Team coaching is not consultancy, advice-giving, team building, or training. Team coaching develops teams to be able to self-manage, self-learn, and ask themselves the right questions. Team coaching provides teams with the skills to self-develop and provides lasting sustainable change over time.
Team coaching aims to increase the performance of the team by building future capacity and capability.
In this blog, we explore how to develop teams with team coaching using the PERILL model that is expertly detailed in “Coaching the Team at Work” by David Clutterbuck.
Purpose and Motivation
Team coaching brings focus to the team's shared purpose. A shared ‘how’ this will be done, what goals will achieve the shared purpose, and what tactics are needed to keep the goals on track.
Team coaching creates the space for the team to reflect on how aligned individuals and the team are and how psychologically committed everyone is.
External Systems and Processes
Who are the team’s stakeholders? What influence do they have? How well are the team connected with its stakeholders? Are stakeholders being listened to? What are the stakeholder expectations? Can the team prioritise their stakeholders? Do both the team and the stakeholders feel valued by each other? What is the psychological contract between the team and the stakeholder?
How to develop teams with team coaching requires the recognition of the complex and dynamic influences that stakeholders bring, and we, as team coaches’ support and challenge the team to find innovative and effective ways of working with their stakeholders.
Relationships
It is essential to have good relationships in the team, not only to feel better about each other but because interpersonal relationships based on respect, trust, and openness are critical for team effectiveness.
Team coaching provides teams with the necessary challenge and support to create psychological safety, quality dialogues, and the skills to self-manage conflict in the team.
Internal Systems and Processes
How does the team make decisions? How much time is spent planning, and what percentage of those plans work out? Whose ideas carry the most power? How does the team make sure there are opposing views and information in the decision-making process?
What is needed for everyone to be able to commit and align fully? How well is the team using its available time and energy? What is measured, and what is the impact?
How to develop teams with team coaching allows for focus on planning, decision-making, task management, and measurement.
The Learning Team
“Learning that occurs without reflection is shallow and reactive.” David Clutterbuck (2020).
Teams often comment on the lack of time to reflect, and team coaching, by very nature, enables reflection, processing, and deeper thinking.
How a team learns together and takes responsibility for each other’s learning is fundamental to growth. Different types of teams require different learning approaches, and the leader has a vital role to play. Team coaching helps a team to implement its process of learning.
The Critical Role of the Team Leader
What type of leadership does this team need? How does this leadership cope with the complexity of the team as part of a complex and adaptive system of other teams? Is leadership one person or a group of people?
There is much written about leadership, but what is clear is that leaders need to be adaptive to different contexts, cultures, and systems, making rigid frameworks for leadership largely redundant.
Team coaching seeks to focus leadership on their role in each of the other elements of the PERILL model.
Summary
Teams and the systems they operate in are complex, and complexity needs to be met with complexity. How to develop teams with team coaching searches for and identifies patterns. These patterns emerge and create a narrative that the PERILL model cross-references as we seek to find links and connections between each model element.
Contact Us Today For Team Coaching
If your team would benefit from team coaching to improve future capacity and capability in the areas described above, contact our expert team of coaches to find out more.
Written by leadership coach Ian.
Sources:
Clutterbuck (2020) “Coaching the Team at Work” Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London
“Leadership Team Coaching in Practice” Hawkins, P (2018)
“Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership” Hawkins (2017)
