Can you coach a team? Absolutely, and you should

This month's BIASED BRAIN ask what team coaching can and cannot do for the success and well-being of your team.?

1. Transform through collective learning

First, a friendly reminder: NO amount of team coaching can make up for a lack of a clear commision.???

So if you find it hard to define your team's reason to be, it's purpose, roles and responsibilities, you need to take a good, hard look at whether your team's commision is clear. If not, talk to your board or senior leadership team.?

We have super-condensed Peter Hawkins' book, "Leadership Team Coaching. Developing Collective Transformational Leadership" in this newsletter. We can only recommend that you get your dirty mitts on this book as soon as possible - it is super useful, well-researched and well-written (Just a recommendation - no kick-backs for us).

In this short video, Hawkins explains the five things that a team needs to have in place and continously work on in order to deliver excellent results:

1. A clear?commission?- why are you here and what are your succes criteria? This is the OUTER purpose of the team
2. Clarifying?- the strategic narrative, roles and expectations, KPIs and core values. This is the INNER purpose of your team
3. Co-creating?- this is how your team create together INSIDE the team: Your ability to solve conflicts, your behaviours, your communication etc. - in short: Your team culture
4. Connecting?- this is how your team work with stakeholders OUTSIDE the team.
5. Core-learning?- this is the team's ability to reflect and learn. From each other, from mistakes, from successes. This is the most important part, and is a?continous process that needs to be an integral part of the team's day-to-day work

Hawkins has a lot of research and examples to back up his model and the book is not a "heavy" read, but rather engaging and relatively hands-on.

We use the model every time we evaluate and?coach a team, and have done so many years. We find it simple, sufficient and it's systemic approach is coherent with the way we coach individuals.

Leadership Team Coaching?(Link to Saxo - also available on e.g. Amazon)

TEAMCOACHING WITH HEXES

“Senior leadership teams, like other teams, need expert help in learning how to become better at working together over time.” Wageman et al

A collective IQ of 60... Hear Peter Hawkins explain - in just shy of 5 minutes - why above-average intelligent?people can perform way below average as a team

2. Energy doesn't care

It flows where you direct it

Be it towards a collaborative and supportive culture or a competitive and abusive culture. And no, you can't have a competitive culture within a supportive, collaborative and safe team. If you compete, one can lose while the other win, thus making a joke of a common goal and a common result. And no, competition does not make everyone strive for excellence. It makes everyone keep things to themselves, thus diminishing the overall intelligence and innovation power of the team.

Instead, strive for psychological safety, vulnerability, strength in collaboration and strong experiences together as a team.

This is what we do in?our outdoor programme for leadership teams: DOWN & DIRTY

3. This month's article looks at the unicorn that is high performing teams

High performance teams - a beautiful thought

Do you know that feeling? Your team has just had a tight deadline on a project that has involved a lot of planning, coordination, meetings, test runs, odd working hours, internal milestones, room for mistakes, discussions, conflicts and pressure.?It was a cohesive team effort. Everyone took ownership and responsibility, the roles were clear, and you managed to get all skills into play, team members shared knowledge and the communication was concrete and constructive focusing on the common goal. You delivered on time and with the best result.?

What you and your team experienced here was most likely to be a?High Performance Team.?Would you be able to do it all over again in five days? Quite possibly not...

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

HEXES

#teamcoaching #leadership #cocreation #highperformance #leder #behavior