Team coaching
Are you ‘just’ a Board or are you also a team? Do you want to see tangible improvements in the way you operate together? Do you need to galvanise your board to help them reach the highest levels of team and organisational performance?
If you and your team ready for change, then this is the programme for you.
Our coaches offer a unique and tailored blend of approaches to develop your top team, including group coaching, team building and development workshops, facilitation, and process consultancy (focusing on how things are done, rather than what is done).
Every board is different, so the precise design of every team coaching programme is different too. But some of the more common objectives are:
- Create better interpersonal relationships within the Board
- Move from being ‘just’ a Board to being a genuine team
- Develop the team as a collective in their purpose, performance and process
- Develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with stakeholders
- Ensure collective focus on strategic goals
- Improve business performance
To get the most from this approach it’s essential that the CEO / MD and all exec board members participate. Whether non-exec chairs or NEDs should also attend is a subject for discussion.
As outlined in more detail below, it’s usually a five-stage process.
- Coach/facilitator to meet CEO / MD to explore issues and to meet team members individually
- Inquiry and research
- Feedback, discussion and programme design
- Programme delivery
- Consultant to have final meeting with CEO / MD to review outcomes and suggest how to maintain momentum
All teams can benefit from coaching. And some more than others. But it’s important to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve.
If the team isn’t performing as you’d like because of dysfunctional relationships within the team, then our Boardroom team dynamics programme might be a better option for you.
If just one or two board members are lagging slightly behind the others in terms of their contribution to the team effort, then Executive coaching would be a good starting point.
If, however, the team as a whole are all on more or less the same level and there are no major dysfunctions but they’re somehow just not firing on all cylinders, not quite gelling, not performing at the level you need, then a team coaching approach as outlined here is probably what you need.
Clare is a highly qualified, experienced and effective coach and organisational change and OD consultant, specialising in team dynamics.
Agenda
Less of an agenda, more an outline of the approach. Purely indicative – a starting point for a conversation with you. Clare would be happy to tailor it to your precise requirements.
The first step of this programme is for our consultant to meet with you, the CEO/MD to learn more about the specific outcomes you want to see.
We then meet each member of your team to build our relationship with them, explain the process and get their buy-in, and ‘contract’ with them to undertake a series of sessions with the Board team as a whole.
The next step is inquiry, the elements of which are agreed by you. This may include the use of a diagnostic tool, psychometrics profiles, or 360° surveys. We have a number of such tools at our disposal. If you’re comfortable with it, the 360 can include getting feedback from people outside the board team itself, whether external stakeholders or internal direct reports.
But there’s no need to reinvent the wheel or repeat what you may have done previously – we’d want to make full use of any existing data on team performance, eg, previous 360s, staff survey results, KPIs, team objectives, stakeholder feedback, etc.
Having done the inquiry stage, we then need to feed back to you our discoveries and diagnosis, and discuss with you the design of the group sessions based on the data gathered.
The number of workshops may differ. We usually suggest a minimum of four half-day workshops, designed specifically for you and tailored to your team’s personalities and specific needs. Typically there is time for one or two theme options per half-day. The option of full-day workshops to cover more content is possible and the structure can be tailored to your needs.
Moving on to the delivery stage, the general structure of the sessions is based on the Peter Hawkins CLEAR approach. Options for the team coaching journey map may include:
- Diagnostic analysis feedback and co-discovery
- Do you need to be a team?
- What makes an effective team: the 5 disciplines of successful team practice
- Limiting assumptions
- The 5 dysfunctions of a team
- Types of diversity
- Clarification of mission and collective purpose, who commissions and how
- Team strategic plan
- Internal relations and team dynamics
- Relationships with key stakeholders
- Team learning
There is also the option for the coach to attend regular meetings of the team to provide feedback on patterns they notice, eg, keeping on track with mission, behaviour, patterns of relating and the emotional climate, the stories the team is telling itself, its mindset, motivations and assumptions, etc.
We allow time at the first workshop to contract with the group on boundaries and confidentiality, practicalities, ethics and our working alliance, alongside arriving at a joint view of the current state of the team, to agree where we collectively would like the team to be at the end of the coaching process, to decide what needs to be addressed and focused upon and how we need to work together to achieve the most value.
Having explored and experimented with new ways of operating, we move to a point of action; how will you act differently to perform better? We facilitate the planning process using the 5P model. We help the team to start living the changes immediately and agree on a future review process.
At the end of the series of sessions, we conduct a final meeting with you to reflect upon learning from the group work, what changes we are noticing, and what you may take forward to continue momentum in the right direction.
For a no-obligation discussion about running something along these lines for your organisation, just give us a call on 01582 463465.
