5 Steps to High-Performance Teams

Coaching, at its best, starts with the Self and expands to Society and System. All coaching needs to be democratic. Anyone with a need should be able to access it affordably. Is this fanciful?

Coaching is an art, a learned art, and not a taught skill. As an art, coaching is transformational and holistic. Unfortunately, measured through coaching competencies and markers, the art of coaching has been mutated into a skill label.?

Much of what passes for coaching is a cognitive transactional interaction, rather than a transformational, somatic and ontological inquiry needed to evoke true awareness of unconscious beliefs. Such inquiry becomes far more critical in teamwork when multiple sensory lenses are needed. One doesn’t need credentials and certificates to coach. One needs to be a master of the art, not labels of skills. What one needs is to start with self-coaching with an intent to transform oneself, listen to oneself with love and respect, create awareness of limiting conditioned beliefs and how to overcome them, and move into anchored action. All this requires reflection, practice and commitment.?

Because of the complexities involved in coaching teams, many coaches find this more difficult than individual coaching. They offer individual coaching instead as being better suited. It may be better suited for the coach. Is it for the client?

The objective of this newsletter is to support anyone who wishes to be a coach, labelled or otherwise. All blogs in this series can be used by anyone to become a coach. Each one of us has the potential to be a coach, healer and leader. We don’t need to be labelled.

Cut to the chase, teams create companies, not individuals. Leadership crises in institutions arise from interactive, collaborative and communication issues. Though these may be about individual mindset and behaviour at the core, the solution lies in the larger framework of teams the individuals work in. Factors of how the individuals impact the team members and other stakeholders, and how they impact the individual, can only be resolved at the team level, not at the individual level. Team dynamics decide organisational culture.?

The trickle-down effect of individual coaching could be very significant and transformational to the individual. However, it does not always carry through to the organisation, unless teams too are coached along with the individual. All too often leaders regress in behaviour without adequate team support. Sometimes they leave when the organisation does not value their transformational shifts.

Why do we recommend the systemic team coaching approach to companies?

1.???Systemic coaching, which integrates team coaching with individual coaching as needed, builds effective, high-performance teams, with a shared team vision and action plan, in alignment with multiple stakeholder views. Organisational effectiveness has been proven to be based on collaborative people engagement. Anyone who believes that samurai leaders, who take no prisoners, and are loyal unto themselves, lead organisations to glory lives in an illusory world.

2.???Companies have no measures at all to evaluate individual coaching at the organisational level. When the coaching is systemic, in alignment with organisational goals, it can be measured for performance. These measures can be in terms of structure, clarity, meaning and impact in the manner described in Project Aristotle.?

3. Teamwork is far cheaper and more effective in organizational results in $$ terms. The best person in an organisation to evaluate coaching is the CFO!

Coacharya’s 5 simple steps to high-performance systemic team coaching are:

1.???Building emotionally bonded teams

2.???Envision a shared future, bringing in multiple stakeholder views, from the future and from outside as well, in alignment with institutional goals.

3.???Work through challenges of limiting belief systems, individual, team and organisational, developing options based on the awareness created

4.???Design and plan time-lined actions with individual and team accountability

5.???Implement frequent follow-up and continuous improvement?

We shall look at a Coacharya process that empowers these 5 steps in the next blog.

Reflect

·??????If you or your leader colleagues have been coached and transformed, how much of their behavioural changes have benefitted the organisation?

·??????How was this measured??

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Ram is a co-founder and mentor at Coacharya?https://coacharya.com. Ram's focus is the integration of Eastern wisdom with modern science, spiritually, systemically and sustainably. Visit Coacharya.