Coaching — individuals or team?
Both individual and team coaching are needed and complementary.
While I’ve been coaching for over 15 years, and involved in leadership development even longer, most of my coaching focus has been on coaching individuals. But individuals are part of a community or team, which, in term is part of a bigger ecosystem.
I do consult on how to get teams to perform better such as planning using CBPM (Commitment-Based Project Management), Mission/Vision development, OKRs, etc. This consulting involves facilitating discussions on how to improve their performance and coaching on their joint efforts. I leverage various tools, including Patrick Lencioni’s work on team dysfunction (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team) and The 6 Types of Working Genius. And I leverage OKRs, what I knew at Intel as MBOs (Management by Objectives). A good recent book is Who Does What By How Much?
I’ve started putting both my individual coaching and team consulting together. To get better at it, I’ve been reading quite a bit. Peter Hawkins is a very well-known coach, researcher, and practitioner and his books are becoming my go-to guide. As I dig into his concepts, it becomes obvious that I can improve team performance as I coach and consult with his ideas.
Key Concept
The definition of team (or group) coaching can be confusing and it is something Hawkins focuses on. He starts by defining the various types of team coaching, something that can be confusing and that people mix the meanings. In Leadership Team Coaching he identifies nine(!) types of team coaching:
- Group coaching of team members — individuals are coached within the team, while other individuals in the team become resources for the individual being coached
- Team development — “…any process carried out by a team, …, to develop its members’ capability and capacity to work well together on their joint tasks.” Tuckman would consider this as part of the ‘forming’ and ‘norming’
- Team building — a subcategory of team development, is any process that helps a team in the early stages of development, what would be termed ‘forming’ in Tuckman’s model
- Team facilitation — a person(s) is asked to facilitate the team’s effort so that they can focus on the task. This is where the planning aspects of CBPM would apply.
- Process consultancy — a consultant observes and provides feedback on how the team is approaching the task. Less hands on that team facilitation, but closely related.
- Team coaching — one of the most confused terms, coaches have applied it to coaching the team leader, to a number of individuals (group coaching), to facilitation, to consulting, to one-off workshops. The real objective is to enable the team to function at more than the sum of its parts. The emphasis of the term is on how the team works together. He proceeds to propose a continuum of team coaching:
- Team facilitation (see above)
- Team performance coaching — coach focuses on team process consulting (above) and team performance.
- Leadership team coaching (below)
- Transformational leadership team coaching (below)
- Leadership team coaching — “…focus is on how the team collectively gives leadership to those who report to them, and also how the team influences their key stakeholder groups.” While Hawkins focuses a lot of top-most leadership in an organization, the concepts of leadership team coaching can apply to any team.
- Transformational leadership team coaching — focus not only on today but also tomorrow. Coach needs to support three horizons: current business-as-usual; innovating for tomorrow; and long-term with the focus of creating a “future-fit organization.”
- Systemic team coaching — “Systemic team coaching is a process by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve both their effectiveness and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage and co-create value with and for all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business ecosystem and create beneficial for the wider ecology.”
This is a lot! As coaches, and leaders, it helps us to understand these terms. Depending on where the team is, you can apply different types of coaching. As a coach, you would typically start coaching individuals then move on to team development and team building. You may be asked to do some facilitation and process consultancy even before you are involved in team development and team building. Based on your success, you will be able to move to the other aspects of team coaching: leadership and transformational coaching. Eventually you may be able to work on systemic team coaching.
As a leader you will be the main coach of your team as an external-to-the-team coach will not always be there and you set the example. Use these terms and concepts to help you coach.
This progression depends on the coach AND the team. Are they able to make progress or are there dysfunctions that will impede the progress? Is the mission clear? Are the strategies in alignment? Many factors come into play beyond the progression of team coaching.
Books mentioned:
Contact
Contact me at jose@coachsolera.com to find out how to improve your leadership.
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Visit my team performance coaching website: https://coachsolera.com
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