SPEED to Team Performance

Vision of leaders needs the muscle of teams to fulfil.

Coacharya

Coacharya’s SPEED process integrates individual and team coaching in a systemic approach to create high-performance teams, to resolve organizational challenges.?

The objective of this newsletter series is to democratise coaching and enable everyone to practice coaching at work and life. Each one of us has the potential to be a coach, healer and leader. We don’t need to pay for labels.?Please use them to develop yourself as coaches. Post any queries you have. They will be responded to.

Collective Enhancement over Individual Drawbacks

In any institution, Military, Church or Corporate, individual leaders, however, celebrated they are, acknowledge that without collaborative team effort, they would not have been successful. Those who did not fail. In corporate and social institutions, in this age of informational-based power, leadership is distributed and collective. Leaders who identify, inspire and influence individuals with abilities succeed. This is not the age of samurai leaders, loyal solely to their ambition.?

In earlier blogs, we looked at frameworks of Google’s Project Aristotle and Coacharya’s 7 steps to high-performance teams. Now, we look at Coacharya’s SPEED process that integrates these powerful frameworks. As in any coaching, especially systemic teamwork, the coach works with uncertainty, not knowing. Any process is only a guideline. The coach’s intuition and energy of the team are the support systems.?

SPEED Collective Coaching Process

SPEED process is for collective visioning, turnarounds, crises, culture change, and projects with specific functional goals. For best results, the team should be cross-functional and cross-hierarchical, selected for familiarity with the theme of the selected goals. With ~12 members, the first part of the process would take ~16 hours, after which the Coach would meet with the team monthly over 9 months, for ~3 hours each, to follow through progress on planned actions. The team leader role can be rotated.?It’s helpful to have two coaches in teamwork, who may shift roles, one of who whom observes verbal and non-verbal expressions, even as the other interacts with the team. An effective mix of individual and team coaching over the 9-month period would be six team sessions along with three individual coaching sessions. Not all leaders in a team may need to be individually coached.

Preparatory Work to determine SPEED Goals

A climate or cultural survey is needed if the overarching objective is a cultural change or a turnaround situation that would need a mindset shift. A survey tool that evaluates both individual and organisational belief systems would be best. Following the survey,??brief conversations are held with all team members to elicit their views as well as their stakeholders, on what they provided in the survey. Inputs from the survey and interviews are discussed between the coach and the organisational sponsors to frame the coaching objectives in SMART format, as much as possible.?

Sharing Strengths?

This first stage of ~ 8 hours is to build the team. Focus is on building an emotionally bonded team, with interdependability, and a psychologically safe and trusted environment for the team to work in. General contracting on confidentiality, as well as organizational purpose, is established. Team members share vulnerably, strengths and insights from successes and failures in the past, with collaborative and appreciative support from team members. No critical comments are permitted.?Objective is to create an emotionally bonded and interdependent team in a psychologically safe space

Presenting Future?

At the next stage,?the team moves from the present reality to co-create a vision based on the organizational goals shared with them. If the team is large, it can be split into subgroups, and their outcome visions synthesized. This is best done as a creative right-brain activity with visuals. This and the remaining 3 stages take ~ 8 hours. Objective is to create a shared vision comprising goals that aligns individual aspirations with the institutional meta goal.

Exploring Options?

In this third stage, the gap between present situational reality and the envisioned future is explored from 2 perspectives

·??????Limiting beliefs of individuals, team and the organisation as to challenges

·??????Gaps that exist in knowledge, skills and learning?

Quite often teams will develop action outlines as options at this stage, without limiting themselves to budgetary resources. This stage also requires a right-brain approach.?Objective is to create awareness of challenges rooted in unconscious and limiting beliefs and reframe them to move towards the goal.

Establishing Structure:?

In this 4th?stage,?resources and budgets are calculated in groups with functional expertise.?Most corporate groups have familiarity with this left-brained process.?Objective is to list action steps, what may be the support needed to overcome challenges, timelines and financial resources.

Developing Action:?

In this last and crucial stage, the team takes responsibility and accountability for all that it has created thus far, creating specific timebound individual and team ownership actions, to be followed through for six to 12 months depending on the project complexity. One or two team members are given the responsibility to create a detailed dashboard, which can be reviewed by the team internally once a month, and with the coach once a month.?Objective is to anchor all that was committed to in accountability and create a detailed process sheet to accomplish the goals.

A more detailed version of the SPEED process, which has been updated in this post, is?here .

Organizational benefits through the systemic team coaching SPEED process are threefold, and especially valuable at CXO level policy and decision-making leadership teams, in terms of?

1.????Building collaborative emotionally bonded teams

2.????Greater value than individual coaching interventions

3.????Evidencing value for the money spent on coaching?

Try this approach and see the results for yourself.?

Reflection

·??????How well do senior leadership teams at the CXO level collaborate in your company?

·??????What value does coaching the leaders have in building leadership teams in your organisation?

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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.