Team Coaching- There is no I in change

As a business we are dedicated to helping our clients design and realise the change they want and need to see in the teams and organisations they lead.

The journey to realising that change is never easy. Every organisation has its own set of challenges, nuances, context and complex human relationships and the person leading the journey has a particular burden to bear.

They have to ensure the right course is set, protect their team from external forces that might threaten to divert them and ensure everyone within the team believes in the need to start the journey and is motivated by the destination, with the knowledge that the destination is most likely just a first stop.

The temptation is for leaders to confront these challenges by believing that the solution can and should lie solely with them. The “hero” leader will concentrate on fist thumping moments of oratory to rouse the troops and head off towards the horizon, often at the detriment to team cohesion and a shared vision. At the other end of the leadership spectrum, the “leader as servant” will literally take the burden of the journey as theirs alone and create an equally unempowered team, who feel untrusted by their “parent”

The hardest part of leading a team through change is for the leader to accept that to successfully complete the journey, they have to facilitate their team to design and realise change together. The I has to become we.

The “Where are we going?” question is obviously hugely important and we spend a lot of time facilitating offsites for leadership teams, to collaborate and co-create a collective answer.

The next question – “How are we going to get there?” – is partly about roadmaps and project plans, but crucially also about changing behaviours and outlooks. If the place you want to get to is a different place you are starting from, then different things need to happen, things need to change.

Getting a team of senior, confident people to do things differently in organisations that have conditioned them to think in a certain way is hard, but we have found a Team Coaching approach to be effective and transformative.

Coaching is a powerful way of getting individuals to articulate and achieve change in themselves but in a team context, it can lead to individuals pulling in sightly different directions, unaware that their peers are striving to achieve the same goals. 

To use a sports team analogy, a team full of superstar athletes with their own fitness coaches will be at the peak of their own abilities, but without a single coach to identify a team goal they will achieve much less.

Our Team Coaching approach starts with a short workshop to help the team identify a single team goal aligned with an overall change goal, often created in an offsite.

Individual coaching sessions focus on how the individual can help the team achieve the collective goal, with the added benefit of coaches being able to share insights from coachees amongst themselves and help identify areas of blockage and growth.

Those areas are then brought back into the team context in supporting workshops within the Team Coaching programme. Using journaling, observed coaching and exercises around Growth Edges and Psychological safety, we can help the team reflect on their progress, commit to action and help the leader understand the team dynamic.

Committing to a process that involves all of a team in designing and implementing change, can seem daunting at first, somehow alien to the perception of how a leader should behave. Similarly being coached as a team, demands a sense of shared trust and responsibility from the leader and all of the people in it. 

Our experience of change and running Team Coaching programmes in particular, suggest that the initial feelings of vulnerability and uncomfortableness are replaced with a sense of real hope and achievement. In the words of one of our Team Coaching clients “I didn’t think it was possible to learn this much and feel this differently. If you’d said to me when we started, ‘trust me - this is where you'll get to’ I’d never have believed you.”

If you would like to find out more about our Team Coaching approach please get in touch.