Team Coaching

When talking to clients about team interventions, they speak about ‘lack of collaboration’ and ‘silo based thinking’. It’s not that people wake up with the intention to not deliver as a team, but often organisational structures, systems and individuals are not set up to support and enable team based working – leaders are generally rewarded for individual outcomes.

I use a model called Adaptive Leadership when working with teams. It is all about empowering the team to do the work itself. In order to engage with this modality, it’s important to spend some time in diagnosis before intervening in the team dynamic. Getting really clear on what is going on underneath the surface. What are the ways of thinking, doing and being that are helping and hindering the team? How are they truly hearing and responding to their stakeholders’ needs? What is the quality of the conversations that the team are having? What holds them back? Where are they using their unique gifts in the service of others? Where are they willing to risk being uncomfortable in order to grow? A quantitative analysis is used to support or challenge this qualitative data.

It’s important to engage with key stakeholders to gain an objective perspective on how the team is tracking. This is done through dialogue and questions to elicit team performance, strengths and areas for improvement.

After this themes are presented and a partnership agreement is crafted with you in order to co-create a meaningful experience for your team which could last twelve to eighteen months.

The team coaching phase comes next where a range of interventions are used from observation of team meetings, to setting up systems and processes to serve your team working together more effectively to workshop style experiences, where the team get to experience a range of modalities like adaptive leadership, emotional intelligence, appreciative enquiry, high performing team strategies, presence based leadership, meaningful dialogue and self-awareness tools to name but a few.

It is important to be able to hold a space for the team by facilitating them through projects, dialogue, ideas, frameworks and thinking rather than the traditional mode of training. This is deep facilitative work and can initially be confronting for individuals as it is truly about empowering them to be accountable and to see where they are creating their own pitfalls in the system.

After working with a team for a period of twelve months, a thorough, formal evaluation is conducted. Then an ongoing recommendation is co-designed with you so that the work continues in a meaningful way.