If you are a leader of a team or a purchaser of development for your organisation, you can’t have helped but notice that since the pandemic, there has been a good deal of coverage about “leading at a distance” and developing high performing teams. Not surprising when you consider how challenging the pandemic proved to be for many leaders and as a ‘new normal’ settles on our landscape, for now at least, the focus on teams is equally understandable. A business can try to transform through helping individuals but a team is effectively the smallest unit of change that has the best chance of reaching the kind of numbers – directly and by extension – that is needed to shift enough people to gather momentum.
Dedicated. Proactive.
Developing a high performing senior team is a proactive process, that takes dedicated, focused time and application. The kinds of progress that a team needs to make, is not generated as a result of a one-day Team Building event, where you’ll have some fun making bridges out of toilet paper or climbing milk crates stacked on top of each other. Unless your team happens to be working in primary school education or outdoor pursuits, the direct transferability of these kind of events, rarely produces desired lasting change for most businesses.
Team coaching allows change to happen in a relevant way, where each team can make the specific progress it needs to, to work effectively together and whilst members of the team are apart.
Adults learn through applied and contextual problem solving. Team coaching allows the time to be taken in various combinations, to tackle the real work of the team (product) and that will result in the team’s development (process) resulting in greater clarity, alignment strengthened understanding and closer relationships. It also promotes a motivation towards action, for the benefit of the team as a whole, whilst remaining mindful of the drivers of the individual members of the team.
New perspectives for improved results
Team coaching, when executed well, helps a team raise its awareness of the team as a whole and of the individuals within it. Perspectives about what constitutes a team and how it might operate as part of wider systems can be explored – not as a theoretical exercise but as a way of thinking afresh about how your team could look and operate. Team coaching also challenges the team to develop through tackling the important priorities of the real work they face.
The team coaching experience
Team coaching is a complex and demanding process. In the last two weeks, I have had the joy of working alongside our Exigence Team Coaches with global senior teams in London, the Netherlands and Los Angeles. If you had been a fly on the wall in any of those sessions, you would have seen tears, heard a lot of laughter, moments of quiet and importantly, disagreement and large helpings of productive honesty. At the end of the two-day session you would also have seen a crisp, clear and widely understood roadmap that the team has committed to follow when back at work. In 6 weeks’ time, we’ll go back and help each team reflect on its progress and work out what it still needs to do.
We enable your organisation to achieve individual and collective transformation goals quickly and confidently, whether you require support for senior leaders, executive teams, or large cohorts of mission critical managers.
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