What is team coaching and why do you need it?
In business and in life, we cannot be successful in isolation. We need team members, colleagues and support staff to help us achieve a goal. Even the star player on a football team cannot win the grand final on their own!
Coaching is no longer a term belonging solely to the sporting arena. In the last few decades, we’ve seen coaches emerge in other areas – life, financial, health and, of course, business and career. This increased reach of coaching has seen the global executive coaching market explode to the point that in 2022 it was valued at USD $8.9 billion and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 12.08% by 2028.1
This is why there is growing investment in supporting and coaching individuals in parallel with teams to ensure that individual performance and success can translate into team and business performance and success.
At Peeplcoach we specialise in leadership and executive coaching that empowers individuals to deliver success for themselves and for their businesses. Our approach includes coaching both individuals and teams, allowing us to amplify the success of leaders, their teams and their businesses.
To explain this, let’s define coaching in terms of how it differs from managing, mentoring and training, and explore why exactly team coaching has now become a game-changer for high-performing organisations.
Our simple definitions are as follows:
Coaching – The underlying philosophy of coaching is that the participant knows the answer and the coach’s role is to ask powerful questions, to guide and to challenge the participant to find the solutions they can commit to. Coaches do not give advice or tell participants what to do.
Mentoring – The underlying philosophy here is that the mentor has lived experience of a situation and will share their knowledge and experience to support and guide the participant to find solutions. Mentors quite often will give advice.
Managing – Managers generally train, direct, empower and control activities and tasks to deliver specific outcomes. They will also often give advice.
Training – Training involves participants being taught a specific skill.
Good leaders inspire, motivate and create an environment for success. They know how to balance coaching, mentoring, training and telling. They allow experimentation and failure. Poor leaders direct, control and tell only.
Coaching helps create great leaders.
The three types of coaching we practise at Peeplcoach are as follows:
Individual or executive 1:1 coaching, where a coach works confidentially and privately with one participant to help them find solutions to their specific issues and challenges.
Group coaching, where groups of individuals come together to discuss and resolve specific issues. These groups may or may not part of the same team, but they will be solving similar problems. They could be at the same level or stage in their career or in the same industry or function.
Team coaching, which is not the same as group coaching. Team coaching is one of the fastest growing disciplines in the coaching profession and is becoming increasingly important in many organisations, including private corporations, government agencies and non-profits.2 The specific purpose of team coaching is to align and support a team to achieve a shared goal more effectively and efficiently.
When coaching an individual, the focus is on that person’s self-awareness, goals, strengths, opportunities and actions. When coaching a team, the focus is not on individuals or a collection of individuals, as in group coaching, but rather on the team as a single entity: the team’s shared awareness, goals, collective actions and dynamics.3
We’ve all read the research, that diverse teams result in better business performance, enhancing innovation, strategy, financial success, and employee engagement and retention4. But the more diverse a team, quite often, the more conflict there can be and the harder it can be to achieve alignment. To optimise team and business performance it is critical for teams to work well together – to be able to trust, challenge, agree, disagree, execute and evaluate without blame, anger, frustration or ego, all in the service of agreed goals.
The team coaching approach encourages team members to go beyond their roles and understand one another’s strengths, weaknesses and aspirations. The approach creates an environment of agency and accountability, with a healthy balance between challenges and support.5
The key steps to effective team coaching and the creation of high-performing and successful teams are as follows.
Understanding and clarifying the team and business goals
Achieving alignment on goals and ensuring those goals also meet the needs of each of the individual team members
Identifying the issues, blockages or obstacles impacting the performance of each individual team member
Understanding and clarifying, honestly and openly, the strengths and weaknesses of each team member
Creating awareness and mitigating the risks of the talent or information gaps within the team
Creating a safe space for honest and robust communication
Engaging a trained and professional team coach experienced in creating alignment across disparate groups to help facilitate the team’s success.
So, why do YOU need team coaching? You need it so you can achieve your goals quicker, create a culture of trust, build commitment and alignment, increase accountability, and inspire courage. With this, teams become more effective, perform better and produce better results, not only for the team but also for individual team members and the wider organisation.
If you would like to find out more about team coaching and the impact we are making feel free to reach out to us.
Sources