Team coaching - how to get dressed

The challenge

In my work as coach and supervisor, I often come across experienced 1:1 coaches who either, i) coach teams and wonder why they do it – it’s so different and so hard, ii) have coached teams and have now stopped, or iii) have no intention of ever trying to coach a team. Yet there are short course programs out there, their content based on generic skills and competencies, purporting to help 1:1 coaches become good at coaching teams in just a few days. What’s going on?

Notice we are not being encouraged just to work with teams, we are being encouraged to work with teams in a unique way. We are encouraged not to become mere team facilitators, or team builders, or consultants – we are encouraged to become team coaches. ?Team coaches are different, according to some, because they:

·?????? seek to improve the performance of teams

·?????? engage teams in dialogue

·?????? work with teams only in the medium-term and not the short-term (1).

The ICF differentiate team coaching from other disciplines by saying that team training, consulting and mentoring are all directive (coaching is not), team facilitators pay no attention to team dynamics, team coaching is always a long term intervention focussed on achieving goals (none of the other disciplines are), and all the expertise and ownership sits with the team. The ICF also suggest that the team coach is obliged to point out these differences to prospective clients. But do these distinctions really make sense? For example:

Surely some facilitators and team builders are also working to help teams perform better? Is

If two people adopt the same approach to working with a client in one session, but only one person goes on to conduct further sessions with that client, does that mean that one person is coaching and one person is not?

Are all consultants and mentors really directive? And team coaches are never directive, even though the ICF competencies say it’s sometimes OK?

Would all team facilitators agree, that in their quest to help teams work more effectively together, they never pay attention to team dynamics?

All the expertise in team coaching sits with the team? I have met few teams well versed in team effectiveness – surely this is an area where any practitioner can add value, including team ‘coaches’?

People will continue to try and create clear boundaries between team coaching and other disciplines, but ?it all seems rather convoluted. Why do we need to make these distinctions? Is it really so important to create this boundaried practice? And how many of us are stood clapping and applauding while a lot of us strive to create something unique and special - without properly challenging that work?

The industry

Once team coaching had been invented, then people were bound to ask the coaching associations what it is, and how to become one. And the coaching associations have responded by defining standard competencies and accreditation processes. This inevitably means defining in even more detail what a team coach does, as opposed to what others do when working with teams.

In The Wise Team Coach (2) we explore in detail the different team coaching competencies of the ICF, EMCC and AC. They have commonalities. All three associations tend to position the team as a stable entity (though there is plenty of evidence to suggest this isn’t always useful (3)), they all distinguish team coaching from at least team facilitation, and they all say that the team coach needs a good understanding of team dynamics. And they are different. The ICF model is very clear that the team is the client, not the team leader and is particularly specific on differentiating team coaching from other forms of intervention. The EMCC model is full of references to systems and systems thinking, specifically theories of complex adaptive systems. The AC model is probably the least directive on the face of it but, as I learned through exploring their accreditation processes, they take a very competency-specific approach.

So, we have decided team coaching is a real thing, different to other disciplines, and we have tried to differentiate it in such detail that we can assess who’s doing it right and to what level of competence. But it’s hard to differentiate team coaching from other disciplines, and so it’s perhaps not surprising we accordingly have multiple competency frameworks. The associations might respond by saying that their competencies are the outcome of research, but we need to understand the nature of that research.

The research

Most of the research involves asking experienced team coaches what they do, then distilling the answers into a set of competencies. Or asking team coaching experts what they think and similarly summarising their responses. The results are interesting and useful, but that doesn’t mean we should think of them as definitive. For lots of reasons. First, who’s to say you need to distil all these approaches down into one? Perhaps they all work well? Perhaps your own approach works just as well? We have scant evidence to tell us that particular ways of working lead to great outcomes (4). ?

Second, as Bachkirova & Lawton-Smith point out, this is a process of looking backwards to decide how best to work moving forwards (5). That’s not an approach that always works. What worked well yesterday may not work so well as teams continue to adapt to changes in the organisational environment.

The three association’s competencies are different. Once you understand the process by which they were created, this makes total sense. In a world in which the boundaries between team coaching and other disciplines are not clear, each association spoke to different groups of coaches, and so different sets of competencies were bound to emerge.

How then to get dressed?

The emperor is not naked. All the work that has gone into trying to define team coaching as something unique, and to articulate this new discipline in a set of very detailed competencies, has produced useful insights, but the work goes too far. The emperor’s new clothes purport to be something they are not. To get dressed through this lens is to preoccupy ourselves with a somewhat arbitrary set of rules and processes and to treat it as gospel. The emperor’s new clothes may feel ill-fitting and coarse and may not lead to us being especially proficient in our work.

So, looking to mimic the emperor’s new clothes may not be the right way to get dressed. Instead, we might decide to first, embrace the journey. We won’t learn to become a brilliant team coach overnight.? We must do the work and keep doing the work and look for inspiration wherever we may find it. Second, we need to look beyond these new boundaries. If that means leveraging insights from facilitators, team builder, mentors, and consultants, then so be it. They have a wisdom we can learn from. Our work is multi-disciplinary and wide-ranging. And third, the best way to decide whether or not we are doing a good job is to look to the outcomes of the work we do.

To get dressed this way demands that we decide for ourselves what kind of a team coach we want to be, including some explicit reference to what we think coaching is and what it means.

?The 3Ps

The coaching associations sometimes say that the purpose of competency frameworks and accreditation is to ensure we all adopt similar approaches to the work so that the client knows what they are getting. This seems somewhat fantastical. Every team coach is different, just as every 1:1 coach is different, and the sophisticated client understands that. The client nevertheless does want to understand what you do. Without a competency framework to point to, we must articulate for ourselves and others, how do we do the work?

?I’ve written about the 3Ps before and so will just provide an overview here. If you’d like to know more, The Wise Team Coach will provide you with more insight and guidance and ?help you work through your team coaching 3Ps. The 3Ps encourage you to define your own:

Philosophy - what underpins your practice? What values, beliefs, and formative experiences? Which models and frameworks inform your practice – and why?

Purpose - why do you do the work? How do you know if you’ve been successful?

Practice - if I were a fly on the wall, what would I see you doing as you work through team assignment?

?If you want to know whether or not you are a good team coach, then you need to address the purpose question. Part of defining your purpose lies in deciding for yourself – how do I know if I’m doing a good job? In writing The Wise Team Coach I asked more than 50 team coaches those very questions. Some pointed only to the client. If the client was happy – job done. Pleasing the client does seem pretty important surely, regardless of what competency frameworks may say. Others pointed also to internal criteria. If I’ve succeeded in helping the team to think more systemically, for example – job done. If those internal criteria are well considered and thoughtful, that seems important too.

Getting dressed

Getting dressed, I would suggest, is about doing the work and reflecting on that work. It’s about accessing everything you can find about helping teams to become more effective, including competency frameworks and books and going on courses, and making sense of those materials with others. Try out new stuff and reflect on how that went. Continue to build what Ralph Stacey called your ‘practical judgment’ (6) and recognise this is a never-ending journey, a challenging and, for some, rewarding journey. But the satisfaction and reward need to come from achieving what you feel to be important, not in complying with someone else’s narrative as to how you should be going about your work.

In doing so we let go of the idea that we need a standard rigid definition of what it means to be a team coach. We let go of the idea we need to clearly distinguish ourselves from other people working with teams. Instead, we are free to do the work we do, continuing to learn and develop, refining our sense of what it means to do excellent work, working by ourselves and always engaging with others as we continue to make a difference. The 3Ps help us to define who we are and how we are similar/different to others in our field, and they help us get super-clear to ourselves, and to everyone we talk to, about how we choose to try and make that difference.

We design our own clothes.

Our approach to team coach development

In this last piece we outline (at a high level) how we help people become better at working with teams. No need to read on if not interested.

Some features of our team coaching program:

One, we accept anyone onto our programs who feels confident to engage. That may well be a coach. Or it may be a facilitator, a consultant, or a team builder. If you know how to coach 1:1 then you have good relevant skills, and so do people with other skills.

Two, our program has been approved by a coaching association. The EMCC liked the program because they recognised you can only ever provide indications as to what constitutes good practice. They liked the reflective nature of the program and the value of the 3Ps approach.

Three, our program is practical. We provide lots of exercises, tools and techniques. We learn through doing and reflecting on that doing.

Four, the program is experiential. We work with small groups, no more than six people, and we ask everyone to run one session. With six people or less, it’s not too scary, and you get lots of great feedback from your peers.

Five, the end of the program is the beginning. We have ongoing speaker programs and the opportunity to engage in ongoing group supervision, all in service of becoming more confident and capable over time.

If interested, check us out (www.teamleaderim.com) and/or have a read of The Wise Team Coach – due out very soon.

Notes

1.??From the introduction to The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Coaching by Clutterbuck, Gannon, Hayes, Iordanou, Lowe & Mackie (2019). A great read.

2.??Published soon -https://www.google.com/search?q=wise+team+coch+routledge&oq=wise+team+coch+routledge&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKABMgcIAhAhGI8C0gEIMzI2OWowajSoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

3.??See the 10 debates QRL (https://leadingsystemically.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/QRL-102-Final.pdf) or The Wise Team Coach.

4.? Jacqueline Peters & Catherine Carr. Chapter seven of The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Coaching.

5.??Tatiana Bachkirova & Carmelina Lawton-Smith. From Competencies to Capabilities in the Assessment and Accreditation of Coaches. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 13(2), 123-140

6.??Ralph Stacey wrote lots of books. A good starting point is Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management. Meeting the Challenge of Complexity.