Team development, team building, team training, team coaching: They all amount to the same thing – right? Not really. Systemic Team Coaching focuses on helping the team to improve its collaboration. Systemic team coaches support teams to develop a collaborative learning environment, where team members clarify their purpose as a team.
Through a structured team dialogue, they work together to learn more about themselves as individuals in the team and abo
ut the team in its wider systemic environment. There are no instant hits or quick fixes, but when teams commit to working together with a team coach, the collective learning environment brings opportunities to sharpen the focus on what is the team is all about. The team coach supports the team to develop solutions that help move it towards its progress towards it ambitions.
Interested in exploring a team coaching solution for your organisation? Here are three big benefits to consider:
Collective Success: While one to one Executive Coaching tends to focus on individual success, team coaching focuses on the team and its wider environment. Today, teams are more and more aware of the need to continuously work on being a team. Navigating the complexities of organisational life, particularly with cross cultural teams and remote working, means that much more time and care needs to be invested into building the human ties, ways of working and mutual trust that provide the platform for high performance teams.
Systemic Lens: Team Coaching also brings the key external stakeholder groups into the picture, connecting the team to those who have influence and interest in its success. The coach supports the team to evolve behaviours and processes that will support the team to develop its partnerships with its key external stakeholders.
Long Term Gains: Successful Team Coaching needs a conscious investment of commitment and time. The investment ultimately pays off when the team builds a culture and a rhythm that can be sustained long after the coaching finishes. For top teams, investing in team coaching pays off for the entire organisation. By helping the top team to develop a collective leadership approach, Team Coaching supports leaders to model ways of working and thinking for the whole organisation. At its best, team coaching has the potential to facilitate organisation transformation.
Relevance: Team coaching is a custom-design process. Considerable time is invested beforehand, to ensure the Coach understands the team, the organisation, the individual team members and the wider systemic environment. The goals of the team coaching process, the methodologies and the desired outcomes are co-designed with the team and its sponsor. In this way, everything about the team coaching process is designed to be uniquely relevant to the team and its environment.
Essentially, it is the congruence of team coaching that sets it well apart from other team interventions. Team coaching focuses on helping the team to build internal congruence so the team members work in concert in leading their own functions and the wider organisation and its stakeholder landscape.Team coaching is recognised as a potentially powerful intervention that can promote the health of an organisation, sustain high performance and support teams navigate the increasingly VUCA environment with which they are faced.