TEAM COACHING · TEAM AND ORGANISATION
Team coaching for leadership teams and departments.
Team coaching works on what arises between people: roles, decision paths, patterns of communication and long-established ways of working together. The focus is the collaboration, not the individual.
The reason is rarely an open conflict. More often it is the observation that a team is performing below its potential, without anyone being able to say quite why. In social and academic institutions a comparable format is often called team supervision.
PURPOSE
When team coaching makes sense.
Team coaching is worthwhile when collaboration stalls for reasons that have nothing to do with competence: unsettled responsibilities, unspoken expectations, or a history that still shapes the team but is rarely discussed. It can be just as useful when collaboration is working very well — as a pit stop, to make the reasons for that visible and to develop the shared way of working further.
- A new team. The team composition has changed, the way of working has not.
- New leadership. Leadership has changed, but the old order still has an effect.
- Friction. The same discussions come round again without anything moving.
- Growth. What worked with five people no longer works with fifteen.
- After a merger. Two cultures need to find a shared way of working.
HOW IT WORKS
In three steps.
1 Diagnosis
What keeps this going?
Individual conversations with all or selected members of the team — in confidence. I then reflect recurring patterns, tensions and differences back to the team, not the individual statements.
2 The work
Working on how you work.
Several sessions in which the team examines and renegotiates its way of working. I hold the frame, structure the work and say clearly what I observe. The process, goal and model of collaboration are all open to review — what looks like the problem at the start can change during the process.
3 Securing it
What remains?
We make agreements that visibly change how the team works day to day. After a few months we look together at what has worked and what has not — and where something needs adjusting.
PRACTICALITIES
Duration, group, confidentiality.
Duration
Three to six months.
There are usually several weeks between sessions. That is when everyday work shows what has changed, what remains stable and where further clarification is needed.
Group
Three to fifty.
In our experience, teams of around fifteen or more are better split into subgroups. For larger groups we design formats in which the future can still be negotiated together.
Confidentiality
No quotes.
What is said in the individual conversations and working sessions stays confidential. We report results and observations at the level of the team — not about individuals.
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