Getting to the essence of 'why Team Coaching is different'. Part 1
On the Being of the Team Coach
Picking out some points from Georgina Woudstra (Team Coaching Studio) speaking in 2017 with Krista Lowe, Team Coaching Zone.
Team Coaching, according to champion and pioneer, Georgina Woudstra, is different to familiar team interventions - team building, development, conflict resolution, team awaydays, solutions-oriented facilitation, consultancy, mentoring and so on. Hence, it is new, growing and could make a massive impact on people who work with other people in any kind of organisation.
Why?
Because the heart of Team Coaching is for the team to take responsibility for engaging with everything about how they work together - visible and under the surface - to create the trust, ability to disagree, commitment, accountability and collective attention to results (Lencioni) that will improve the experience of working in any team.
Surely the aim of all coaches work? Woudstra invites the team coach to equally bring all of themselves to the process, to acknowledge the attraction for providing expert content and structure, and the anxiety of stormy, complicated team dynamics, and let them go. Instead, aim for creating and holding a safe space for the team to address everything they need to, themselves.
In other words, making space for what emerges from the process by not imposing structure or content.
Give an example:
(I'm making these up for illustration)- noticing an energy drop, proposes a mood-lightening exercise;
- breaks the extended silence with an improved question;
- defuses an argument with a helpful re-framing of what someone is trying to say
- asks each group to feedback in turn and usefully summarises on the whiteboard
- under the pressure of all eyes on them, the coach offers a good anecdote followed by a favourite relevant model to simplify what's happening.
What do you notice?
How else can you help the team then?
here is how Team Coaching (my examples again) might address the above scenario:
- draws attention to an energy drop, and stands up and says, 'I notice an energy drop' and sits down.
- honours the extended silence with a supporting interjection 'yes this is a long silence'
- acknowledges an argument by witnessing the working out of conflict 'yes this is raising alot of energy'
- reminds the group to feedback to each other, not the coach and sits down.
- under the pressure of all eyes on them, the coach checks in with themselves, holds the space and says nothing, so that the team turns its attention back on to each other.....
As a very, very new Team Coach, these examples are what I imagine would work, confident that these can and will be improved. Like learning to skateboard while juggling eggs, 10% book learning and 20% seeing others do it well gets you so far - but is the 70% trying and failing again, again, again, will get you there.
A concise definition of Team Coaching:
Partnering with the team and its dynamics, relationships and wider context
to
maximise the synergy of their collective abilities and potential
to
achieve their common purpose and shared goals.
This is Woudstra's - she encourages you to create your own and keep nurturing it.
Some principles underlying Team Coaching.
Relational vs Personal:
Learning and Change in ourselves is a process that necessarily involves other people.
Change is effected through relationship. Coaching is therefore a process that needs to address the whole way the team are together
Team coaching aims at making space for what emerges over designing activities for what is produced
Relational movement:
The Team Coaching space - focusing holistically with the coach as part of the change - comes from the wider interest in the 'Relational'.
The coach changes too - as equally implicit in the change process, not apart from it; change is a shared endeavour. Unlike a model where the coach holds power over the process and withdraws themselves in service of the team's affective change, the coach becomes super-aware of their own needs and how that might affect the process.
Getting to the heart of the 'being of the Team Coach'
We don't serve by conflating TC with Facilitating and Team Building.
The team needs to know it is in charge, able to address all the dynamics that work for them or frustrate them, and work out themselves what they need to make progress. We are applying what we have learned from 1 to 1 coaching - to honour the distinction between co-creating a confident space for self-development and intervening with advice, consultancy, mentoring.
Lets be honest: coaches serve their own fear by producing content and holding power:
Team Coach development seeks to surface the unconscious impacts on the coach that might lead to intervening and taking power away.
Signature presence of the coach
we might think the coach has little left to do.
In fact, it is the opposite - the coach is striving to attend to the team, the process and themselves, and bring everything they can to it.
The difference is lies in the power relationship.
The coach recognises that when they speak or frame the session, they take power from the team. Instead they seek to create the space for the team to work in. By being part of it but not manipulating it.
This requires all the humanity of the coach. Dorothy E. Siminovitch's idea that the coach's signature presence is all that you bring to Team Coaching - experience, background, your way of being, your deep vein of authenticity
coming next:
Two main competencies
- The coaches ability to create and hold the space
- What the coach is noticing and Experiencing
Relationship with the Leader
- coaching the leader to lead
What we miss
- working in partnership to increase the noticing
references:
- the xxxx report 2016 finds 76% orgs expect to invest in TC
- Georgina's regular column 'talking teams' in Coaching at Work (£30 yearly subscription)
- Dorothy E. Siminovitch on the Presence of the Coach, www.gestaltcoachingworks.com
- Example of practitioners working within the relational movement of Gestalt and Psychoanalysis www.relationalchange.org
Comments
Post a Comment