This blog is about team coaching as a leadership and organizational development tool.
An effective team coach can support workplace teams to become highly functioning and perhaps more than the sum of their parts!
Leaders will often acknowledge that a well functioning team contributes to achieving business results. It is true, a team of people, working well together can excel at the delivery of services, completion of tasks, the discovery of innovative approaches to old problems. Typically, this is because the team has figured out how to work together, co-responsible for achieving goals and receiving rewards, in a way that brings the talents of each person forward.
By their nature teams are made up of people who are diverse in talent, motivation, gender, age, education, life circumstances and culture. When this diversity is recognized and engaged the team dynamics can be creative, energetic, well functioning and productive.
A team coach supports team members and leaders to create a culture of trust and safety that allows each member to contribute fully. Team coaching creates the space for dialogue that supports the development of working agreements, behavioural contracts, conflict resolution practices, awareness of personal strengths and style and a culture of openness and experimentation.
The team coach functions within the context of the business and group dynamics and the challenges and opportunities in the broader organizational system and the business environment.
From an objective place the team coach may facilitate, troubleshoot, inform, challenge or provoke new thinking and behaviours within the team. The team coach is not a team member, or an advisor, yet holds the team accountable to its values and processes. The team coach can create the opportunity for team members to stretch for new goals and ways to contribute to their success.
Look for a team coaches’ value in the cost of a poorly functioning team.
When the diversity and strengths of a team are not acknowledged the dynamics can become a liability. A poorly functioning collection of people without a purpose; an unfocused, unmanageable assembly that underperforms and requires reactive leadership attention, incurs turnover cost, loss of customers and inefficiencies caused by conflict and inertia.
A team coach who has the capacity to understand your business environment, human relationships, conflict resolution, the line between teaching and facilitating and who is curious and agile with multiple perspectives to bring objective support can bring great value to your team.
Let’s talk about this and other leadership challenges. brian.duggan@marathonhrcg.com