By
Partner, Next Step Partners
Workplace coaching has been a profession since the 1990s, and represents a significant annual investment for many HR departments. Most of the focus has been on one-on-one coaching—particularly on executive coaching. In recent years, team coaching has attained a higher profile. A growing body of evidence points to the health of teams—and to the underlying conditions that foster high performing teams, like psychological safety—as the secret sauce for organizational excellence.
Yet team coaching remains far less researched than individual coaching. Most of what has been published draws on lessons from the world of athletics. The research that has been done shows it is both a science and an art. So what is team coaching? When and why does an organization need team coaching? What are the goals of team coaching? And how long should it last?
Like any living thing, a team has a natural life cycle. At the beginning, when a team is first launching, the emphasis is on putting the right conditions in place for the team to thrive. These include an environment of psychological safety. But also clarity as to who the team is, what its purpose is, its structure, culture, and the support it can expect from the rest of the organization. At this stage, the focus is on good design.
Later on, at the midpoint, a team has likely encountered obstacles. They may feel stuck. Here what a team needs is discovery: an outside eye to observe and identify unhealthy patterns; to intervene and interrupt those patterns; and to replace them with healthier conversational habits. As a coach, I am looking for what is blocking the team. I am also looking for where the friction is, and facilitating a process whereby that friction can become useful and lead to new insights.
Endings can also be a rich coaching opportunity. Research finds that, even as a team is wrapping up its work, they may not, if left to their own devices, be able to capture and internalize the lessons from their experience.
Team coaching can provide value to a team at any point in its journey. Which is why I resist any general rules of thumb as to how long a coaching engagement should last. We may successfully help a team put the right conditions in place during their launch phase when they are forming and norming. But that doesn’t mean they won’t need additional support down the road. A team may need more foundational coaching at one stage, and maintenance coaching at another.
The one “rule” my colleagues and I do tend to ascribe to is to avoid one-off, stand-alone engagements. We don’t want a team to be dependent on us. But good coaching takes time. For our work to produce results that are meaningful and have staying power, the coaching relationship needs time to breath: time to establish rapport and trust; to identify and explore missing conversations.
These questions have come up a lot lately in my own coaching practice. I will work with a team anywhere from six months to a year, helping them establish sound practices to unlock the team’s full collaborative potential and reach its desired goals.
At a certain point, I feel they are ready to (as I like to put it) “fly on their own.” They agree. However, when I check back a few months later, I find that some teams are able to sustain the gains made, while other teams fall back into old and unproductive habits—the very habits we worked on breaking.
What differentiates those teams that are able to lock in their learning from those that have a harder time doing so? After working with hundreds of teams over the past 20 years, I believe there are certain success factors that must be in a place for a team to have a successful transfer of ownership from the coach to the team:
While team coaching is getting more play, it is something that tends to fall through the cracks. A Harvard survey of team leaders and members revealed that coaching the team as a whole was the least prioritized element of leadership. An independent eye may be just what your team needs.