Intact leadership teams
Team coaching
Work with a leadership team on how it leads together: alignment, decisions, accountability and trust, examined against the results the team collectively owns.
Definition
What team coaching is
Team coaching works with an intact leadership team, over time, on how it functions as one unit. The team examines how it aligns, decides, holds accountability and handles conflict, in service of the results it is collectively responsible for. The coach works with the team as a system, not as a set of individuals.
My view, from running leadership teams and coaching them: goodwill built off-site rarely survives the first genuinely contested resource decision. Teams change on live stakes or they do not change at all.
Starting points
When teams bring me in
Team coaching is for teams whose collective functioning has real consequences. Typical starting points:
- A capable set of individuals who do not yet operate as one leadership team.
- A new leader inheriting a team, or a team absorbing significant new members.
- Strategy has changed and the team must lead differently from how it was built to lead.
- A country leadership team caught between local reality and the expectations of a regional or global headquarters.
- Decisions are slow, revisited or made outside the room, and everyone can feel it.
- Accountability between peers is soft: commitments are made in the meeting and quietly renegotiated after it.
- A merger, restructure or crisis has left residue the team has not worked through.
The shape of the work
How an engagement works
Diagnosis before design
The work starts by understanding the team as it actually operates: conversations with each member and the team leader, observation where useful, and a clear picture of what the organisation needs from this team.
Sessions with the real team, on the real work
Team coaching happens over a series of working sessions with the whole team, using its live agenda rather than exercises. The team practises new ways of deciding and challenging on matters it actually has to decide.
The team leader stays the leader
I coach the team; I do not run it. Part of the work is strengthening how the leader and the team work with each other, which cannot happen if the coach becomes a substitute chair.
Measured against collective outcomes
Success is contracted at the start in terms the sponsor cares about: the quality and speed of decisions, the follow-through on commitments, how the team handles its hardest conversations.
Distinctions
What team coaching is not
Most of what is sold to teams is not team coaching. The distinctions are practical, not academic.
Not team building
Team building generates goodwill through shared experience. Useful, sometimes. But goodwill built off-site rarely survives contact with a contested budget decision. Team coaching works directly on those decisions.
Not facilitation
A facilitator helps a team get through a meeting well. A team coach helps a team change how it works between and beyond meetings, and builds the capability to do it without the coach.
Not training or workshops
Training delivers a model of teamwork. Team coaching works with this team, on its actual dynamics, over enough time for behaviour to change and hold.
Further reading
My perspective on the situations teams bring me:
- What Cannot Be DelegatedYou can delegate the how. You cannot delegate the why.
- Personality Predicts Behaviour. Culture Predicts Interpretation.Culture explains the terrain. It does not explain the person.
- AI Solved the Tasks We Gave It. It Exposed the Decisions We Had Not Made.AI solved the tasks we gave it. It exposed the decisions we had not made.
A short introduction
Short videos
Group and team coaching
The difference between an intact team with shared accountability and a cohort who share a challenge but not an operation. 1:56
Questions
Common questions
- How is team coaching different from group coaching?
- Team coaching works with one intact team on its collective performance; the unit of work is the team. Group coaching works with a set of leaders from different teams who share a developmental context; the unit of work is each individual, supported by the group.
- Does the team leader need to be part of it?
- Yes. A leadership team cannot change how it works while its leader stands outside the process. How the leader and team work together is usually part of the work.
- Can this be combined with individual coaching?
- Often, and deliberately. Some team members benefit from individual coaching alongside the team work. Boundaries and confidentiality between the two are contracted explicitly.
Is this the right approach?
Bring the situation you are dealing with and I will tell you whether this is the right approach for it, whether another one fits better, or whether coaching is not what you need. The conversation is confidential and carries no obligation.