What is Team Coaching?
What follows is pretty much consensus from across the board. When you look at all of the activity that falls under the Team Leadership Development banner, all of which we at PHQ are involved in – it can be divided it under several headings.
Based on Dr Declan Woods article “Team Coaching or not team coaching, that is the question”, published in Coaching Perspectives, 2020
Team consulting
Team Consulting encompasses assessments followed by recommendations, strategy development, advisory and support. Very important, worthwhile, valuable and highly sought after but it's not Team Coaching.
Team building
Team Building tends to be made up of games simulations structured group experiences delivered during special events external days out designed to help a team in the early stages to form and get to know each other. Very familiar to many, again very useful sought after but not Team Coaching.
Team facilitation
Team Facilitation typically takes the form of a workshop, anywhere from a couple of hours to several days. Quite structured and run by a facilitator to ensure that an agenda, tasks and/or functions are completed.
PHQ has done a lot of these very successfully with great results. But again, not Team Coaching.
Team development
Another stream of leadership development falls under the team development heading. More related to using tools and exercises to help teams function better often using specific work activities.
Group coaching
Group Coaching is a facilitative process that leverages the resources and knowledge of a group of individuals working on a common theme but having different individual performance goals.
Unlike Team Coaching, in Group Coaching individuals do not need to achieve common objectives for which they are interdependent but have in common just a theme or competency all of them want to develop.
Team coaching
This brings us to Team Coaching.
The view that PHQ takes is that Team Coaching is coaching the entire team, in the moment, doing regular work.
That means providing insights, observations and suggestions [that we call ‘moves’] to help the team identify behaviours or pattens occurring in the moment.
This is the accepted thinking around what specifically forms Team Coaching.
The challenge is it requires a confident adroit and considered use of observation and ‘moves’ – nothing about that is simple and easy to achieve and can be a bit of a tight-wire act.
But it’s very powerful.
It requires the coach to not only be skilled and experienced but confident in their ability to be involved in the moment, in the thick of it, whilst not be leading the discussion.
It also requires a lot of the team. They need to be comfortable with the observer. It does not mean they necessarily have to take up the ‘move’ suggested; it doesn't even mean that they allow for the interruption - because right where they're at - they don't want to be interrupted.
Nonetheless that is the part the team coach is playing. They are there by permission/invitation and importantly the meeting is not theirs – they are not running it.
Consider Jurgen Klopp on the side of the field observing his team in action. He determines they could perhaps consider a different course of action to get a better result and he asks permission of the referee to interrupt the game momentarily and provide some insight or observation to his team. The referee restarts the game from where they were and now they get the opportunity to try it differently.
Somewhat inconceivable in the heat of a Premier League match between Liverpool and Man United - but very conceivable in the midst of a team undertaking some really critical and important work in a business environment.
Powerful, immediate, fluid, reflection in-action. Right at the pointy end of things.
If you're interested in finding out more about what team coaching is or how it may be useful to your team book in a 15 min call with me.
About the author
Jacqui Ferris is a respected Executive & Team Coach, with over 20 years’ organisational experience, working in organisations across Australia and New Zealand.
Her key focus areas include coaching senior leaders and teams to create a shared focus and undertaking, which in turn creates value for their organisations, and stakeholders.
Jacqui is the Managing Director of PHQ. She and her colleagues design, deliver and embed tailored individual & leader development programs for organisations.