Teams need coaching

Over the past decade or so executive and later other forms of individual coaching has established itself as a staple of people development efforts in organisations. The cynical aspect of individual coaching is that it cloaks systemic issues in individual garb. But coaching done well is invaluable: it lights some fires in the dead wood, confidence and a new bravery grows in the clearings, and individuals with invigorated imaginations set out to create vital organisational worlds.

These worlds are large and small, but at the heart of them all are teams, those small bands of adventurers who hack away through bureaucratic thickets, upend hardened orders of power, and tend patches of possibility.

What if we afford the same quality of attention to the teams that hold the energy of organisational renewal, as we do for individuals on the one hand, and for the intractable abstractions of large systems on the other hand? ?

The work of team coaching is to help teams move between the dancefloor of action and the balcony of reflection, so that they can become better at being a team and performing as a team within their organisational world.

I focus on four team dimensions: team identity, team world, team work, and team agency, using maturation theory to understand and develop the predominant team action logic, and the #Enneagram to develop team awareness and dynamics.

The team action logic refers to the team’s strategies, schemas, or ploys for dealing with its challenges. A shift in action logic enables an expanded and more integrated perspective of the team’s work and deeper attention to the team’s internal condition to perform (the team’s reflective and learning capacity).

Working with the Team’s Enneagram profile helps it to see itself better: its character or personality, its dynamics and tendencies, its specific ways of getting stuck and recovering its mojo, the ways in which individual team members relate to each other and to the team, and the ways in which the team engages with its larger world.

Being part of a team can be the best or the worst experience of organisational life. Great teams are invaluable to the organisation – teams are where the work gets done, whether it’s the work of production or the work of transformation. Mediocre or terrible teams cost organisations not only in productivity, but in morale, and it doesn’t have to be like that.

Get your teams coaches.

It could be anybody else, but here I am, offering my services: I know my shit, and I can see bullshit as much as I can see beauty and truth; I am unafraid of my own fears, and I can meet you on the crest of the wave or at the bottom of the pit – it is all the same to me; I know my own judgemental nature well enough to encounter you with curiosity and openness; and I am on your side.