#186 Three principles and 10 top tips for Team Coaching
Principles
One fundamental principle of team coaching is to ascertain whether you’re working with a team at all. Many organisational ‘teams’ are actually groups of people who happen to sit on the same organogram. Take, for example, the following two senior leadership teams:
Team 1: The senior leadership team of an HR Function, where the Director of HR has five heads of service reporting to him: HO Payroll, HO HR Advice, HO Employee Relations, HO Business Partnering and HO Learning & Development. He runs weekly team meetings, where each HO reports on their pressures this coming week and, led by the HR Director, they interdependently work out how they can support each other so that all the work of HR is accomplished this week. They feel like a team – nobody in the team succeeds unless and until they all do. Everything that needs to be said is said in these regular meetings so that it is available to everyone. They are in it together. They also meet quarterly to review strategic performance and annually to set strategy. In psychodynamic terms, they operate in ‘work group’ mode, focusing on the real tasks of HR.
Team 2: The senior leadership team of a Finance function where the Director of Finance has five heads of service reporting to her: HO Management Reporting, HO Financial Reporting, HO Finance Operations, HO Financial Planning and HO Taxation. She runs monthly team meetings, where each HO reports on what’s happening on their patch, and once a year, they discuss and set Finance Strategy. However, there is little interdependency between them, and she could line manage each of them separately via one-to-one meetings. The extent to which they feel like a team is a moot point, which vanishes when any one of them is under stress. In psychodynamic terms, they operate in ‘basic assumption’ mode. Basic assumptions are typically ‘fight/flight’ (I’m only interested in protecting my patch) or ‘dependency’ (I’ll leave it up to the boss to tell us all what to do).
I would argue a ‘team’ coaching assignment for the Finance Function in this example represents group coaching, whereas for the HR function, it might represent true team coaching, depending on the goals. In group coaching, the coach is there to provide the scaffolding to enable personal change, and each person can take something different from the work. In team coaching, the team is working on a common goal, and nobody succeeds unless and until they all succeed. That is not to suggest there’s anything wrong with group coaching, or a ‘team’ being run as if it were a group. It’s just that they are different, and the team/group coach needs to be aware of what they’re working with.
In both team and group coaching, the coach is responsible for providing structure. Groups and teams benefit from predictable structure (check‑ins, exploration, decision‑making, reflection) while still having room for emergent issues.
Principles
Group coaching and team coaching are not the same thing.
Team coaching is fundamentally systemic: patterns, alliances, roles, and shared meaning matter more than individual performance, and the leader of the team must be included.
Do not coach individual team members if you are coaching the team – remember, anything that is said must be available to everyone; otherwise you are colluding in converting the team to a group.
TC Tips - beginnings
Contract clearly with the whole team: a robust team coaching contract sets expectations, roles, boundaries, confidentiality and success criteria.
Start with a diagnostic (but keep it light and participatory): use interviews, observation or a simple team effectiveness model (such as Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions or the Drexler-Sibbet High Team Performance Model) to understand dynamics. Avoid heavy assessments that overwhelm team members in engaging in the process.
Co‑create purpose, goals and ways of working: teams perform better when they jointly define their collective purpose, priorities and behavioural agreements.
TC Tips - middles
Attend to group process, not just content: new team coaches often focus on tasks and discussions rather than how the team is interacting. Naming patterns (eg dominance, avoidance, fragmentation) is core to team coaching.
A good structure is to give people space to articulate who they are and why they are in this team. Then move on to the team ‘why’ before getting into ‘what’ they are here to achieve collectively at work, and therefore in the coaching.
Then you can start on the real work of the coaching: how will they achieve together?
The structure of your team coaching needs to consider boundaries. Explicitly discuss:
External boundaries between the team and the rest of the organisation. Is this more open (which brings stimulus for innovation), or more closed (which forms a tight-knit team identity)?
The internal boundary between the team leader and its members. Open boundaries here often indicate healthy delegation, whereas closed boundaries indicate control.
Intra-team boundaries (ie between team members) can be open (interdependent) or closed (independent). Closed boundaries here might evidence that you’re working with a group rather than a team.
Hold your own boundaries and role firmly: team coaches play multiple roles (facilitator, coach, observer), maintain neutrality and avoid being pulled into organisational politics or taking on a role or responsibilities that are not yours to take.
Team coaching is about team dynamics: how distant are the team members from each other? Consider using a constellations approach or exploring values or a team charter. Explore the internal and external reputation of the team, their behaviours, any historical trauma, and recognise longer-standing colleagues, or even those that have left and their ‘ghost’ remains.
TC Tips - endings
Encourage collective reflection and shared learning: team coaching is about shared meaning-making. Build reflective practices into every session.
Evaluate progress regularly with the team: use simple measures like a team temperature check, clarity of purpose, quality of dialogue, decision-making effectiveness and/or stakeholder impact. Review these together and adjust the coaching approach accordingly.
