Business coaching is a field that’s experiencing rapid growth. One of its primary functions is to create the circumstances under which performance improvement can happen, and when the client is a team, coaching has been proven to be highly effective.
Team coaching begins with the assumption that the team is already functioning and is able to follow external guidance to improve its performance. Setting up a team is not a coaching role; the coach is there to identify problems and help the team find solutions. The eventual outcome will be that the coach departs and the team functions at a level consistently higher than before.
Just as the team leader has a special function in the overall context of the team, so does the team coach. The leader’s job is to coordinate the activities of the team and serve as a conduit to management; the coach’s role is to assist the team to develop itself.
When the coaching process is carried out correctly and professionally the results can lead to outstanding success. Here are some of the ways in which team coaches can help their clients:
1. Clarify and Simplify
The coach can help the team acquire a comprehensive and uniform view of itself and its goals, removing any misconceptions and helping all team members gain a clear focus on where the team’s going.
2. Identify Problem Areas and Remove Stress
The coach brings an outsider’s perspective that is free of prejudices and can objectively spot areas where something is inhibiting the team’s progress and causing team members to be stressed. By working through these problem areas the coach removes stresses and thereby helps direct the team’s energies.
3. Encourage Moves Forward
Team coaches often see good ideas that have been proposed but then failed to proceed for one reason or another. The coach is in the unique position of being able to encourage a reconsideration of these ideas and recommend their implementation if they are in line with the team’s goals.
4. Gain an Expectation of Success
Too often a team is found to be wandering in search of a goal rather than expecting to achieve it. The coach can enter the picture and create an expectation of success — a feeling among all team members that their work will (not just may) result in achieving the goals that have been set.
5. Encourage Good Communication
Without good communication a team will fail. Every member needs to clearly understand what they’e supposed to do and what they’re going to accomplish. They also need to be given reports of progress along the way. The coach can stimulate the team’s internal communications and make everyone aware of what knowledge needs to be shared.
6. Improve the Team’s Effectiveness
The coach’s external viewpoint will quickly spot any roadblocks to maximum effectiveness, whether caused by people, personalities or simply a fear of failure. The coaching process can remove the roadblocks and make the team members collectively more effective.
Coaching a team is not like coaching individuals. The aim of team coaching is to unify the members of the team into a force whose energies are directed toward achieving a common goal. This is generally facilitated by making the most of the coach’s external perspective and by overcoming barriers to progress that have been erected within the team.
A special relationship can exist between the team leader and the coach if the structure of the team permits the leader to have sufficient independence and authority. For example, if the team is too large to permit attention to be given to individual members the team leader can be used as the channel for instructions and directions.
Where many coaches go wrong when working with a team is that they let themselves become a member of the team, losing their independence and authority by getting too close to their client. In turn, the coaching outcome is usually less than optimal.
Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.