Team Coaching Pocketbook [1 ed.] 9781908284549, 9781906610906

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TEAM COACHING Pocketbook For coaches and team leaders, a pocketful of tips, tools and techniques to harness the collective capability of teams and boost performance

Erik de Haan

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THE TEAM COACHING POCKETBOOK Erik de Haan Drawings by Phil Hailstone "Does a great job of both demystifying the art and craft of team coaching and also resourcing the reader with an armoury of skills and ideas for practice. De Haan’s generosity in sharing his examples of both triumphs and disasters makes the book accessible and engaging." Professor Charlotte Sills, Ashridge Business School and Metanoia Institute "Do not be fooled by its small size. This pocketbook is jam-packed full of helpful ideas and interventions for busy leaders of teams and those who support teams. It distils considerable wisdom and knowledge for the novice as well as the seasoned team coach." Associate Professor Liz Wiggins, Ashridge Business School "Easily accessible and well laid-out; it is a neat reminder of the key elements that need to be addressed when coaching a team. Provides clear and simple guidelines for the team coach, such as using your own awareness to foster a productive team climate of trust and loyalty." John Leary-Joyce, President, Academy of Executive Coaching

Published by: Management Pocketbooks Ltd Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants SO24 9JH, U.K. Tel: +44 (0)1962 735573 Fax: +44 (0)1962 733637 Email: [email protected] Website: www.pocketbook.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. © Erik de Haan 2017 This edition published 2017 ISBN 978 1 906610 90 6 E-book ISBN 978 1 908284 54 9 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data – A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design, typesetting and graphics by efex ltd.

Printed in U.K.

CONTENTS THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH 5 What is team coaching?, why team coaching?, who can be a team coach?, reflection, example, the essence of the role, what team coaches do, team coaching when team leader, team coaching for the external coach TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES 25 Three key choices for external coaches, example, choices for all team coaches, structuring a session, types of intervention, balancing interventions, working with conflicts, areas of focus – interpersonal relationships, communication, development, performance, reflective climate, generating new insight, example COACHING CHALLENGES 49 Coaching the top team, challenges in leadership teams, shadow sides: the four Fs, six performance indicators, challenges of leadership team coaching, making a solid contract, enhancing mental fitness, techniques for fostering deeper reflection

TEAMWORK FOR TEAM COACHES 63 Optimising teamwork & team performance, levels of teamwork & team performance, improving output, example: ISS 1, separating process & teamwork, what teamwork can achieve, group or team?, from individuals to teams, complexity in teams, relationships with the outside world, example TEAM PROCESS FOR TEAM COACHES 85 Challenge the distractions, example: ISS 2, creating the right conditions, lost efficiency – the hard facts, communication, social inhibitions, social distractions, countering losses, example, decisionmaking, a model for improving team process TEAM LEADERSHIP FOR TEAM COACHES 101 Making teams more effective, example: ISS 3, effective leadership, different teams need different leadership TEAM CLIMATE FOR TEAM COACHES 111 Natural ground for coaching, example: ISS 4, a rich source of understanding, key aspects of team climate, trust is at the heart, notice & enhance trust levels, working with climate, example, why is trust so important?, helping with trust & loyalty Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

TEAM COACHING

INTRODUCTION As a team member, a team leader or a team consultant you feel responsible for a team of people working together, whether a team of ‘workers’ or a team of ‘leaders’. You can see that the quality of the team’s work can be very variable and depends on how members of the team are working together and how they are individually aligned to the team’s key goals and tasks. You would like to help make your team more effective and a better place to work. You already have some understanding of coaching and coaching techniques. Then this is the book for you. 4 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

T HE

ROLE OF T H E T E A M C OAC H 5 Contents Page

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

WHAT IS TEAM COACHING? The job of a team coach is simply to focus on making the team think better; to create space and provide protection and inspiration for better reflection on team processes and practices. Ultimately, reflection is key to building a team that is both more effective and more united.

‘Helping the team improve performance, and the processes by which performance is achieved, through reflection and dialogue.’ David Clutterbuck, 2007

‘Enabling a team to function at more than the sum of its parts, by clarifying its mission and improving its external and internal relationships. It is different therefore from coaching team leaders on how to lead their teams, or coaching individuals in a group setting.’ Peter Hawkins, 2014 6 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

WHY TEAM COACHING? Helping the team to think better is no easy task. A coach needs to create the openings for the team to reflect on what is working well for them already and where their biases and weaknesses are to be found. High quality team reflection results in: 1.

Understanding and insight – key motivators for positive change.

2.

The combining of diverse opinions and views – leading to improved levels of performance.

3.

Feedback from team members at all levels – a kind of ‘upwards feedback’ which is known to improve leadership decisions.

A study with 100 work teams in China (Tjosvold et al, 2004) found that those teams reflecting on their tasks were more innovative, while another study (Schippers et al, 2008) found that such teams had higher performance too. Further research in 2012 with nearly 100 work teams from the NHS found that reflection particularly helped with innovation under conditions of heavy workload and high psychological strain.

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

WHO CAN BE A TEAM COACH? Team coaching is one of a team leader’s many roles, alongside offering inspiration and guidance, making decisions, facilitating and following through. Team coaching can also usefully be provided by others: ●

● ●

Members of the team who are naturally reflective: if they can ask good questions and provide understanding for what is going on in the team A helpful outsider such as an internal consultant or non-executive leader A professional (external) executive team coach

Ultimately the responsibility for team coaching goes back to the leader, whether he/ she undertakes it or organises someone else to do so.

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY REFLECTION? What you can do to offer team coaching is essentially twofold: 1. 2.

You can ask for reflection, by asking a question or giving time for team members to process how they are feeling, what they are thinking and how the team is doing. You can contribute to reflection, by making observations about the team which enhance understanding within it.

More specifically: ● ● ● ●

Asking for time to think in the team by using open questions, eg ‘I wonder what the core concern of the team might be in this moment?’ Asking about the link between a statement and underpinning feelings or evidence Opening up reflection to more of the ‘experts’ around the table. After all, every team member is an expert about the team Opening up thinking to areas which are harder to access (because they are unclear, ambiguous or controversial) 9 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY REFLECTION? When you help to reflect you make use of your: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Listening skills Summarising skills Ability to stay with not knowing Curiosity and interest in understanding something better Ability to see, observe and be perceptive about what is going on Bringing together of different observations and information Ability to check information and be curious about it Reaching out to others to contribute to the team Empathy and ability to connect with others

Again, all these skills are present in all teams, but they are constantly under pressure because of the need to act and the need to jump to conclusions, decisions, action and (often false!) certainty. A team coach is there to resist this need and pressure, and to keep asking for reflection. 10 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

CASE EXAMPLE I was acting as team coach in an organisation that had suffered some serious downsizing over the years and was now growing again, but plagued by despondency and fear. My first step was to interview each person in the wider leadership followed by a meeting with the executive. The start of the meeting went more or less as follows: Leader:

‘I recognise all of this. It is a good summary, but how can we improve things?’

Director A:

‘We’ve already tried so many times.’

Director B:

‘I don’t want to create hope in the organisation that we will resolve things; before you know it our funding will be cut again.’

Team coach: ‘You seem to move very quickly from reviewing the situation towards solutions.’ Leader:

‘Yes, but the review is obvious, and describes what’s wrong with us.’

Director A:

‘Yes, and I have said this so many times but people are not taking responsibility. They are looking at us to make improvements.’

Director C:

‘I guess we need to do something. But I am away visiting American subsidiaries. Maybe in the summer?’

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

CASE EXAMPLE Director B:

‘In two months’ time there might be a week when we are all there. Late April, how about that?’

Leader:

‘Yes, let’s do that. And let’s use the strategy we wrote three years ago. We never implemented it because the shareholders didn’t like it.’

Team coach: ‘I am noticing that you are not looking at the summary, and its content.’ Leader:

‘Yes, but the summary is good. It is all there. Now we need to act.’

Team coach: ‘You all seem to know the problem (the report) and the solution (your old strategy). I think you are frightened, though, to speak about what is the matter with you, what this is about, ie to speak about the concerns raised by the report.’ (Silence

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– for the first time in the meeting people are thinking and not immediately stepping in to speak.)

The coach continues by saying something about how responsible the team appears to feel for everything that is going on, and how depleted they seem to be because these problems have been around for so long, and so much time and money have already been invested.

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

THE ESSENCE OF THE ROLE Whatever you do as team coach, it is important to remember that many things can stand in the way of good reflection: ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

The need for the team to perform and work hard to achieve targets The need for firm and consistent leadership and decision-making in the team The objectives that frame the team’s work and may limit creative thinking Tensions in the team and anxieties about individual or team futures Varying levels of commitment from team members Expectations of the team, from the leader or outsiders Frustrations and disappointments, eg regarding team dynamics

As a team coach, you are only responsible for bringing about high quality reflection and not for these other aspects of teamwork and team leadership. That is all you need to focus on, at least during the time devoted to team coaching.

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

WHAT DO TEAM COACHES DO? 1. OBSERVATIONS During a typical coaching session, the team coach will request time and attention to inquire into ‘work’, ‘process’, ‘climate’ or ‘leadership’. Typical questions would be: ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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How is the team doing? What are its current priorities? Are they the right ones, taken up in the right way? How fluid, open and constructive is communication? How helpful is team leadership at the moment? How are relationships within the team? What ideas do you have about improving some of these?

It is important also to be able to observe a team in context and understand how what is happening right now is linked to what else is going on for and around the team. What about tensions and anxieties in the wider organisation?

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

WHAT DO TEAM COACHES DO? 2. INTERVENTIONS Whilst continuing to observe, the team coach ventures to offer a contribution to develop the team and its capacity to reflect: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Model an inquiry stance so that the team enhances its own ability to inquire and reflect Keep offering summaries and questions (like the ones on the previous page) Model ‘real’ (open, truthful, thoughtful) conversation Facilitate learning from experience for the team Notice and raise awareness of team patterns and group dynamics Value and take seriously different perspectives on the team’s current work and process Challenge assumptions within the team Look at the implications of any fresh reflections for potential actions and decisions, without leading on those actions and decisions

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

COACHING WHEN TEAM LEADER If you are in charge of a team it’s important to devote time to team coaching as this will enhance the quality of work within the team and also improve its output. By allowing the team to do reflective work you will see overall performance go up, as well as the mutual understanding of team members. Moreover, internal relationships and motivation will also improve, so team coaching is a no-brainer. Essentially it is the quality of reflection that determines an existing team’s ultimate effectiveness. Much of the team’s reflection will obviously look after itself as individuals or sub-teams engage in reflection spontaneously. There are many ways, however, in which spontaneous reflections become lazy, lose their freshness or become counterproductive by being biased, repetitive and self-serving. Rumination, rationalisation and defensive argumentation, which are antidotes to reflection, are never far off. 16 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

COACHING WHEN TEAM LEADER For senior leaders the biggest risk is to become complacent or over-confident about reflection, ie the biggest risk is to think that you understand. Do not underestimate the hard work that you as a leader need to do to find out what the team really thinks and feels. And it is equally hard work to coach your team, to help everyone (including yourself) to reflect more deeply. So organising reflection for your team will take some effort. How much time do you currently devote to reflection? How much time are you able to allow for the meeting to remain a dialogue about what is most relevant today and not ‘descend into’ a discussion of a topic? How predictable do your meetings feel? How fresh can they be? See also the Coaching Challenges chapter on the topic of dialogue.

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

COACHING WHEN TEAM LEADER CHECKING IN WITH YOUR TEAM A good way of fostering reflection is to do a regular and very open check-in, allowing everyone to express how they are feeling today and what is on their minds right now. For larger teams of 10 or more, such a check-in can take an hour but is still worth it. One way of doing this is to share, compare and find out, ie: 1. Each team member shares how he or she is in this very moment, and in particular their ‘feeling state’, their emotional make-up. 2. All then compare how others are at the same time. 3. The ultimate intention is to find out new connections and information about what is really going on within the team here and now. Other ways of doing this are in the Coaching Challenges chapter, with specific examples of team coaching and dialogue techniques.

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To page 60

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

COACHING WHEN TEAM LEADER CHECKING IN WITH YOUR TEAM Why are simple check-ins important? ●

● ●

All team members get a chance to express themselves, which makes them feel more part of the team and of the meeting. This is good for motivation especially as, within the meetings, people will frequently disagree, or will not have that feeling of playing an equal part Team members understand each other better and develop higher levels of trust, so in the end they will do more for each other and for the team as a whole The team learns more about itself and where it sits within the current challenges and requirements of its business. Often, people are surprised and encouraged to find that colleagues have felt and noticed similar things. Or they are grateful to learn new ways of looking. Moreover, as everyone reflects, something will emerge that is new to the whole team, through the subtle and creative art of ‘free association’ and by paying attention to what emerges

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

COACHING WHEN TEAM LEADER INTEGRATING COACHING IN MEETINGS Coaching is not just for the beginning of meetings, but should take place during the meetings too. In that way it will enrich decisions as well as increase motivation. Specific interventions for leaders during meetings: ●

●

●

I wonder

if... Ask questions about views and opinions, ‘What makes you say that?’, ‘How would that work?’, ‘Why would that be helpful?’ Ask for more views and opinions than you are getting, eg by asking others in the team who are not naturally speaking up Present your own views in a reflective way, by only lightly introducing them: ‘I wonder if...’, ‘What would you think about…’, ‘How about…?’

In short: try to explore a topic first before you start influencing! 20 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

COACHING WHEN TEAM LEADER INTEGRATING COACHING IN MEETINGS Here are other areas to be aware of before and during team meetings: ● ● ● ● ●

Keep a good balance between reflection, action planning and decision-making (ideally, at least 10 minutes per hour should be reflective in nature) Observe dynamics and pay attention (also explicitly) to how the team feels and works Bring discussions back to core issues: what is the team debating, essentially? What is the core dilemma or problem? How is that related to core tasks and goals? Can you spot how these core issues show up in feelings and interactions between team members, now in the room? Can you make those links explicit? At the end, take 5 minutes to review the meeting itself: how did we do, did everyone have space to reflect and join in, could we have reflected more deeply?

In short: keep wondering about what is going on right now! (It is more relevant to your team’s challenges and decisions than you tend to think.) These ideas seem straightforward – but how many leaders do you know who can pull this off, and stay creatively indifferent to their own leadership agenda as they devote time to reflection? Very few, in my experience. Still, those are the best leaders.

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

COACHING WHEN TEAM LEADER QUESTIONNNAIRE Here is a questionnaire for your team, with four key questions. 1.

Do we reflect enough?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

No, we are always firefighting

Rarely

Occasionally

Sometimes

Often

Very often

We are a truly reflective team

5

6

7

Very often

Too much: we are almost smothering each other

2.

Do we support each other in our reflections?

1 No, we are scoring points off each other

2

Rarely

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3

Occasionally

4

Sometimes

Often

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

COACHING WHEN TEAM LEADER QUESTIONNNAIRE 3.

Do we have the courage for challenge in our reflections?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

No, we are polite and we avoid conflict

Rarely

Occasionally

Sometimes

Often

Very often

Too much: we are overly harsh and critical

5

6

7

Very often

We are capable of stepping back from day-to-day operations

4.

Do we avoid being derailed by detail?

1 Never: there is too much detail in our meetings

2

Rarely

3

Occasionally

4

Sometimes

Often

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THE ROLE OF THE TEAM COACH

THE EXTERNAL COACH If you have been brought into the team as an external coach, you have a few advantages: ● ● ● ●

●

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You have no other team roles to ‘park’ and can focus exclusively on coaching You know very little about the team, so you will be less distracted by facts, content and history, and more curious about why things are as they are You can be relatively undisturbed by tensions in the team: deferring your judgement, maintaining a neutral stance (just that little bit longer…) Your role is only temporary so you can let go of the need to deliver, produce, improve – those are all essentially the team’s tasks Being temporary and independent means that you can challenge the leader and team members much more, eg if you think they just repeat the obvious or play politics instead of making an effort to think outside the box

Try to stay in reflective mode for as long as you can to make use of your outsider’s freshness and objectivity.

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T EAM

C OAC H I N G TECHNIQUES 25

Contents Page

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TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

KEY CHOICES FOR EXTERNAL COACHES How you work with teams depends on making some key structural choices. External coaches contract for a finite assignment and so they can make more choices than internal coaches and team leaders. We will look first at these choices, then at contracting with teams for coaching, and then at interventions, tools and techniques, relevant for internal and external coaches. KEY CHOICE 1: Do you want to work with the team only as a team, or do you also coach some individuals or smaller groupings within the team? Confidentiality, trust and safety are important factors with regard to this choice. Generally, it is not advisable to coach other managerial levels just above or below the team at the same time, nor other teams that this client works with regularly. Confidentiality is always experienced as lower when your individual client knows you are also coaching individually another member of the same team. 26 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

KEY CHOICES FOR EXTERNAL COACHES KEY CHOICE 2: How much preparation do you need to do before you begin? In team coaching, there are advantages in being well prepared but also advantages in coming in fresh. Whatever the level of preparation, a team coach should always try, in my view, to maintain an open, receptive outlook. Ask yourself, ‘What do I need to know about the team and its challenges before we start?’ Other considerations are: ● ● ● ●

‘If I interview team members in advance, will it help in building up safety and trust?’ ‘Will I be drawn in as an ‘expert consultant’ if I do a lot of preparation, eg including psychometric measurements?’ ‘How can I keep an open mind after my initial impressions and data collection?’ ‘How can I ensure that, as work with the team progresses, I can work as openly and receptively as possible?’ 27 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

KEY CHOICES FOR EXTERNAL COACHES KEY CHOICE 3: Can this really be managed by one person? The size of the team and the level of pressure on it are the main deciders for this question. When working with top teams (see also next chapter) and those with eight or more managers, a coaching pair is advisable – with a ‘front’ and a ‘back’ position. One of you can then just observe and give feedback on relevant dynamics and patterns in the team. The other can take the lead in organising coaching processes, asking questions and intervening in the many ways discussed in this book. In some extremely high-pressure circumstances it helps if the two coaches only convene during breaks, and therefore that the ‘observing’ coach does not feedback directly to the team.

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Other considerations: ● You will need to hold up a mirror to the team without getting swayed by its dynamics. If you feel you can do this on your own, then by all means go ahead ● You need to be able both to participate in the team and also to stay outside it, in an observing, thinking capacity

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TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

CASE EXAMPLE TEAM COACHES WORKING IN A PAIR A university leadership team of 15 needs to review and agree its new 5-year strategy. During the day they review personal commitments, SWOT analyses, a unifying vision, strategic intent, formulation of a strategy, and decisions about the consequences for structure and leadership. A very full day with an external team coach facilitating all processes, and even taking the flipchart sheets home to draft a strategy document. Because of the size of the team, the coach has asked a psychoanalytically trained colleague to observe as she herself leads the day. If there had been tensions within the team, the first coach would have asked her colleague only to feed back directly to her in the breaks. In fact, here the situation is safe and contained enough for him to comment to the team and first coach directly. 29 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

CASE EXAMPLE TEAM COACHES WORKING IN A PAIR Here are some of his stronger statements: ●

●

● ●

‘It is shocking to see the many things you avoid. At home you do your finances, at home you nurture your relationships, but here at work you all seem to want just to do research and absolve yourself entirely of your managerial responsibility.’ ‘I can see that my colleague, your team coach, has genuine leadership today. You gladly leave leadership to her. Do you have any leadership ambitions at all? What will this mean for the moment your coach leaves you?’ ‘It seems your board secretary is leading all the subgroups he is in. Your secretariat appears more powerful and better networked than all of you together.’ (at the end) ‘Now that you have a plan, you may expect resistance. And when resistance comes, my prediction is that the plan will crumble and fall prey to the powers that be. What chance does this new strategy really have here in this organisation?’

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TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

KEY CHOICES FOR ALL TEAM COACHES WORKING WITH THE PULLS ON THE COACH As soon as a team welcomes you in, it will also try to make you agree or confirm something about how it perceives itself. For example, saying, ‘We are very successful – contrary to other teams here we always make our targets.’ This team wants you to see it as successful. They will also press you for allegiance or for the answers to questions, eg ‘We have now been told to up our targets even further – don’t you think that’s outrageous?’ It is worth coming up with a hypothesis about the team first, to show you understand, ‘It sounds like you are finding the additional demands very tough. Is there a sense that it is unfair to ask you to do even more, as if you are being punished for your past success?’ Another pull is for the coach to come up with a solution or to fix something for the team. Don’t get drawn in; try to focus on enabling them to grow, eg by contracting, ‘Would it be a good idea in this session to focus on how the team might respond to the new demands, in such a way that targets remain realistic?’ 31 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

STRUCTURING A SESSION Here is a (simplified but still useful) five step model of team coaching: make it easy for the team to connect with you by being open, curious, C onnect: helpful, calm and contained, as far as you can. yourself: notice the pull on you; how you are being drawn in or what your O bserve emotions are telling you. A ppreciate what is happening right now: explore, summarise, clarify and hypothesise to understand the current issues. C ontract on the current issues: establish a contract for what the team wants to achieve with you in this session. H elp to achieve the contract: facilitate the team to achieve the contract’s objectives, by enabling fuller and deeper understanding, summarising where the team is right now, and offering direction to move forward to decisions on actions.

C.O.A.C.H.: Connect, Observe, Appreciate, Contract & Help. 32 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

TYPES OF INTERVENTION John Heron, in 1975, came up with a helpful framework of six types of intervention that we can use when working with teams. An example of these interventions in action follows on page 35. ●

Prescribing: Giving directions, advice and recommendations to the team – often needed to open up the space for reflection. A team coach may need to take on authority in the interest of reflection

●

Informing: Giving information and knowledge to the team – rarely needed during team coaching

●

Confronting: Challenging the team’s assumptions; stimulating their awareness of their own behaviour, attitudes or beliefs – very useful as a way to bring in your observations

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TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

TYPES OF INTERVENTION

34

●

Releasing: Helping the team to release tension, and to discharge or come to terms with emotions that are blocking progress – using your own emotions is an important skill for a team coach: they often give access to hidden tensions and emotions within the team

●

Exploring: Helping the team to self-discovery, self-directed learning, and to owning and solving their own problems, without becoming involved in their change yourself – this can often be done silently in team coaching, or by offering sporadic summaries and explorative questions

●

Supporting: Building the team’s self-esteem, self-confidence and self-respect by underlining what it is doing well, what needs and concerns merit its attention, and what team members have in common – this can be done with the help of positive feedback, direct appreciation and active support

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TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

TYPES OF INTERVENTION EXAMPLE Here is a specific example (containing only the team coach’s interventions) of how to use the various types of interventions in a typical coaching session: 1.

‘Looking forward to working with you again today.’ (informing; connecting).

2.

‘So you need to find ways of meeting a higher target in terms of client revenue?’ (exploring).

3.

‘It sounds as if the higher targets feel unfair – and yet there is a realisation that with the new CRM system you can service more clients, even if there is a lot of anxiety about actually pulling that off – is that right?’ (confronting; releasing).

35 To page 33

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TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

TYPES OF INTERVENTION EXAMPLE 4.

‘So, many of you are wondering what actions to take, and how to get the most from the new technology? Is this something you want to spend some time on?’ (exploring; contracting).

5.

‘You have lost some confidence, particularly as you are not actually selling the work anymore. Does that mean you meet new clients with more trepidation about being able to fulfil the brief?’ (releasing).

6.

‘How could you work with that trepidation and perhaps be better prepared?’ (exploring).

7.

‘Let me summarise where I think we have got to now…’ (exploring).

8.

‘It looks to me like you actually make a 20% saving on your time. And if you can manage that ‘trepidation’ you would easily be able to raise your target by up to 20%, ultimately. It means you are in a rather good situation as the Board is actually asking for much less.’ (supporting).

9.

‘Why don’t you prepare a formal response to the Board now?’ (prescribing).

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BALANCING YOUR INTERVENTIONS When you are working with a team there is always a balance to be found between: ● ● ● ●

Directive and non-directive interventions Supporting and challenging interventions Content and process contributions Open-ended reflections and bold confrontation

You will find yourself swayed by hidden pressures coming from the team: to lead, to be an expert, to be very supportive or instead rather bold, etc. You need to keep observing yourself in order to strike the balance that is best for coaching: best for reflection and best for achieving the coaching objectives. Therefore it is helpful to keep interventions as minimal as possible – and to keep a good proportion of interventions essentially reflective: summaries, observations, and hypotheses about what is going on. 37 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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WORKING WITH CONFLICTS Conflicts help to make choices and viewpoints clear and bring out the best arguments for decision-making. It can often be the job of the team coach to open up festering conflict that has long been avoided (see Lencioni, 2002). Here are three golden rules to observe in the presence of pressure or conflict: 1. Remain neutral and relatively uninfluenced, ie recognise your own biases and judgements about the pressures/ conflicts, and let go of them. 2. Retain ‘creative indifference’ both with regard to the arguments of various team members, and with regard to the conflict itself, ie whether there is a conflict and whether a conflict is good or bad. 3. Seek a reflective balance between recognising that there are differences and recognising that there are common interests/ experiences/ views. The latter are often forgotten when a team is undergoing a period of turbulence.

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Don’t forget that conflicts – provided they are well-regulated and reflectively handled – are very healthy for a team’s productivity. So don’t dampen down, or conspire to avoid, a conflict that is emerging.

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AREAS OF FOCUS 1: INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS As you begin work with a team, there are many aspects that you could pay attention to, and many possible interventions. Some areas that team coaches are drawn to are not necessarily the most fruitful to focus on. In the following sequence, I would argue that only the team’s climate (see p46) is the exclusive domain of the team coach. Interpersonal relationships within the team Rather than looking at improving interpersonal relationships, try to bring out the underlying causes of dysfunctionality and work on the hidden conflicts, or lack of commitment, that may emerge. Conflicts and tension within relationships will usually have understandable causes and may actually contribute positively to the team’s output, effectiveness or reflective ability. If you are aware of friction, try wondering aloud what those relationships might tell you and the team about what is going on, at this moment, for the team as a whole. It helps to pay attention to arrival, seating, taking turns in a meeting, levels of ‘airtime’, interruptions and tone of voice as they all literally embody interpersonal relationships and current issues. 39 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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AREAS OF FOCUS 2: COMMUNICATION Communication within and around the team Again, communication patterns can tell you a lot about the team’s current experiences, but they are not what you are there to improve; your main focus is reflection. Keep in mind what communication, and by extension collaboration, are there to serve: the outputs of the team. So if you feel drawn into discussing poor communication, change the focus and start wondering: ‘What do the difficulties in getting together, or communicating appropriately, tell us about team issues like team productivity and effectiveness?’ ‘Is there a sense that there is an underlying conflict about where the team should be going, or might there be withdrawal from communication, and from meetings, because of a lack of commitment, or a lack of trust?’

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AREAS OF FOCUS 3: DEVELOPMENT Developing individual people in the team Focusing on the development of individual team members is another potential distraction. Individuals and their performance, abilities and anxieties may be very important for both team and team leader (and of course for the individuals themselves), but for a team coach they are best left alone. Instead: ● Ask yourself what individual behaviour might represent for the team (so-called valencies) ● Notice your own tendency to be swayed towards and away from individuals, how your likes and dislikes are triggered by everyone in the team ● Provide individual feedback only in terms of how people are taking up their role within the team. (As noted before, this kind of individual coaching is an area strictly outside of team coaching, but it can have its uses provided that the focus remains the team)

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AREAS OF FOCUS 3: DEVELOPMENT CASE EXAMPLE Using valencies (individual sensibilities) to guide coaching The leading partners in an accountancy firm have learned through internal polls that they are not fully trusted and their leadership is poorly viewed. Apparently they don’t listen to their staff, and don’t involve them enough in winning new work and in strategic decisions. As a result, a lot of good, experienced consultants have been leaving. They have now hired a team coach to develop their skills and find a response to the poor feedback and brain drain. At the first session, halfway through the meeting, the coach is introduced to the Board and sits down with them to explore the issues. As she enters the room, the coach feels physically smaller and finds herself overwhelmed by the many strong opinions being expressed. Once she starts to look around the team she notices that there are others who also seem timid and are not contributing.

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TEAM COACHING TECHNIQUES

AREAS OF FOCUS 3: DEVELOPMENT CASE EXAMPLE After a moment of silence, a senior person to her right queries the need for the coaching, asking if it is really necessary and whether ‘all of us’ need to participate, particularly those, like him, with no line management responsibility. A few minutes later another partner expresses her strong support for the coaching, but also irritation at the way the managing partner has introduced the coach to the team. There had been no advance announcement. The coach finds herself agreeing but does not say anything. As the discussion progresses a recently promoted partner tries to raise the issues of leadership and asks what aspects the team wants to address first. Still later, another partner announces that he has to leave early because of an important client call coming in, and then – in a genuinely despondent tone – he says something about a broken relationship with a client that may not be repairable.

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AREAS OF FOCUS 3: DEVELOPMENT CASE EXAMPLE In these opening minutes we already see many different valencies. At one level, everyone is addressing their own concerns, but we can also see each and every person speaking on behalf of the team: 1. The coach picks up something about intimidation and about raw competition – and herself feels intimidated. 2. The first partner to speak raises the strong ambivalence in the team about dealing with the leadership issues and exposing themselves to coaching. 3. The female partner asserts her own leadership and critiques current leadership. The coach picks up this valency, also wishing she had more power in this team. 4. The new partner seems to care about the results of the poll and expresses a wish in the team to move things on and start addressing the issues. 5. The fourth partner may be expressing the need for regular work to continue while improving the team. By mentioning a problem he also expresses some vulnerability. A team coach can use every event in a team, big or small, within him/ herself or initiated by others, to deepen reflection, through the concept of valency, ie that individuals have a highly personal antenna for certain issues and not others. 44 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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AREAS OF FOCUS 4: PERFORMANCE The team’s performance is not the direct target of the team coach, contrary to the impression you might get from observing sports coaches at work. As made clear in the previous chapter, performance should be the main interest of the team’s leadership – which almost by definition means it is not the core responsibility for coaches. Performance should (normally) improve, however, as a result of team coaching, because high performance is a direct result of deep, open and honest reflection. Instead of focusing on whether results are up or down, try to ask good questions about it. Why does the team think this is happening; how can we explain variations in performance and outcomes? How has the team itself contributed to such variations? And it is worth keeping in mind that all teams and individuals find it easier to ascribe success to themselves and failure to circumstances or others, so there is plenty of scope to ask hard, challenging questions related to performance. 45 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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AREAS OF FOCUS 5: REFLECTIVE CLIMATE For team coaches, concentrating on the nature of the reflective climate in the team right now is the most worthwhile thing. The focus should be the reflective process itself, ie the quality of the coaching as it takes place and the quality of thinking about team performance right now. You can think about things like performance, outcomes, decisions, relationships and communication with some detachment – so that, ultimately, they will look after themselves. In other words: don’t jump in and try to make things better, but stay ‘out’, detached, abstinent (but with deep empathy!), asking yourself and the team what might be going on at this moment. No reflective questions are out of bounds: eg it is legitimate to ask whether the team before you should actually be a team at all.

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In reality you will never be completely detached from a team when you are with them; in subtle ways you are being pulled in as you coach.

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GENERATING NEW INSIGHT CASE EXAMPLE Meaningful reflections can often be found in unexpected places. I recently worked with a senior management team in an organisation that had collaborated with the occupiers in World War Two, a fact I didn’t know before I started. The day before I met the team I had something close to a panic attack. In the session with them I found that they were unable to stand up to their CEO, whom they experienced as constantly thwarting their long-term strategy in favour of short-term demands. The sheer force of these pressures had caused the team to split: some departments responding to the demands and others suffering negative consequences, with quite capable managers being demoted by the CEO. The team’s leader, the MD, struggled to stand up to her boss and had been given to understand that unless A, B, C,… she would be found a ‘failure’ in six months. This kind of bullying affected her badly, making her work long hours and damaging her confidence. I recalled that after my panic attack the day before, I had felt I had to handle it alone and hadn’t told anyone, an unusual thing for me to do. My own personal experiences turned out to be very helpful to the team, as an illustration of paralysis as a response to power.

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GENERATING NEW INSIGHT CASE EXAMPLE Over time and with coaching, the team learned to offer the CEO a more mature response, discussing their priorities with him and negotiating a way through the shortterm demands, whilst maintaining their overall unity and longer-term mission. The team also very gradually exposed a deeper fear that related to standing up to an occupier, something the organisation manifestly did not do some 75 years earlier. To their surprise staff seemed to be affected by similar issues now. Working through such issues ultimately made them stronger in their response to management. In some cases the impetus for becoming more effective has to be found at great historic or emotional depth.

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C OAC H I N G

CHALLENGES

49 Contents Page

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COACHING CHALLENGES

COACHING THE TOP TEAM We now look at team coaching when the team comes under pressure. For example, when: ● ● ● ●

The team is not working well together and has limited capacity for reflection Important decisions have to be taken with insufficient information and conflicting viewpoints There are high pressures from stakeholders, eg underperforming teams, teams in transition There are high pressures and expectations generally, eg top leadership teams

Top teams tend to work under the greatest pressure and scrutiny, and often feel exposed, both on the inside and on the outside, while having limited ability to truly understand what is going on through high levels of complexity, great uncertainty and relentless change. It is worth looking at what challenges affect the team at contract stage. It is hard to do this sort of coaching alone: the risks of being absorbed and rendered futile are far too high. In these challenging conditions it is wiser to work in a pair.

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CHALLENGES IN LEADERSHIP TEAMS The dynamics of top leadership are complex: stepping up to make a leadership gesture always creates a rift within oneself, a rift between one’s sunny, active, constructive, or aggressive side that wants to contribute, create and prove something; and one’s doubting, pessimistic, needy, vulnerable, careful side, that craves connection. This shadow side is part and parcel of leadership. As it emerges, top leadership invariably corrupts over time because of: ● ●

The increasing ability to influence decisions (so-called management discretion) Dynamics at play that bring out further shadow side characteristics of the leader’s personality

Unattended, this leadership shadow will eventually result in derailment and overdrive. Team coaches can play a role in attending to the shadow sides of the team. It is possible, through honest and frank reflection, to re-integrate shadow sides into a leader’s ‘bright side’ strengths and competences.

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SHADOW SIDES: THE FOUR Fs Shadow side patterns in top teams can have many forms but they all have in common that they are under the surface or suppressed: shadow side patterns don’t express themselves directly. They can be picked up through grumbles, frowns, agitation, or exhaustion. These grumbles build into vicious cycles over time. Examples in leadership teams are:

Fighting or infighting – passing around aggression Fear – passing around shame Fatigue – passing around hope (that someone else will deal with it) Virtuous cycles can be much slower to take hold but start with explicit awareness of, and taking responsibility for, the shadow side patterns. So virtuous cycles are usually characterised by:

Frustration – the ability to sit with experience, reflect on it, name it and work with it. 52

Resilience, perseverance (‘doggedness’) and staying power are other names for this ability to allow genuine frustration to be present (see De Haan & Kasozi, 2014)

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COACHING CHALLENGES

SIX PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR TOP TEAMS Katzenbach & Smith published their research on high-performing teams in 1993, where they found that the following characteristics were more present for higherperforming top teams: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Meaningful purpose. Shared commitment to that purpose. Specific and ambitious goals for the team. Interchangeable skills as well as complementary skills in the team. Mutual accountability: acknowledgement of joint accountability towards a common purpose in addition to individual obligations to their specific roles. Clear norms or rules that inform behaviour.

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COACHING CHALLENGES

CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP TEAM COACHING During coaching you often become aware of a team’s dysfunctions, be they major or minor. Lack of trust, lack of understanding, lack of agreement, lack of commitment, and avoidance of conflict will all fuel the cycles of fighting, fear or fatigue. It is important for you to: ● Notice such dysfunctions ● Notice how you are being pulled in ● Consciously choose a reflective position Be wary of becoming yet another resource for the team, a conflict manager, a mediator, an ‘enter-trainer’, host, facilitator, conduit or presenter. Instead, remain reflective and challenging. Don’t wait to get any immediate thanks for your calls to reflection, but be assured that the team will be grateful in the end and the work will be more worth your time. 54 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

COACHING CHALLENGES

MAKING A SOLID CONTRACT For a team coach it is worth looking at the contract that you have with your team. A contract helps you to increase mutual understanding about your role and goals. It also helps you to get into reflective mode. Aspects of contracting to attend to are: ● Levels of contracting: – with organisation, team, individuals, and direct reports – for the overall coaching contract, for every session, and for every moment in a session ● Contracting between the team coaches (if more than one) and between leader and coaches: who is responsible for what? ● Agreeing clear objectives and a clear transition back to team leadership at the end ● Working with anxiety, managing expectations, and the psychological contract: offering a delineated space and safe boundaries including confidentiality ● Contracting space for exploration before the coaching starts: contracting for team interviews and psychometrics (considering pros and cons of doing those) 55 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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ENHANCING MENTAL FITNESS THE ABILITY TO ‘SIT WITH FRUSTRATION’ Through ‘sitting with frustration’ (page 52) top teams can develop and stay in touch with their challenges and the pressures put upon them. To become better at ‘sitting with frustration’ and staying calm under pressure: ● Notice the top pressures on the team ● Understand why those pressures are there ● Understand who is making the demands ● Bring the pressures into an organisational-historical context: what is the history behind the pressures? ● Why can so little be done about the pressures? At this stage mindfulness practice and dialogue techniques can be very useful. Only when the pressures are deeply felt can we ask the question, ‘What would be a radically different strategy that would do something about the root of the problems?’ 56 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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FOSTERING DEEPER REFLECTION BRING MORE OF YOURSELF TO THE TEAM Top team members bring a lot of themselves to the workplace, not just the amount of time they spend working, but also what is at stake for them to make the team and the organisation successful. But often they do not know themselves and each other as well as would be helpful if they are really to rely on each other. Team coaches can help improve this understanding by means of: ● Psychometrics, eg 360-degree feedback or personality characteristics. Within the relatively safe context of coaching it may help the team to share the findings with each other. The most difficult but most useful to share are those into (a) core values and motivators, and (b) leadership shadow or potential derailment patterns (see next page) ● Exercises that encourage deeper expression, eg bringing a meaningful object from home and telling team members about it, and the ways it reminds you of the team and its current challenges Processes such as these are particularly helpful at the start of a team coaching journey: they give everyone more vocabulary to work on their issues.

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FOSTERING DEEPER REFLECTION LEADERSHIP DERAILMENT PATTERNS Here are some common leadership derailment patterns that come out under stress or significant external pressure: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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Believing the rules are made to be broken No longer really believing what you say Thinking that you’re right, and everyone else is wrong Become disengaged and disconnected Getting the little things right and the big things wrong Becoming subject to mood swings Becoming pessimistic and focusing on the negatives Trying to be different just for the sake of it Trying to please everyone and win the popularity contest Needing to be the centre of attention Becoming afraid to make decisions

Do you recognise any of these for yourself under stress?!

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FOSTERING DEEPER REFLECTION ROLE NEGOTIATIONS Issues in teams always come up at the boundary between people through unmet expectations, personal conflicts, and poor communication. It is worth negotiating what each team member can expect of each of the others, and making a clear contract around such expectations (role negotiation). ● ●

● ●

Each member of the team prepares a feedback form for each of the others The feedback should comprise at least half a page, with specific observations and expectations, along the following lines: – ‘What you are doing well’ – ‘What you could be doing less of or what to stop doing’ – ‘What you could be doing more of or what to start doing’ On the basis of these forms all team members have a conversation of at least 20 minutes in pairs (in a carousel) where they agree about future collaboration Some six months later they organise a follow-up conversation (optional)

It is always a refreshing exercise, leading to deep and personal conversations, and normally has a very positive impact on how the team works together.

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FOSTERING DEEPER REFLECTION DIALOGUE TECHNIQUES Another aspect of better understanding and alignment within the team is the quality and depth of communication. This can best be improved here and now. Team coaches can help. A first step towards a deeper dialogue is to sensitise the team to here and now, ie this very moment of interaction. Here are some ways to arrive more fully in the present: ● Invite the team to ‘share, compare, and find out’ (see page 18) ● Invite team members to focus on this very moment and only say what comes up for them right now: bodily sensations, feelings, emotions, observations, etc. ● Work with a ‘talking stick’: only the person with the stick talks whilst others listen and try to reflect on what is being said – after speaking, the stick is not given to a new speaker but is left in the middle of the circle, until someone else feels the urge to speak and picks it up All these methods, and many other dialogues, have generative silences in which listening can deepen and emotions come to the fore. 60 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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FOSTERING DEEPER REFLECTION DIALOGUE TECHNIQUES When a team is inexperienced with dialogue and is stressed, or task-focused, rather than able to stay in the moment and think, it may help to ask each team member to summarise the previous speaker first before proceeding with the dialogue. As coach, you can play a useful role by staying somewhat outside of the conversation, while occasionally trying to name what is happening, what might be there under the surface, what is being said but not listened to, what might be struggling to be said (in other words, what is almost said). If there is a good dialogue within the team, this is usually characterised by high concentration, liveliness, mindfulness, care and consideration for others, and a higher than usual level of listening and sense-making. When that has been achieved, a team coach can also nudge the team towards greater openness, towards expressing obstacles or ‘elephants in the room’, sometimes by asking a question, sometimes by venturing a guess about what is on people’s minds. 61 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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SUMMARY These techniques will help you tackle the types of problem you are likely to encounter with teams working under great pressure: ● ● ●

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Make a solid contract with the team Enhance their mental fitness and resilience for reflections: working on their ability to ‘sit with frustration’ Foster deeper reflections in team coaching by using the following techniques: – Bringing more of yourself to the team: getting to know team members more fully and personally – Role negotiations: providing peer feedback and understanding what team members are expecting from each other – Dialogue techniques: deepening the quality of listening and moments of meeting with the team – Making use of everyone’s presence here and now: listening out for challenges and ‘unspeakables’ in this very moment

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T EAMWORK

FOR T E A M C OAC H E S 63

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TEAMWORK FOR TEAM COACHES

OPTIMISING TEAMWORK & TEAM PERFORMANCE On our quest to optimise team performance, we are working in the realm of strategy, or best fit. What is the best fit between this team and its context, including other teams, client organisations and suppliers? And what is the best fit for the future? Put more simply, what are the core function and aims of the team? Team strategy is based on how the team hopes to gain a strong competitive advantage and satisfy the interests of stakeholders. It entails formulating and then implementing the team’s core function and goals, using an understanding of its resources and environment. The following questions will help you with this: ● What is the team there for? ● What contribution can it make to its environment tomorrow? (and over other time scales) ● What, therefore, should be the deliverables of the team? 64 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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OPTIMISING TEAMWORK & TEAM PERFORMANCE From this kind of goal-setting we can do planning and optimisation, and formulate new questions about: ● The structure of the team – is it open, closed, like a group, like a team, like a bunch of individuals? ● The work of the team – what are the strategic objectives, targets, contracts and deliverables? ● The relationships – who are the main stakeholders, main clients and interested parties, suppliers, competitors? ● The processes – workflow, communication, collaboration, roles ● The leadership ● The culture Over the next four chapters we are going to explore how coaching can improve each of these aspects of team performance.

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LEVELS OF TEAMWORK & TEAM PERFORMANCE Let’s distinguish what the team coach can do from other facilitating and leading roles within teams. Here is an overview of the different roles one can take up for one’s team, at any time (based on a graph by W. Brendan Reddy in his 1974 book about team intervention skills): .

rk

o Teamw

ses

roces Team p

Manager

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Facilitator

limate Team c Team Coach

TEAMWORK FOR TEAM COACHES

LEVELS OF TEAMWORK & TEAM PERFORMANCE The diagram illustrates that each of the roles or ‘functions’ for a team looks at a number of important team processes, but each places a different emphasis in working with the team: ● ● ● ●

The manager focuses on the work that needs to be done: strategic objectives, tasks, allocation, control and efficiency The leader focuses on the effectiveness of the processes to get the work done, ie on outcome, general direction and team strategy The facilitator leads the team meeting and looks at learning and development of the team and its members The team coach looks at the team’s climate, culture and group dynamics, the way decisions and behaviour are grounded in relationships, reflections and feelings

Everyone on the team partakes in all of these roles all of the time, to various degrees.

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LEVELS OF TEAMWORK & TEAM PERFORMANCE The four team leadership roles are consistently shared by different people: ●

All members have a responsibility for all four roles – even if it is just selfmanagement, self-leadership, etc., but also more widely for the team

●

The leader (whoever is accountable) can combine managerial and leadership responsibility, and some exceptional leaders are very good at facilitating and coaching the team too

●

Facilitation under difficult circumstances (conflict, pressures from the outside, merging of teams) is best done by an independent outsider

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LEVELS OF TEAMWORK & TEAM PERFORMANCE ●

Team coaching under challenging circumstances (eg in senior teams) is best done by a dedicated outsider who takes minimal responsibility for the three other roles

●

Without a dedicated team coach, coaching becomes the responsibility of the team leader or a nominated member. So, for most of the time, team coaching is the team’s own responsibility and one that resides mainly with the leader

●

An external team coach can revive and reinvigorate the team’s reflection within a short space of time, after which the team can usually carry the responsibility again

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TEAMWORK FOR TEAM COACHES

DEEPEN YOUR UNDERSTANDING To deepen your understanding of your role as a team coach, we will look at each of the four aspects in turn. Team coaches need to know about each one as they can all become part of a team coaching conversation. It is also good to be clear about the distinction between the work, the processes, the leadership and the underlying climate of the team. Each of these evolve and grow over time. This chapter covers what a team coach needs to know about teamwork and is followed by three further chapters: ● ● ●

What a team coach needs to know about team processes What a team coach needs to know about team leadership What a team coach needs to know about team climate

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TEAMWORK FOR TEAM COACHES

IMPROVING OUTPUT Teams want to improve their teamwork in order to improve their output. Teamwork is shorthand for the combined actions of a team, or the delivery of the team as a whole through individual and shared contributions. A team coach should be interested in teamwork because: ● It is teamwork (the ‘core tasks’) that brings the team together ● It is what the team will be measured and managed on ● It is what the team wants to improve through coaching During team coaching you can ask about the nature and quality of teamwork.

rk

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cesses

ro Team p

ip

adersh

Team le

mate

li Team c

Manager

Leader

Facilitator

Team Coach

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CASE EXAMPLE ISS 1: TEAMWORK To illustrate the art of teamwork, let us look at a well-known, rather extreme team that is relatively easy to study as they are in a ‘lab’ already. From my reading of diaries from the International Space Station, ISS, I have created a running case example. The ISS normally hosts six professionals, pilots as well as scientists, who are entirely dependent on each other, as they work in a challenging and dangerous workplace on a well-defined mission. Their interlocking tasks and schedules are their teamwork. It is mostly planned well in advance and all crew have been rigorously selected and trained to work independently and also be good team players, as needed.

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CASE EXAMPLE ISS 1: TEAMWORK Teamwork in the ISS is highly regulated, eg everyone wakes up at 6:00 and starts work at 08:10. Lunch is at 13.05 for exactly one hour with dinner and a crew conference at 19.30. In other words there is a lot of (pre-agreed, optimised) teamwork going on that does not require much processing or reflection. Team coaches can ask fresh, naïve questions about teamwork, ‘Why are you doing it this particular way?’, ‘Why is lunch at five minutes past one rather than simply on the hour?’ All to encourage reflection.

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TEAMWORK FOR TEAM COACHES

SEPARATING PROCESS & TEAMWORK In order to ask the right questions, a team coach needs to know what the teamwork is, how much daily communication it requires, and what expertise and competences team members are bringing to the common endeavour. Team coaching enquires into teamwork and team process. You can see these two elements as the yin and yang of teams. On the surface they seem similar but in fact they are as different as chalk and cheese: ●

●

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Chalk, or team process, stands for reflection: the ability to think about what needs to be done and ask questions, ‘Is this the right work?, ‘Is this the right reward?’, ‘Is this the right output?’, ‘Is this the right team?’ A bit like drawing tentatively on a blackboard… Cheese, or teamwork, stands for what needs to be done, namely to produce the team’s output, including the deliverables and the team’s remuneration or reward, as in the book Who moved my cheese? by Spencer Johnson

As Johnson also says, the consequence of not doing the ‘chalk’ (reflection) is unavoidably that the ‘cheese’ (production) will run out!

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TEAMWORK FOR TEAM COACHES

PROCESS & TEAMWORK Team coaches pay attention to the work and the process of a team. You need to know about content (the teamwork or cheese) and what the team you work with is expected to deliver. This includes the most favourable conditions for good output, the pros and cons of working with a team rather than a group of connected individuals, and how teamwork relates to the environment: eg clients, suppliers, owners, governments. This chapter covers those topics. We will look into what is known about teamwork so that you can ask the right questions. In sum, as a team coach you can foster reflection on both the chalk and the cheese. You can reflect on the teamwork including outputs and how that is going (cheese) and you can also reflect on change, collaboration and reflection in the team (chalk).

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WHAT TEAMWORK CAN ACHIEVE Teamwork is one of the greatest inventions of mankind… even if the ants do a very good job of it too! It is through collaboration and teamwork that our species now controls the planet, for better or for worse. It is easy to find outstanding examples of human achievement brought about through teamwork. Think about any major development in business or science (product launches, R&D, measuring subatomic particles), and even in medicine or the arts (operating theatres, concerts, films). The sophistication, prowess and complexity of our modern industry can be entirely related to ongoing developments in teamwork, allowing more and more people to contribute to a project, constructively, just in time, and irrespective of their locations of work, allegiances, or cultures of origin. From the examples mentioned: music, film, painting, industry and trade – what is a good metaphor for the current objective of your team? What business are you in and how does what you make show up in the team? 76 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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GROUP OR TEAM? Please answer these questions first: ● Is a family a group or a team? ● Is a small village a group or a team? ● Is my department a group or a team? Then look at this simple definition of teams: A team is grouped around a core common task and goal, a group is not. So if a collection of people have a common purpose, we will call them a team. Most groups at work are at least teams in part, as they will share in the common endeavour of their organisation. Another definition: Teamwork is essentially making the most of the team’s common purpose (core task) or in other words, to get as close to the core objectives as we can. 77

Answers: Yes, a family is a team (normally) with closely aligned objectives. No, a village is not a team although some objectives may be aligned. Your department may be either: if working on the same results/ projects together then yes.

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FROM INDIVIDUALS TO TEAMS Contrary to popular belief, teams are actually less productive than individuals working alone. Best estimates show that on average three or four individuals are as productive as one team of six. Ringelmann demonstrated this effect for ‘rope pulling’ in 1913: the combined pull of a team of N is much lower than N times the pull of an individual alone. The same is true for nonphysical work. So individuals on their own are far more effective and efficient than groups and teams. Not all work can be done by individuals, however, and most of today’s complex work has to be done by teams consisting of individuals with a common purpose. The art of teamwork is basically trying to make up for the substantial level of loss, recovering a little of the lost ground. It is through team coaching that this can happen, eg by delegating more to individuals, or by improving collaboration and mutual understanding.

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TEAMS BECOMING MORE COMPLEX CASE EXAMPLE In some ways every team is also not a team. The Board of Consulting Limited comprises four men and two women, of different nationalities. They have mostly risen through the ranks in the organisation and know each other well. They work well together in leading the firm as they line-manage partners and managers. In most areas of work they would say they are a team, and even where they disagree, they are committed to their shared purpose. However, the managing partner has become convinced that the firm should grow outside Europe into Asia, and in particular China. He is already moving ahead with this strategy. The rest of the team remain mostly unconvinced and cautious. This has led to the managing partner often being away in China and clearly less focused on the day-to-day running of the business. No one else has really bought into a China strategy, with most considering it a waste of their scarce resources. Clearly even strong, unified teams can have enough disagreement not to be a team on certain issues. On the China question this is still a disparate group not a team. 79 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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COMPLEX TEAMS Teams are getting ever more complex. Take a work team that you yourself are part of (most of us now are part of more than just one team!). Have a look at the list below and tick the ones that are true for your team: Multidisciplinary

Geographically dispersed

Multigenerational

Working across time zones

Multicultural

Working within multiple organisations

Multinational

Virtually working together

More and more in the 21st century we find that all of the boxes are ticked, ie our corporate teams are rapidly becoming truly diverse. 80 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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COMPLEX TEAMS With diversity and geographical spread come new forms of communication and increasing demands. There are more and more pressures on teams and on team members individually, and they (ie we!) have to step up to everincreasing challenges. At the same time all these developments are bringing more diversity, which leads to even richer and potentially more creative outcomes (which is why this is such an unstoppable trend!). More complex teamwork is being facilitated with constantly improving communications technology. 81 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD Teams have porous boundaries, allowing influences in from the outside. Team members move between teams, and they bring in ideas, services, goods and people. Teams have been compared to baskets in this sense: ‘containers with leaky walls’. The porous boundaries also allow a team to trade with its environment: to deliver services or products, to put up a ‘toll booth’ (charging only those outside the team), etc. Boundaries are therefore the place where teams deliver on their objectives: teams always work for something, and that something is outside the (current) team. As far as possible therefore, boundaries need to remain open, clear, safe and agreed.

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RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD Boundaries can be more or less porous: ● The least porous are sects, totalitarian regimes and some rare autarkies or selfsufficient societies: they tolerate hardly any influence from the outside ● The most porous are dissolving teams where the common purpose vanishes, eg: – many cross-functional project teams – virtual teams that have vaguely agreed to ‘stay in touch’ – LinkedIn or WhatsApp groups where no one ever posts much – gradually disintegrating teams, eg after a takeover As a team coach it is generally worthwhile to reflect on boundaries and involve the team in such reflections, because so much happens at the boundary – and so many difficulties can be traced back to boundary issues.

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CASE EXAMPLE WORKING WITH BOUNDARIES The leadership team of a hospital has come through a period of massive cost-cutting. Now, finally, the Board has been reassured by regulators that they can begin to develop their services again and invest in their future as a (now smaller) hospital. Motivation is still at an all-time low and raising morale is high on the Board’s priority list. Together with their team coach they have decided to formulate a new strategy working with the extended management team, so as to start involving senior management. As a first step they have asked all department heads for a SWOT analysis. To everyone’s great surprise nothing has come back by the deadline. They begin to realise how difficult it will be to engage people, even at this senior level. Here there is a boundary around the Board, and another boundary around the extended management team that includes the Board. Motivation across this boundary is difficult partly because the Board is privileged, eg they ‘have’ the team coaching. 84 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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INTRODUCTION With team process we come to the heart of how the team works together to deliver results. Process is about the way team members optimise the various contributions to outcome. This is a very delicate aspect of team performance where misunderstanding, ambiguity and conflicts emerge. Team coaching can make a big difference in this area.

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CHALLENGE THE DISTRACTIONS In every team many factors hold the team back from delivering the optimal result; for example, team members often criticise the communication in their teams and indeed this is very hard to get right. As you focus on reflection you will find there are many distractions. Examples are deadlines, urgent jobs, the latest news and gossip, strong pulls into the dynamics of the team, such as coalitions, inclusion and exclusion, and bids for control. Your job as a team coach is to challenge these distractions and to ask the team to pay attention to process. In this way you can help them to prioritise. Team coaches have to keep asking: ‘How can we make the process more effective and efficient, so that the team works better together?’

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CASE EXAMPLE ISS 2: TEAM PROCESS Team process comes to the fore when the ISS crew needs to make a new decision – something unexpected, eg a new request from planet earth, or some repair work to carry out. At such a moment the team needs to engage in a joint ‘process’ that helps them to resolve the issue, ie to communicate, influence each other, take joint decisions and act on them. In the ISS team process is notoriously difficult, because of the confinement and dependencies, and the multicultural, multi-language mix. One crew member, Valery Ryumin, wrote in his diary: ‘All the conditions necessary for murder are met if you shut two men in a cabin measuring 18 feet by 20 and leave them together for two months.’ The crew need to have regular team meetings, to be disciplined and loyal regarding the decisions, to follow through all actions and safety checks, and to get support (a form of coaching) from the mission control centres. In reality, their diaries indicate that they find the authority of mission control immensely frustrating: ‘Interesting, how you can be on top of the world one moment (literally) and then be completely demoralised the next, because of what is said on the ground.’ 88 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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CREATING THE RIGHT CONDITIONS We all know the experience of flow in teamwork, when everyone seems to work together seamlessly and constructively. We also know how rare this feeling is. Because of the increased social pressure and the need to communicate, working in teams brings many losses. As mentioned earlier, teamwork is less productive than individuals working independently. There are many challenges to overcome when optimising the processes. Entirely making up for the losses is not possible; which means that so-called synergies from putting individuals into teams and from merging teams in organisations are rarely realised in practice. Over the following pages we will look at some evidence that teams are less effective than we like to believe, and consider what we can possibly do about these losses in the team process. 89 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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LOST EFFICIENCY 1: THE HARD FACTS There are three types of efficiency losses in teams: 1. Effort and productivity – on average people inside teams put in 75% less than outside. So team members work less hard than individual workers. 2. Problem-solving ability – teams tend to perform substantially less well than the best individual in the team. 3. Creativity – brainstorming teams produce 60% fewer ideas per team member than the average individual in the team working alone. These figures vary with team size: the losses in productivity and creativity increase with the size of the team. So if teams and individuals are compared on a per person basis, individuals win by a large margin. Teams only win because of their strength in numbers, ie when comparing the team’s output with that of an individual. We can conclude that it is best to allow individuals to work by themselves to their own targets, as far as possible. There are other ways to set up collaboration, eg by creating independent business units or an internal marketplace. 90 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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LOST EFFICIENCY 2: COMMUNICATION Communication between team members is crucial for the quality of teamwork. However, even when communication is good, it is very difficult to get the right information to the right team member just in time. In teams there is a lot of ‘retweeting’ of information: only widely shared and muchdiscussed information will be attended to, not necessarily information crucial to the task that may be in the heads of only some of the team’s members. There are also pressures for social conformity, so team members suppress their own differences, challenges and creative ideas. People are anxious to achieve agreement, leading to groupthink: dominant views are taken in without much reflection (even when they are wrong!). The best work processes are less dependent on live communication, while keeping information flowing. 91 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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LOST EFFICIENCY 3: SOCIAL INHIBITIONS Some team members may suffer from shyness, introversion and inhibitions in groups, giving them less visibility and impact within the team. Conversely, dominant team members may inhibit others from contributing, as may status and hierarchy, so that people become wary of criticising management. It has been demonstrated that we all work less hard when in a team - the phenomenon of social loafing (see West, 2012). We take less responsibility for a common purpose and we work less hard on average (although this does depend on national culture and is less prevalent, for example, in Asia). These well-documented phenomena should lead us to conclude that independent efforts are better than dependent efforts. Agreeing individual outputs and performance targets can help to overcome the inhibitions of social process.

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LOST EFFICIENCY 4: SOCIAL DISTRACTIONS A team acquires a life of its own and although that can be very fulfilling it is also distracting. Our productivity in teams gets diminished by the need to attend to other people – a phenomenon called production blocking. With the increase of virtual teamwork and electronic communication, this form of distraction is changing: while we can now work more independently, we are constantly exposed, through technology, to new distractions and blocks to good communication, such as icons on screens and the temptation to multi-task. Teams rarely achieve the full synergy of working together but when they can share a high proportion of their relevant knowledge and reflections with one another, they are in a better place. This can be driven by team coaching. It is better to bring a team together for deep reflection or celebration, rather than for meetings dominated by information updates and decisions: as if everyone needs to know everything about every single activity or needs to be part of even minor decisions. 93 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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COUNTERING LOSSES: CREATING THE RIGHT CONDITIONS We will now look at ways to work against these distractions and difficulties. There is ample evidence that reflection can counter some of the losses involved in teamwork: the amount of reflection in a team has been found to be positively correlated with: ● The workload a team can handle ● The psychological strain it can sustain ● The level of its innovation In short, there is evidence that if teams reflect more together they can handle higher workloads and more psychological pressure, and can become innovative as well. Thinking together about how the team is doing is the only antidote we know to the many losses in teamwork.

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EXAMPLE OF TEAM PROCESS CASE EXAMPLE HIGH ADRENALINE They are called the ‘big beasts’ in this organisation. They have risen through the ranks and are now in managing director positions, with an air of success about them. They hold the president’s feet to the fire, by debating his decisions, openly critiquing perceived weaknesses and monitoring implementation. They can be very demanding of other parts of the organisation and some of them assume massive personal privileges. They form a senior management team that is truly impressive but that most ordinary mortals, in lower positions, want to placate. As a result, information is not always fed through and the top team finds out about issues at a very late stage and rarely directly from the people involved. That makes them even more critical or annoyed, which in turn makes others still more cautious. To renew the team and open up communication channels, the president brings in a few strong outsiders and organises team coaching with an external coach. In the sessions some of the underlying dynamics are exposed, helping to explain why this organisation has been struggling so much with hierarchy and communication. 95 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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COUNTERING LOSSES: DECISION–MAKING Decision-making is another factor worth concentrating on. Surowiecki (2005) has done extensive research on knowledge creation and decisionmaking in groups. On the basis of this research he suggests that although for most team activities the group average is mediocre, this is not true for decision-making, where the average group decision is in fact consistently better than a decision taken by the best member of the team. Surowiecki concludes that teams make the best possible decisions together but only when: ● As many team members as possible are engaged with decision-making ● They have a wide range of opinions ● They have the greatest possible independence in their thinking ● They have maximum independence in making the decision, eg through voting

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Note the differences with everyday team meetings in most organisations, where each of these aspects is normally reduced rather than enhanced.

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COUNTERING LOSSES: DECISION-MAKING This type of fluidity in generating and bringing together the team’s views is precisely what good leadership or team coaching can do for the team. In the next chapter we will look at high-quality leadership for teams. Team coaches can help by actively bringing the greatest possible variety of opinion to the table and by encouraging equal participation in decisions: this will create better team decisions! One way to organise this is through cards on Metaplan boards which are stickered and processed by all team members independently, to maximise the information that decisions are based on.

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A MODEL FOR IMPROVING TEAM PROCESS Hackman (2002) suggests that team process can be improved by looking after and optimising the following ‘five conditions for effectiveness’: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A real team rather than a team in name only: a clear shared task appropriate to teamwork, ie requiring members to work interdependently. Clear compelling direction for the team’s work. An enabling structure that facilitates rather than impedes the work. A supportive organisational context around the team. Ample team coaching, ie organised and trusted reflective space, so that the team can review its work and processes.

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A MODEL FOR IMPROVING TEAM PROCESS These five conditions open up five highly relevant questions team coaches can ask: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

What is the task that all team members are responsible for? And if there is no joint core task, why are you spending so much time together? What is the core issue of tomorrow’s clients that your teamwork is going to resolve? What is your future strategic fit as a team, knowing your own context? What processes do you need to have in place to be optimally effective, and optimally reflective? What other teams and organisations do you rely on for your core delivery? Can you improve your working relationships with those teams? What is the quality of the reflective space available to the team? Do you trust that space enough to be really open with each other?

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CONCLUSION The following lessons can be drawn from what we now know about team process: ● ● ● ● ●

Using team meetings to share information about each other’s work is not particularly helpful or effective: so reporting back to base is usually unnecessary Team meetings are best used sparsely: team members can get on with their work and will organise themselves to get the information they need Open team meetings are still important, namely for issues that genuinely concern all team members For these issues it is crucial to take time and get input from all, ie to organise ‘upwards feedback’ that truly affects leadership Another key use of team meetings is to develop more trust and reflective ability, by engaging in team coaching

Contrary to what many team members and leaders think, in most circumstances team coaching is the best use of their time when they get together. 100 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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MAKING TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE Team coaching puts existing practice under the microscope and asks: How can we do better as a team? How can we improve our work, our goals, our way of working together and also our leadership? The constant scrutiny is quite challenging of the status quo, and can be challenging of the team’s leadership as well. It is important that team leaders and managers understand the benefits team coaching brings, both to themselves and to the team. Leaders need to separate their team coaching from their leadership, by organising dedicated reflection time away from influencing and decision-making. rk

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MAKING TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE CASE EXAMPLE ISS 3: TEAM LEADERSHIP Everyone on a team shares responsibility for how the team is led and how the work is done, but for ease of process one person is usually in overall charge. On the ISS this is the team’s commander, who is responsible for the overall mission success and the safety of crew and station. Real leadership resides outside the ISS, in the five mission control rooms around the world, where all the data is analysed and the missions are directed. There is a complex legal structure based on international treaties that keeps leadership in place. Daily management is delegated to NASA, so for the commander most authority resides in Houston, Texas. Because of the real risks and vulnerability of the mission, it is important for everyone on board to know exactly where authority lies and to follow instructions from ground control.

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MAKING TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE CASE EXAMPLE ISS 3: TEAM LEADERSHIP On a small, highly interdependent team such as the ISS, one can observe shared leadership where the commander works with the others as an equal. Frictions relating to leadership tend to occur between the astronauts and mission control (‘us’ and ‘them’), as witnessed in the many diary entries commenting on apparently spurious, ridiculous and contradictory instructions from Houston. Here is a reflection on leadership from one of the astronauts: ‘One of the problems is that our training doesn’t really cover some of the basics of life in orbit that we need to have under control. We spend all of our time on emergency scenarios and spacewalks. Sometimes understanding how to live would go a long way to increasing the success of the mission.’

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MAKING TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE CASE EXAMPLE ISS 3: TEAM LEADERSHIP Clear and accepted leadership is very important for the quality of every team’s success, so a team coach will observe and intervene on the leadership within the team. An outsider (an external team coach), in particular, can help to observe current leadership, to challenge it and to help improve it and its complement, followership.

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MAKING TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE Teamwork, team building, team leadership and team coaching are all essentially directed at counteracting the great losses that come from working in teams. Leadership is the main function dedicated to making the team more effective. This does not make leadership particularly easy: surveys have shown that over 50% of all team leaders in the industrial world are regarded by their own team as ‘unhelpful’ overall. That is a damning indictment and something all leaders should worry about. Here is a quick heuristic for establishing who is a good leader and who isn’t: ‘If you are in a meeting or a presentation or engaged in any other work activity, and all of a sudden your boss joins you in the room, how do you feel? – Inhibited and exposed? Or strengthened and appreciated?’. If you are an external team coach, one of your main tasks is exploring the quality of leadership in an open way so that it can be improved. 106 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP If you want to understand the impact of leaders, then first it is important to understand that leadership success is not the same as leadership effectiveness: ● ●

Success can be defined by high ratings from superiors and ‘promotability’. Wellknown predictors for leadership success are general intelligence and social skills Effectiveness can be defined by team performance, and therefore by high (honest!) ratings from the team members. Well-known predictors for leadership effectiveness are ‘routine’ communications and dealing with HR issues

In all of this, the ability to receive critical feedback from the team (as part of routine communications) stands out as a key differentiator between effective (good) and ineffective (bad) leadership. Team coaches can help by opening up channels to voice critical feedback. For the evidence behind the statements on this page, see De Haan & Kasozi, 2014. 107 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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DIFFERENT TEAMS NEED DIFFERENT LEADERSHIP

We know what to do

Here are some different types of teams that have been observed (see Obeng, 2002):

Team on a quest

Orchestra team

Improv team

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DIFFERENT TEAMS NEED DIFFERENT LEADERSHIP See which of these your own work team most closely resembles: ●

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An Orchestra team (we know what to do and how to do it) is like clockwork with all the parts working together in repetitive patterns. There is little freedom for individual members, eg factories A Team on a quest is a team trying to find a solution to a unique problem, eg project and programme teams A Team on an expedition works with clear, repetitive routines but on end terms that are as yet unknown or undefined, eg productions of movies and shows, hospitals, universities An Improv team (we don’t know what to do or how to do it) is a team with relatively little certainty or agreement, such as developmental and innovation teams, eg some R&D and marketing teams

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DIFFERENT TEAMS NEED DIFFERENT LEADERSHIP As a leader, it is important to know that leadership requirements can be different for the four types of team: ● The Orchestra team needs quality monitoring and fine-tuning, so there may be a tendency towards micromanagement ● The Team on a quest needs to keep the focus in mind and to be well-drilled, so the leader should be very present, and is often a peer-performer ● For the Team on an expedition, leadership can be light, mainly providing feedback and challenge in terms of how the team is doing ● For the Improv team there are cycles of learning and discovery where leadership can just be light and reflective Team coaching is most useful for the latter two, who need to think more about what they are doing, and less for the first two. 110 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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NATURAL GROUND FOR COACHING The team’s work is grounded in its processes, through collaboration and communication. Its processes are grounded in leadership and decision-making. The team’s leadership is grounded in its climate: the team’s ‘feel’ – personality, culture and basic trust levels. The team climate is where we feel what it is like to be in this team and where we make meaning of the work. It is the natural ground for team coaching, where feelings, attitudes, attachments, viewpoints and assumptions can be processed. As team coach you enter the team’s climate and make use of your own feelings as you become (at least temporarily) a member of the team, in support of them as a whole. rk

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CASE EXAMPLE ISS 4: TEAM CLIMATE The climate is how team members feel and what they think of one another. From the ISS, a dramatic mix of feelings have been reported. Feelings seem somehow to be more alive in space. As one astronaut writes: ‘With time on my hands for half an hour, I feel slightly melancholy, for some reason… Space seems to somehow amplify our emotions, positive or negative, however they might be. Maybe it is the remoteness, or the beautiful scene outside, or a consciousness that we are in a unique situation, benefiting from the work of others. News stories have powerful emotional impacts on me.’ Studies of the ISS crews have found a recurrent dip in morale during the third quarters of expeditions. One would expect this to influence team process and team leadership, and ultimately the quality of teamwork. Through morale and motivation, team climate impacts on all the other aspects of life on board.

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A RICH SOURCE OF UNDERSTANDING The team climate is at the heart of team coaching, as we explore the underlying feelings and (unconscious) ideas present in the team. It is from the climate that the team can draw inspiration and trust, allowing them to resolve current challenges and move past impasses. The climate is also the richest source of understanding about the team. If you can read how it feels, lives and breathes, you will have invaluable data about its challenges, bottlenecks and issues. Time and time again, team coaches assess what the team’s visceral sensations are – both explicitly and implicitly (above and below the surface). Team coaches use themselves as antennae to form this understanding and to gain material for a summary or interpretation of what is important right now. Attempting to influence the team’s climate, culture, dynamics and feelings directly, however, is rare and not very useful. It can feel indulgent and leads to mostly reversible changes. Working on climate directly can have a high feel-good or bare-your-soul character that does not generally transfer back to the workplace. 114 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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KEY ASPECTS OF TEAM CLIMATE The things I always look out for in working with any team, as their coach, are: 1.

2.

3.

The team’s personality which is really what the word climate means: how does the team as a whole manifest itself? What are the key differences in feel or behaviour between this team and any other of the same size and responsibilities? The team’s mood which you can understand as the weather as opposed to the climate: what particular team manifestation can we pick up today? What are the overriding emotions, behaviours, intentions? The team’s core attachment, ie basic levels of trust and loyalty: how connected does the team feel, and how safe? Again: both generally (climate) and today, at this very moment (weather).

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TRUST IS AT THE HEART Levels of internal trust are key to what any team can achieve (see Lencioni, 2002). Trust not so much in the sense of reliability: ‘I know what to expect’; but mostly in the sense of trusting, ie safety and belonging: ‘I feel safe and connected’. ●

Trust is how vulnerable we can allow ourselves to be in this team

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Trust is how much we believe the team is still there for us when we are out there, working on our own

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Trust has been shown to be at the core of team process, leadership and even teamwork, ie the output of the team

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NOTICE & ENHANCE TRUST LEVELS Psychologically, trust is nurtured by being trusting. In this way trust can be given and spread through the team. Trust is mostly reciprocal, so it is built over time, and it always has something to do with safety, belonging and protection, ie with strong and healthy boundaries around the team. It is also nurtured by containment: by offering a safe, trusting environment, sustainably over time. Then the question, ‘How safe is it here to be vulnerable?’ can be both asked and (tentatively) answered. As team coaches we offer containment to grow trust, because we know high trust levels yield high quality of process, decision-making, collaboration, leadership and performance/ output.

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WORKING WITH CLIMATE CASE EXAMPLE HOLDING UP THE SKY This management team of seven owners and leaders of a consulting business occasionally works with an external team coach. Their last session was a year ago; this time they have a new coach. At the start of the day there is polite but slightly anxious conversation. And there is quite a lot of consternation when they discover, as the session starts, that one of the founding members has chosen to work instead of attending. The team coach asks the remaining six for two metaphors and a fact: a metaphor about themselves now in the team, one about their expectations for the day and a fact about themselves that is important and unknown to the others. There is a high level of sharing and openness, and the CEO confesses he feels like Atlas, condemned to hold up this firm for eternity. Soon a few simmering conflicts or misunderstandings are brought into the open and talked through. The team coach is struck by the high levels of trust and loyalty. 118 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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WORKING WITH CLIMATE CASE EXAMPLE HOLDING UP THE SKY And so the coach takes a risk and shares his own metaphor, about himself on the day: he feels like being Hercules, who bore the whole weight of the sky for Atlas for one day, so that Atlas could fetch him the Hesperidean apples. ‘But, like Hercules, I can only hold it for you for this one day.’ The risk worked out well and the team was intrigued, whilst the leader felt safer and made new associations with his own metaphor of Atlas. From here on, the high level of containment allowed them all to really feel their feelings, and think in a radically fresh way about several important business decisions. In the ‘unfinished business’ of this team the coach was able to pick up on the themes of tenderness versus harshness; as well as sacrifice mixed with resentment. In this way a team coach can create space (‘hold up the sky’) for the team to work through their vulnerabilities, safely and creatively.

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TEAM CLIMATE FOR TEAM COACHES

WHY IS TRUST SO IMPORTANT? Trust helps people to be vulnerable and open – Which is good for information sharing – And also for debate: for productive conflicts about issues

Which is good for reaching the best decisions – And also for ‘loyalty’: the ability to follow up on the decisions

Which is good for team results (as distinct from individual results) – And also for peer performance monitoring and improvement

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Which, when experienced together with continuing safety, is the same as trust.

Peer performance improvement is the same as openness between team members

So trust is nothing less than a virtuous cycle in high-performing teams!

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TEAM CLIMATE FOR TEAM COACHES

HELPING WITH TRUST & LOYALTY As said before, as they work with the team coaches can build a safer, more trustworthy environment that in turn increases long-term trust. Team coaches can also offer containment, which means firm boundaries and awareness within those boundaries. Containment is both giving space and giving limits to space. They do this by: ● Contracting with clear objectives, firm beginnings, endings, role definition (of themselves, leaders, clients, members) ● Understanding, through summary and hypothesis Loyalty is also a fertile area for exploration. Too many teams remain a bunch of individuals with diverse or split loyalties. And too few prioritise their first loyalty, which is to the team they are a member of (rather than to the team that they lead or the team that their boss is a member of, or other loyalties across the organisation). Team coaches can observe wavering loyalties (visible through non-attendance, passivity, irritations) and help make priorities clear. 121 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

TEAM CLIMATE FOR TEAM COACHES

SUMMARY Team coaches hold the space for thinking: They make their sessions safe and reflective ... ... which brings more trust and more openness ... ... so that concerns are being voiced and processed ... ... so that team processes and leadership can be improved ... ... so that the team feels more trusted and motivational ... ... so that the performance of the team can look after itself. 122 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

TEAM CLIMATE FOR TEAM COACHES

SUMMARY All you need to do is C.O.A.C.H.:

C onnect: make it easy for the team to connect with you O bserve yourself: notice the pull on you A ppreciate what is happening right now C ontract on the current issues H elp to achieve the contract

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FURTHER INFORMATION

RECOMMENDED READING Experiences in Groups, Bion, W. R. Routledge, 1998 Effective Group Coaching: Tried and Tested Tools and Resources for Optimum Coaching Results, Britton, J. J. Wiley, 2011 Coaching the Team at Work, Clutterbuck, D. Nicholas Brealey, 2007 Group Coaching: A Comprehensive Blueprint, Cockerham, G. iUniverse, 2011 Critical moments of clients of coaching: towards a ‘client model’ of executive coaching, De Haan, E., Bertie, C., Day, A. & Sills, C. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 5, 2, 109-128, 2010 The Leadership Shadow: How to Recognise and Avoid Derailment, Hubris and Overdrive, De Haan, E. & Kasozi, A. Kogan Page, 2014 Leading Teams – Setting the Stage for Great Performances, Hackman, J.R. Harvard Business School Press, 2002 A Theory of Team Coaching, Hackman, J.R. & Wageman R. Academy of Management Review, 30(2), 269-287, 2005 124 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

FURTHER INFORMATION

RECOMMENDED READING Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership, Hawkins, P. Kogan Page, 2014 Helping the Client, Heron, J. Sage Publications, 1975; 5th edition 2009 Who Moved my Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in your Work and in your Life, Johnson, S. Putnam, 1999 The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, Katzenbach, J. R. & Smith, D. K. Harvard Business School Press, 1992. The Hedgehog Effect: The Secrets of Building High Performance Teams, Kets de Vries, M.F.R. Wiley, 2011 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni, P. Jossey-Bass, 2002 Perfect Projects, Obeng, E. Pentacle, 2002 Intervention Skills: Process Consultation for Small Groups and Teams, Reddy, W.B. Wiley, 1991 125 Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

FURTHER INFORMATION

RECOMMENDED READING The role of transformational leadership in enhancing team reflexivity, Schippers, M. C.; Hartog D. N. D.; Koopman P. L. & Knippenberg, D. Van. Journal of Human Relations, 61 (11), 1593-1616, 2008 Team reflexivity and innovation: The moderating role of team context, Schippers, M.C., West, M.A. & Dawson, J.F. Journal of Management, 41 (3), 769-788, 2015 The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki, J. Anchor, 2005 Group and Team Coaching: The Essential Guide, Thornton, C. Routledge, 2010 Reflexivity for team innovation in China - the contribution of goal interdependence, Tjosvold, D., Tang, M. M. L., & West, M. Group & Organization Management, 29(5), 540-559, 2004 Effective Teamwork: Practical Lessons from Organizational Research, West, M. A. Wiley, 2012

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About the Author Erik de Haan Erik is a leadership and organisation development consultant, psychodynamic psychotherapist, executive (team) coach and supervisor. He is the Director of the Ashridge Centre for Coaching and programme leader of the Ashridge Master’s (MSc) in Executive Coaching, and the Ashridge Postgraduate Diploma (PG Dip) in Organisational Supervision. Erik is also Professor of Organisation Development & Coaching at the VU University of Amsterdam. He has written more than 150 articles and eleven books in different languages, among which are Fearless Consulting (2006), Coaching with Colleagues (2004, with Yvonne Burger), Relational Coaching (2008), Supervision in Action (2011), Coaching Relationships (2012, edited with Charlotte Sills), The Leadership Shadow (2014, with Anthony Kasozi) and Being Supervised—A Guide for Supervisees (2015, with Willemine Regouin). He serves on the editorial boards of several peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Philosophy of Management and APA’s Consulting Psychology Journal. Contact Erik can be reached on [email protected], 0044 7789698633 or www.erikdehaan.com. He is very grateful to the publisher Ros Baynes for inspiring and provoking him to write about what team coaching is, and not about what it is not. Copyright protected – Management Pocketbooks Ltd

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