Richard leads the London office of a global consulting firm. He took on the role unexpectedly, when the previous office head resigned. He inherited a new set of leaders in a difficult economic climate. He wanted to get clear on the strategy and pull the group together into a team.

What did you want to get out of team coaching?

I needed to understand where everyone stood, what they were thinking, and whether they were on board with where we were going. We also needed to sort out who was going to do what as we moved forward, to get clear on each of our responsibilities and objectives.

How did it go?

Better than we had expected. It definitely required a lot of work, but if paid off. We’ve learned a great deal about each other and have even made some really important decisions that I didn’t think we’d get to. We’ve gotten to know each other better, and we’ve grown as a team.

What do you wish you’d done differently?

We planned some individual meetings to check in on our progress after the initial coaching, but we should have been more structured about it. Until we all really change the way we operate together, it would have been helpful to put more discipline into the follow-up tasks, with more formal and facilitated check-ins on progress.

Having smart people with great experience
often isn’t enough to tackle the big challenges
that organizations face.

To win, those smart people need to work in teams, build relationships and trust, clarify and articulate objectives, understand roles and responsibilities, envision a path forward, align resources and interests, and then get things done. It sounds straightforward, but it rarely is. With lots of different ideas, strengths, challenges, interests, and egos involved, the path can be very murky.

Team coaching helps teams operate more effectively.

Together, the team and coach navigate both the dynamics of the team and real business issues. This isn’t training on the theory of how teams work or get stuck. It’s hands-on, working through the actual priorities and challenges at hand, peppered with attention and discussion about how the team is operating. The focus is on what is happening today, what needs to be accomplished, how the team needs to function to achieve its goals, the gap analysis between reality and what’s needed, and a plan to make it happen.

We work with the team as a whole, teaching skills that are required for difficult conversations, practicing those skills while working on real business issues, and supporting a different and better way of working together.

The result is a team with a shared purpose, stronger relationships, a new way of behaving with one another, and renewed optimism about what’s possible.

This process takes time. It’s one thing to understand how mindset and behaviors need to change and another to make the new mindset and behaviors your standard operating procedure. It takes iteration: discovery, idea generation, experimentation, Q&A, feedback, course corrections, re-envisioning the end goal, modifying plans, more feedback, and so on.

Teams bring in a coach for many reasons: adding new members, struggling to be effective, a new challenge, desire to raise the bar, a specific setback, a new leader, or a new opportunity.