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What is Team Coaching?

At a minimum, a team coach is someone who works with a team over a period of time to:

• Support it in learning and growing
• Enable it to access its full potential
• Build performance capability and capacity
• Overcome challenges and obstacles to progress
• Help it achieve clarity of purpose, goals, values and working methods
• Work through changes of membership or leadership
• Help it adapt to organisational change

A team coach needs the skills and knowledge to:

• Facilitate team discussions
• Coach one-to-one, using executive coaching skills in a team context
• Use process consulting skills to analyse and describe team issues within an organisational context
• Design and lead an array of events and activities to meet a wide variety of individual team requirements
• Be familiar with a wide range of relevant theoretical models
• Have the judgement and experience to make good choices about the mix and timing of all such elements

The personal qualities needed

Some of the qualities needed to coach teams are attributes of experience and character rather than anything that can be acquired through book learning alone. Team coaching involves more than just ‘one-off’ interventions; the coach may need to work with a team for months or even years, dealing with them at their most sensitive, raw and dramatic moments. At the heart of any such extended encounter lies a set of deeply human relationships that at times can test the personal resources and character of the team coach to the limit. Theoretical knowledge alone will not buy you the respect, commitment andtrust of teams and their leaders who are often working under extreme pressure, who are frequently suspicious of anything that smacks even remotely of ‘consultant speak’ and who will rarely suffer fools gladly. There is probably no idealprofile, but minimally a team coach needs:

• The ability to be assertive in a way that always conveys human respect and support
• The flexibility to be able to create rapport with a very wide range of personality types and across many kinds of culturalcontext
• A strongly developed attitude of respect for a wide range of cultures, combined with the ability to behave acceptably within them whilst not compromising core personal values
• A strong sense of humour – particularly about oneself. This is not a role for the precious!
• The ability to both plan methodically and have the flexibility to respond to contingency
• An active working belief in the resourcefulness of people, translating to an assumption that no matter what the difficulties,   he team can succeed; that they have the resources they need to make the progress they desire
• High personal confidence and resilience – physical and emotional
• The ability to think clearly and calmly under pressure
• The ability to handle ambiguity, loose ends and uncertainty
• High integrity and a commitment to behaving in a trustworthy way
• High political intelligence – the ability to read a situation and know how to handle it with judgement and discretion
• Sensitivity to group and individual mood
• A detachment from one’s own need for affection, inclusion and control in a team context
• Goal focus – the ability to always keep sight of the end goal
• ‘Centredness’ – a strong capability to maintain internal equilibrium anchored by clear values

Certainly, experience helps. Situations that can seem alarming or even threatening when one is new to working intensely with teams seem much less so as experience builds. It is reassuring to be familiar with techniques, models and processes that can genuinely help guide you through the potential minefield of group behaviour. As your confidence grows so will teams you work with grow more confident in you – in itself an important constituent of success. »

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