From Surviving to Thriving: The Team Coaching way
The way we work within an organization has definitely changed. Organizational design, working spaces, team structures were already seeing a shift, this year has only catapulted those changes. Efficiency and productivity though have always been a priority and in recent times have taken fore front position not only at an individual level but at a organizational level as well.
Often when organizations plan on improving productivity, they focus on individual development. Majority of performance appraisals measure individual performance. If we want better performance, productivity, consistency and innovation wouldn’t it be more efficient to focus on team performance, development and coaching. I do not want you to think that individual development should be ignored rather an equal emphasis on team development is required.
In a world where most organizations are agile and leaning towards methodologies like Scrum, Kanban and the like, a greater demand has been placed on teams to move from performing to excelling. We have moved beyond taking our teams through the traditional stages of forming, storming, norming and performing. Every individual in a team is expected to collaborate and work together and everyone expects that all team members are able to or know inherently how to work as a collective group. After all, each of us have been a part of team at some point in our lives. This unfortunately is one of the many misconceptions why some teams underperform or in worse case scenarios develop toxic behaviours that effect the end goal.
If you’ve played in a team sport in the past or do so now you know that the roll of your coach is to not only improve the performance of the entire team but also look out for those that are not performing to the best of their ability and to help them succeed to those levels.
Whether we are leaders of physical or virtual teams how we understand what will make our teams tick or the underlying challenges that may affect our goals in future? Organizational leaders have steadily started leaning towards using Team Coaching as a catalyst to drive performance. Coaching has always followed an approach of support and guidance versus a more traditional formal feedback session. The purpose I believe, to accelerate and improve long term performance has been one of the many reasons why leaders and organizations have favoured coaching. If we were to look at the statistics for individual coaching alone, we know 99% of those coached were satisfied with the overall experience. Coaching has shown to improve work performance by 77% and provided companies an 86% return on investment. How much more then are the benefits of coaching on team performance?
(figures taken from the International Coach Federation ICF Global Coaching client study).
Team coaching like individual coaching provides structure, support and empowerment and helps teams learn, practice and develop new behaviour over time. If you have had an opportunity to coach another person you would know that it is essentially bringing an awareness to the person’s already existing skills, abilities and opportunities that creates the greatest change. So, it is with team coaching where being aware of each one’s personalities and strengths can change be driven to achieve a greater sense of collaboration.
Coaching works best because it actively and intentionally helps teams integrate new practices over time. It focuses on sustainable success rather than short term and works on underlying abilities to deliver results. As Aristotle rightly mentioned, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. The phrase aptly defines the concept of synergy. For anyone who has worked in a team or played a team sport you would be familiar with the acronym T.E.A.M (Together Everyone, Achieves, More). Thanks to the recent study done by Deloitte on 2019 Human Capital trends and ICF, 70% of organizations are introducing or increasing their use of team coaching and 65% view the shift from functional hierarch to team-center and network based organizational models as important or very important.
I believe I am one of the 80% of L&D professionals that believe we need, now more than ever to develop leaders differently. Do you think Team coaching is the answer to 21st century company challenges?