An Introduction to Team Coaching

What is Team Coaching?

Henley Business School provide the following description of team coaching:

Team coaching helps teams work together, with others and within their wider environment, to create lasting change by developing safe and trusting relationships, better ways of working and new thinking, so that they maximise their collective potential, purpose and performance goals.

What can team coaching deliver/what are the benefits of team coaching?

Team coaching focuses on unlocking the potential of each team member and encouraging the team as a whole to be highly efficient.

It establishes a new quality of relationships within teams and organisations, empowering an invisible force that drives collective progress, creates recognisable difference and adds value to a company by increasing optimism, competence and performance.

Team Coaching Outline Process

A typical team coaching process would involve at least four coaching sessions with the entire team, over a period of 4-6 months and could be delivered in person or via MS Teams/Zoom.

The team coaching programme will follow a set process as follows:

1. Preparation

This would typically comprise 121 short interviews with each member of the team to establish how the team operates and whether it is open to development at this stage. It could also involve some form of short survey.

2. Scoping & contracting

Agreeing what the coaching aims will be and how it will be carried out.

3. Process skills

Addressing the skills that will be needed by the team to make the most of the team coaching sessions.

4. Team coaching sessions

These are structured in order to gain the most from each session, encouraging participation of all members of the team.

5. Process transfer

Where the team gradually takes over the management of the coaching conversation, no longer needing the coach to lead the process.

6. Assessment

A review of the outcomes and benefits derived from the team coaching initiative.

Outline Team Coaching Approach

Taking a systemic perspective to identify contexts in which individual teams may function well or poorly in order to identify opportunities for change and improvement, the coaching approach will cover:

1. Purpose and motivation

What the team is there to do.

2. External processes, systems and structures

How the team interrelates with its multiple stakeholders.

3. Relationships

How people work together.

4. Internal processes, systems and structures

How the team manages workflow, supports each other, and maintains high quality of communication.

5. Learning

How the team responds to its changing environment and maintains continuous improvement and growth.