TEAM COACHING

Unlock the Power of Teaming

Team coaching is not coaching each individual on the leadership team, but coaching the entire team as a whole unit. A team is a complex, dynamic system comprised of individuals with differences in personality, upbringing, culture, working style, history, motivations, and needs. Together, these differences create the team’s unspoken values and norms of behavior. These differences also lead to conflicts and misunderstandings that prevent the team from effectively collaborating.

Choose team coaching when you want to create systemic transformation that flows from the top team to the rest of the organization. The changes we will make and the lessons you will learn will help your team break through stuckness and mediocrity to become a unified and powerful unit. Ultimately, the goal is to help you work together better to achieve your corporate and strategic objectives more easily.

Through our work together, we will:

  • Improve interpersonal collaboration and effectiveness

  • Uncover patterns and norms of behavior in the group

  • Create new norms and establish ways the group will work together

  • Increase emotional intelligence and self-awareness

  • Learn to move gracefully through interpersonal conflict

  • Experience changes in real-time

Modalities we might use:

  • Offsite Facilitation

  • Meeting Facilitation

  • Training & Teaching

  • Team Building

  • Consulting

  • Team & 1:1 Coaching

Real-Time, Real Work, Real Results

We say that team coaching is "real-time, real work, real results." This means the team coach sits in on meetings already in place and makes live coaching interventions. To do this, it is important that the team leader and team members consent to be coached live in front of the group and are willing to change their leadership behaviors.

The Journey includes Three Phases:

  1. Initial Engagement - Through assessment, observations, and interviews, we will identify the key challenges blocking your team from effective collaboration. This phase ends with the team identifying the top 2-3 topics they want to work on together.

  2. Team Coaching Delivery - Your team coach will design a bespoke journey lasting 6-12 months with team coaching as the basis. This will include other modalities (see below) that will help meet your desired outcomes while aligning with your budget. Most engagements are done with two team coaches. This phase ends once all services are complete.

  3. Closing - We will end the engagement with an assessment focussing on three primary questions: What has changed for team members individually? What has changed in the internal dynamics of the team? What has changed in the team’s role within its systems?

Team Coaching Frameworks

Throughout the journey, we will come back to the same frameworks. We bring these frameworks to the team to get grounded in a common language and approach for what reaching high performance looks like.

CASE STUDIES

  • CO-FOUNDER BURNOUT

    I’ve worked with 4 cases of clinical burnout in executive teams. In all cases, the person had to transition out of the organization and take a leave of at least 6 months. This was a challenging and confusing experience for both the individual and the teams they left behind.

    While the circumstances of each case are unique, my involvement can be summarized as both educational and supportive. I provided information to help the executive teams understand what was happening, how to spot and prevent burnout in the future, and how to communicate the leader’s departure with the organization. I also supported the leader in transitioning their scope of work and seeking help from licensed health professionals.

  • LACK OF TRUST

    A lack of trust is one of the most common challenges that I see in teams. It can appear as both “I don’t feel trusted” and “I don’t trust them.”

    In one particular case, I was working with a 5-person executive team, leading a growing team of 165. There was an ongoing conflict between 3 members that created gossip, triangling, and drama in the team. I was brought in to help resolve the conflict.

    Through interviews, we quickly identified that trust had been broken between these 3. We agreed to do a combination of 1:1 coaching, team coaching, and an offsite. In the end, we identified the source trigger, cleared the air, and repaired the relationship.

    Trust was not rebuilt overnight. It followed after a period of time when the members followed their shared agreements and used the new tools they learned.

  • BECOMING AN ORG

    In startups especially, there are key moments of transition when the founders and executives need to change their leadership approach. One of these phases is around 30-50 people when the startup becomes a real organization, and they start losing the family vibe that got them this far.

    Along with a colleague, I was called in to work with a team struggling to transition from a “group of tech-loving nerds” to leaders of a well-funded and rapidly growing organization.

    Together, we helped them restructure their executive team’s titles, roles, and responsibilities. We also invited them to ask if they genuinely want to remain tech experts or if they want to learn how to manage a team. Finally, we provided them with the training they needed to develop management competencies.

  • BRIDGING SILOS

    Sometimes organizations reach a point where their old structure no longer works as well as it should. This might be a function split across two cities or with a representative in each of 8 different departments.

    In this particular case, a key administrative function had been split across different departments. When the new c-level executive started, they quickly realized that the team did not know each other very well. A colleague and I were contacted to design an experience to bridge these silos.

    We began with a series of interviews and questionnaires that culminated in a 2-day offsite (the first of its kind this team ever had). We focussed the offsite on sharing knowledge and challenges across departments through games and activities. The participants loved how the experience was neither too cheezy nor too dull.

    The offsite ended with a comprehensive interview summary for the leader and a set of clear actions and next steps (with assigned task leads).

QUESTIONS? LET’S CHAT.

BOOK A FREE ALIGNMENT CALL WITH ME.