Why team coaching? Because sometimes the challenge belongs to the team
Why team coaching? Because sometimes the challenge belongs to the team
September is EMCC Global Team Coaching Month, so the timing couldn’t have been better for us to launch our latest CMI qualification at Boo, the CMI Level 5 Award in Professional Team Coaching.
EMCC Global’s Team Coaching Centre for Excellence is using September to bring coaches, leaders and those interested in team coaching together to explore and develop the practice. Across the month, more than 40 coaches from around the world will be involved in conversations about the impact, challenges and future of team coaching.
And it feels like a conversation worth having.
We spent much of our first morning with our new Boo cohort exploring a really important question: why team coaching?
We started by looking at the differences between 1:1, group and team coaching. In 1:1 coaching, the focus is one person and their personal or professional goals. Group coaching brings several people together to learn and develop, although they may each be working towards different individual goals. Team coaching is different because we are working with an existing team with shared goals, helping them improve how they work together and achieve collective outcomes.
The conversation quickly moved beyond definitions and into what this actually looks like in our workplaces. So many of the challenges we see in organisations don’t sit neatly with one individual. They exist in the relationships between people, in how decisions get made, in the conversations that aren’t happening, in the habits a team has developed over time and, sometimes, in the things everyone knows but nobody quite wants to say out loud.
You could coach every individual member of that team and do some really valuable work. But if the challenge belongs to the team, surely at some point we need to work with the team?
The team becomes the client
This is one of the biggest shifts when moving from 1:1 coaching into team coaching.
At Boo, our definition of team coaching is about empowering a team to grow safe and trusting relationships, find how they work best together and collaborate to reach their full collective capability, purpose and goals.
This sits closely with the way EMCC Global describes the practice. Its Team Coaching Framework focuses on helping teams collectively achieve both their task work and their team work, using professional dialogue to increase reflection and self-awareness and challenge the team’s thinking and behaviours so they can develop their own sustainable solutions.
That last bit matters. Team coaching isn’t about a coach arriving to tell a team how to work better. It is about helping the team develop the awareness and capability to do that for itself.
We aren’t simply coaching several people at the same time. We are coaching the team, which means paying attention to what is happening between people as well as what each individual is saying.
Who speaks first? Who doesn’t speak at all? Whose opinion carries the most weight? How does the team disagree? What happens when there is tension? Are people able to challenge each other, or do they politely agree in the meeting and have the real conversation afterwards? Does everyone understand what they are there to achieve together, and are they actually behaving in a way that helps them achieve it?
This requires us as coaches to zoom out. We need to notice patterns and relationships, understand the wider system and work with the dynamics that are happening in front of us rather than seeing each person in isolation.
The skills we use in 1:1 coaching still matter enormously, but team coaching also asks us to work with live dynamics, challenge safely, remain emotionally steady and have authority without taking control.
The benefits and challenges go hand in hand
Our group identified plenty of benefits to team coaching. It can build trust, improve communication and listening, create greater clarity around shared goals and purpose, strengthen relationships and collaboration and help a team understand and improve how it works together. Ultimately, this can have a real impact on team effectiveness and performance.
Of course, none of that happens simply because we put everyone in a room and call it team coaching. We are working with different personalities, expectations and needs. There may be existing conflict, difficult relationships, hierarchy or power dynamics. There are also important questions about boundaries and confidentiality, particularly where a sponsor or senior stakeholder is involved, and we need enough trust and psychological safety for people to speak openly.
Psychological safety was an important part of our conversation because it can easily become confused with everyone feeling comfortable and getting along.
Healthy teams don’t agree all the time. People challenge each other, bring different experiences and perspectives and sometimes have difficult conversations. Creating psychological safety isn’t about taking that away. It is about creating an environment where people can disagree, challenge and say what needs to be said without fear of what will happen to them as a result.
As a team coach, our role isn’t to jump in and fix things when those conversations become uncomfortable. We need to be able to hold the space, stay curious, challenge when needed and help the team explore what is happening for themselves.
So why not just coach everyone individually?
There will absolutely be situations where 1:1 coaching is the best intervention, and others where group coaching is exactly what’s needed. They do different jobs, and part of being a good coach is being curious about which approach is going to make the biggest difference.
If someone wants to explore their own leadership, confidence, career, behaviours or goals, 1:1 coaching may be perfect. If several people are learning and developing around a common theme but have their own individual outcomes, group coaching can be incredibly powerful.
But if the issue is how an established team communicates, collaborates, makes decisions, deals with conflict, understands its purpose or works together to achieve something collectively, coaching everyone individually may only get us so far.
We see this regularly in organisational development. An individual can be sent for coaching because there is a perceived issue with their behaviour or performance. But when we look beyond that individual, sometimes there is a much wider team or system issue sitting behind it.
Perhaps one of the most useful questions we can ask before offering any coaching intervention is therefore: where does the challenge actually sit?
If it sits predominantly with an individual, coach the individual. If several people would benefit from learning alongside each other while pursuing their own goals, group coaching may be right. But if the challenge sits in the relationships, behaviours and dynamics between people who need to deliver something together, perhaps it is the team that needs the coaching.
Team coaching isn’t about creating the perfect team
Team coaching isn’t about making everyone agree, eliminating conflict or creating a team where everybody skips happily into work every morning. Lovely though that would be.
It’s about helping teams become more aware of themselves. How do we behave together? What helps us perform at our best? What gets in our way? What do we avoid talking about? What do we need from one another? What are we collectively trying to achieve and are the ways we are currently working helping us to get there?
The team coach doesn’t arrive with all the answers. Our job is to create the conditions where the team can have the conversations, notice its patterns and find more of those answers for itself.
In workplaces where people are dealing with constant change, uncertainty, stretched resources, competing priorities and pressure to deliver, there is something really powerful about shifting the focus away from “What does this person need to do differently?” and asking “What do we need to do differently together?”
Want to add team coaching to your coaching toolkit?
With September being EMCC Global Team Coaching Month, there probably couldn’t be a better time to explore what developing your own team coaching practice might look like.
That’s exactly why we’ve added the CMI Level 5 Award in Professional Team Coaching to our qualifications at Boo.
This isn’t just about learning another coaching model. Learners explore the team coaching process, team dynamics, stakeholder relationships, ethics, contracting, different models and approaches and how we measure the impact of team coaching. Most importantly, they put that learning into practice by coaching a real team, with observation, feedback and reflection built into the qualification.
If you’re already a coach and want to build your confidence and capability to work with teams, we’ll be running another cohort of the CMI Level 5 Award in Professional Team Coaching.
As always with Boo, you can expect practical learning, plenty of conversation, opportunities to practise and a supportive space to develop your own approach rather than being told there is only one “right” way to coach a team.
If you’d like to join our next cohort, get in touch with Team Boo and we’ll send you the details.
We know what a difference great coaching can make for individuals. Imagine what becomes possible when we bring that same curiosity, challenge and belief in potential to the whole team.
