grow the teams capacity to “coach itself” in growing and maintaining the five disciplines. Over time less and less of the coaches time is required by the team.

More Detail On Team Coaching

Set out below are definitions of the terms used and a deeper explanation of the five team disciplines.

Team Development Definitions

Team Development – Any process to develop team members’ capability and capacity to work well together on their joint task.

Team Training – Focuses on content to be learnt. Is usually classroom based and taught by experts. It achieves a transfer of knowledge & skills. The coaching approach is minimal.

Team Facilitation – focus on an output. Facilitator led session to resolve an issue or problem. The learning about team dynamics is secondary to the output of the session. Often a single event & off site session.

Team Coaching – focuses on output AND team dynamics. So is about the performance & process of the team. Learning how to learn is a major focus. And coaching approach primary methodology. The use of reflection & dialogue; questions & feedback is the way the team understands and learns. The coaching usually takes place within the teams usual context of work.

Peter Hawkins’ Team Coaching Model

This approach uses co-design to set the teams learning agenda and team coaching is about performance AND process, it uses the team’s and the organisation’s need for performance as an opportunity to reveal the processes at work. The aim of team coaching is to improve performance and the processes by which performance is achieved through reflection and dialogue.

The approach and method is based upon Peter Hawkins’ Team Coaching model. Hawkins defines systemic team coaching as:

“Systemic team coaching is a process by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business.”[1]

The Five Disciplines

The five disciplines of a highly functioning team are:

• Commissioning; for a team to be successful it needs a clear commission from those who bring it into being. This includes a clear purpose and defined success criteria by which the performance of the team will be assessed. The team leader then has to select the right team members who will have the right chemistry and diversity to work well together so the team will perform at more than the sum of their parts. The commission needs to include the support that the commissioners will give to the team; a good commission should include: targets; resources — people, financial, administrative, technical, accommodation, etc; information; education — learning and development; regular, timely and appropriate feedback; technical and process assistance.
• Clarifying; having ascertained its commission from outside itself and assembled the team, one of the first tasks for the new team is to internally clarify its collective endeavour. The collective endeavour is a challenge that the whole team find compelling and that they realize they can only achieve by working together. The team also need to develop their own mission and team charter, the process of creating this mission together leads to higher levels of ownership and clarity for the whole team. The mission includes the team's: purpose; strategic narrative, goals and objectives; core values; vision for success; protocols and agreed ways of working; roles and expectations; key performance objectives and indicators.
• Co-creating; it is one thing to have a compelling collective endeavour, clear purpose Strategy, process and vision that everyone has signed up to; living it is a completely different challenge. If the mission is not going to just stay as a well-constructed group of words, but have a beneficial influence on performance, the team need to constantly attend to how they creatively and generatively work together. This involves the team appreciatively noticing when they are functioning well at more sum of their parts and also noticing and interrupting their own negative patterns, self-limiting beliefs and assumptions. A high-performing team also need effective processes and agreed behaviours, both for their formal meetings and for engagement outside meetings. This includes growing their collective capacity to handle conflict and contention in service of the greater system.
• Connecting; being well commissioned, clear about what you are doing and co-creative in how you work together is necessary but not sufficient. The team only make a difference through how they collectively and individually connect and engage with all their critical stakeholders. It is through how the team engage in new ways to transform the stakeholder relationships that they drive improvement in their own and the organization's performance.

There are three main strategies that teams use in connecting to their wider system. These are:

• ambassadorial: communicating about what the team is doing and raising its profile and reputation;
• scouting and inquiry: discovering what is happening and changing in and for customers, competitors, partners, investors, regulators and the wider environment, and how these changes will create opportunities and threats for the team;
• partnering: developing and managing partnerships with other teams inside the organization and beyond that can deliver greater value to the team's stakeholders than the team can do by themselves.
• A high-performing team will have an effective and constantly updated stakeholder map, with role clarity on who has lead responsibility for each critical stakeholder. This relationship owner needs to ensure that all three processes are being handled well on behalf of the whole team. In doing so it is important to recognise that it is the type of external communication that occurs rather than the amount of external communication the team engages in.
• Core learning; this fifth discipline sits in the middle and above the other four, and is the place where the team stand back, reflect on their own performance and multiple processes, and consolidate their learning ready for the next cycles of engagement. This discipline is also concerned with supporting and developing the performance and learning of every team member. Collective team learning and all the individual team members' learning go hand in hand, and all high-performing teams have a high commitment to both processes. Successful teams attend to both team member well-being and long-term team viability by ensuring: a) social support; b) team conflict resolution; c) support for team members' learning and development; and d) a positive team climate. A key part of core learning is the team collectively attending to maintaining and developing these core elements.

Defining the Benefits

The following expands upon some of the phrases used in Hawkins’ definition of team coaching to further reinforce the benefits derived.

• Both when they are together and when they are apart: some teams believe and act as if they are only a team when they are together, but the team functions between meetings when its members are carrying out activities on its behalf.
• In order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together; team coaching is there not only to help create process improvement but also to impact on the collective performance of the team.
• To more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder group; Collective leadership is not just about running and transforming the business internally, but also about how the leadership team engages the various stakeholders in a congruent, aligned and transformational way. These stakeholders include customers, suppliers, partner organizations, employees, investors, regulators, boards and the communities in which the organization operates.
• To jointly transform the wider business: to just respond to the changing context or lead what the team are overtly responsible for is no longer sufficient. The team need to take responsibility beyond their locus of control to how they will deploy their influence to develop the wider business and larger systemic context in which they operate. This is done by focusing on how they will enable the leadership of others (staff, customers, suppliers, investors, etc).