Team coaching is a powerful approach to enhance the performance and productivity of teams.
It is a process that involves facilitating the development of a group of individuals who work together to achieve a common goal. Unlike individual coaching, team coaching focuses on the group dynamics, relationships and communication within the team, as well as the individual performance of team members. The most important peculiarity of team coaching lies in its unique approach to addressing the complexity of the interdependent relationships between team members and the group as a whole. Here are 7 key things to keep in mind regarding team coaching:
1. Emphasis on team dynamics: One of the key peculiarities of team coaching is that it involves working with a group of individuals with different skills, personalities, and ways of working. Team coaching is designed to help these individuals work together effectively, leveraging each other's strengths, and compensating for each other's weaknesses. It places a strong emphasis on understanding the dynamics of the team, including how team members interact with one another, how communication flows, and how decisions are made. By analyzing these, team coaches can identify areas of strength and weakness and work with the team to build a more effective and cohesive team culture.
2. Customized approach: A skilled team coach recognizes that every team is unique and requires a customized approach. They take the time to understand the specific goals, challenges, and opportunities of the team and tailor their coaching accordingly.
3. Collaborative approach: Team coaching is a collaborative approach that involves working closely with team members to set goals, identify strategies, and track progress. The team coach works alongside team members, encouraging them to take ownership of their development and empowering them to drive the process.
4. Focus on collective accountability: Team coaching emphasizes on collective accountability, rather than individual accountability. The coach helps team members to understand how their actions and decisions impact the team as a whole and encourages them to take responsibility for the team's success.
5. Focus on collective capacity: Team coaching focuses on developing the team's collective capacity rather than just individual skills. This means that team coaching goes beyond the training of individual team members and focuses on enhancing the group's ability to work together effectively, collaborate, and take decisions collectively. Team coaching also helps to develop a shared vision, values, and goals that are owned by the team as a whole, leading to greater alignment and commitment.
6. Long-term approach: Team coaching is a long-term approach that focuses on building sustainable changes in order to increase team performance.
7. The Coach: It is very important, the coach to be skilled at working in the framework of coaching collaboration with groups. This means that the coach needs to be able to facilitate group discussions, to have a deep understanding of group dynamics in order to manage them, to build trust and rapport with the team and to be able to identify and address communication challenges, conflicts, and other issues that may be hindering the team’s performance. The coach also needs to be able to provide feedback and support to the team, while remaining impartial and objective.
To conclude, team coaching is a specialized form of coaching. The team coach by utilizing the necessary tools and techniques, may help teams to become more effective, productive, and successful.
Sources:
1. Napiersky, U. (2021). Team Coaching: A Review (on Where We Are Now) and Recommendations for Moving Forward the Practice. In “Team Academy and Entrepreneurship Education” (1st ed., ch.7)
2. The Dynamics of Team Coaching. (2022, April 17). Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved February 16, 2023, from https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/the-dynamics-of-team-coaching/
3. Salihovic, Kristijan. (2021). Team coaching in the workplace. A literature review on team coaching and solving performance deficiency in the workplace.
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