The Power of Team Coaching

In recent years, more and more organizations have implemented coaching with internal or external coaches to unleash the potential of their people. Coaching is a great way to raise awareness, expedite growth and development and foster a culture of continuous learning. It is used widely by individuals in professional sports as well as executives across all industries. Individual executives or pro athletes receiving coaching is great but what it is missing is the fact that no one operates in a vacuum. We are all part of groups or teams. Why is it then that most coaching is focused on individuals?

To avoid any doubt, there is tremendous value in individual coaching. However, In order to take an organization to the next level, it is often important to engage a whole leadership team. This could be individual leadership coaching sessions combined with a team coaching approach. The reason this is so powerful is because it provides deep insights into team dynamics and can bring about powerful positive change in the whole organization through the power of alignment.

The Toxic CMO

At one of our last engagements we were asked to work closely with one member of the leadership team, the CMO. People across the organization highlighted the CMO's poor communication skills, toxic behavior and lack of emotional intelligence. The engagement originally was intended to simply coach the CMO, raise awareness, resolve the issues and move forward from there as a more cohesive leadership team.

However, during one of the first sessions with the CEO we wanted to understand more about the situation, how long it has been going on for and most importantly, why the CEO hadn't done anything about it until now. It turns out, the CEO was very conflict averse - which is quite common actually - and instead of facing the brutal facts and having the tough conversation, the CEO let it slide repeatedly. That undermined the CEO's own standing in the organization and led to a toxic culture across the leadership team.

That told us, coaching only the CMO would not "fix" the situation. The CMO might be a key element here but we needed to address the leadership team as a whole to develop a culture that is built on trust, constructive conflict and alignment. We therefore switched gears and turned our engagement into a team coaching approach.

Team Coaching Process

So, what exactly does team coaching look like? We follow our methodology based on coaching standards established by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and various leadership models established by experts like Patrick Lencioni, Brene Brown, Simon Sinek and more. This provides a robust evaluation framework of where the leadership team is right now, creates a shared pool of knowledge and allows us to establish collectively where the client wants to be. Our approach is as follows:

Step	Team Coaching Activity
1.Individual interviews with team members	As the first step, we conduct in-depth interviews with the individual team members. That allows us to get the full picture and different perspective on the current challenges as well as group dynamics.
2. Gap assessment	From there we identify the gaps between the status quo and the desired state to conduct a gap analysis. This highlights opportunities for development and helps us focus on our team coaching plans.
3. Debrief with the team	At this step, we share our results with the leadership team and discuss the findings. This is oftentimes truly fascinating as the reaction to our findings and the initial feedback shared tells us a lot about the level of awareness and potential blind spots across the leadership team.
4. Determine collective leadership development areas	Now that we identified the gaps and shared them, it is about prioritizing and aligning them across the team. Instead of us deciding or the CEO dictating it is of utmost importance that these priorities are established as a team.
5. Coaching in leadership meetings and one-on-one	We shadow leadership meetings and step in during sessions when we identify areas of improvement. Depending on how comfortable the client is, we either do it right there in the meeting or debrief right after. That allows us to build awareness of team dynamics and individual roles. It also allows us to build new collective leadership skills. In addition, we follow up with individual coaching sessions one-on-one to give each individual room to share their aspirations and challenges in a safe space.
6. Reassess against the gap and the desired state	At regular points throughout the engagement we reassess to check how the progress has been so far and where we need to course correct. What new patterns have emerged and what do we need to focus on next?

Meet the new leadership team

Now, what happened to the client with the toxic CMO? Did they make it? We are happy to report that they indeed come out stronger and more aligned than before. The "toxic CMO" was a symptom but the underlying issue was the risk and conflict avoidance across the team, especially the CEO. Our team coaching and facilitation provided the right language and the safe space for the leadership team to voice their opinion and thoughts in a constructive manner. The leadership team now has a lot more clarity of their desired state and how they want to communicate as a team. We often share Patrick Lencioni's "Five Dysfunctions of a Team" as a model to provide a "shared language" and during the engagement the team developed a much better foundation of trust and engaged proactively in constructive conflict.

That does not mean that the leadership team is perfect and there are still challenges remaining. But they have taken the most important first step and built a very solid foundation to take their organization to the next level.

What challenges are you facing and have you engaged in team coaching? We would love to hear from you. Feel free to leave us a comment or send us an email.