Would Your Team Benefit From Team Coaching?

Team coaching – as opposed to employee training or individual coaching -- significantly improves team performance with initiatives focused on skills-building, intra-team accountabilities, and team-based confrontation of insufficient commitments to team goals.
 
To determine if your team could benefit from team coaching, consider these four instances when team coaching is recommended and the abbreviated suggestion of how team coaching would proceed. Perhaps they’ll look familiar.

1. A newly-formed team is responsible for launching a new initiative. Progress is slow. Coaching solution: Guide the team to fully honor differences in team members’ basic work styles and work-related preferences. Develop cooperative and productive communication without agendas, and develop a shared understanding of the team’s purpose, goals, and activities. Coach the team to engage member accountability so that the team will become self-directed.
2. Team members continue to view the team leader as the primary source of information. There is little agreement other than the specific directions provided by the team leader. Coaching solution: Build team leader’s ability to facilitate teaming, hold team members accountable for team problem solving, and hold the team accountable for recognition and utilization of Subject Matter Experts. Coach team members’ skills development in the same areas as those identified in the team leader’s coaching engagement – focus especially on skills associated with team members holding other members accountable.
3. A team formed specifically to create significant organizational change doesn’t function cohesively from the start. Coaching solution: Assist the team in its development of cohesion and positive relationships within the team and with other teams in the organization that support the team’s change process. Focus on commitment to goals attainment in this early stage of teaming.
4. Team members are disruptive. Cliques and internal factions create and perpetuate power struggles. Interpersonal problems within the team and with others in the organization undermine organizational progress. Coaching solution: Assure the team that despite the disruption, that this is an expected stage of teamwork development. Coach the team to return to established goals, agree upon processes, develop systems of team level checks-and-balances to help assure compliance. Help team members formulate an appreciation for each member’s contributions.

 
And, lastly, here are some suggested evidences of successful team coaching:

1. Improved team-level goal-attainment strategies -- working together
2. Shared team vision and purpose – abolishment of dysfunction associated with the impact of cliques
3. Shared goals and actions for positive employee relations and enthusiasm
4. Commitment to short-range and long-range plans to carry out the organization’s vision and team purpose
5. Improved interpersonal relations within and between teams in the organization
6. Resolve of specific interpersonal conflicts within and between teams

 
As a certified team coach, I collaborate with teams, team leaders, managers, and human resources professionals to develop and implement strategies that improve team performance. If you’d like a cost- and time-efficient way to provide coaching to several individuals on a team, team coaching may be your answer.
 
Would you like more information about this topic? Or, if you’d like a brief, confidential, no-judgement discussion of your current situation? Contact my offices at (336) 999-4533 or email me at DonnaColes.Coach@gmail.com and we’ll schedule a time to discuss your leadership dilemma and identify some options that will help.
 
Or, Click the following link to schedule your discussion with me.
https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18102228 

Until then…