“My team is really good, they are nice people, but still, if you could hold a workshop and tell them that… “Really, we don’t have any major problems, but you take them a bit and sort out those things.”
This is how a conversation about team coaching sometimes begins. Such an introduction often means that individual work with the leader, with the team without the leader, and with everyone together is needed.
Since the terms team and group are often mixed in practice, it is important to clarify what a “team” is. “A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, a set of performance goals, and a common approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. The common approach must include ways of effective meeting and communication that elevate morale and alignment, effectively involving all key group factors and ways for individuals and the team to continuously grow and develop.” – Hawkins & Smith.
Coaching is mostly envisioned as a developmental process involving two people (coach and client), or, as we like to say, a “one-on-one” relationship. Team coaching is different from individual coaching as it involves more people, but at the same time, it is the same, as on one side we have the coach, and on the other side, one whole entity – the team. In this dynamic process, we see the team as a whole, or a system. The team coach is the coach of that whole. We note this because team coaching is done with teams, not groups, for which different principles and methods apply.
In team coaching, the entire team, including the team leader, becomes the client (coachee). Special attention is then paid to the development and functioning of the team as a whole, rather than emphasizing its individual members. Experience shows that the key factors for team success are the fulfillment of team members’ roles, their communication, mutual trust, mutual support, collaboration, and interaction.
The team coach employs two principles: the big picture (zoom-out) and details (zoom-in).
While the zoom-in approach of the coach requires individual work, feedback, and conversation with individual team members for better inclusion of that member in the team dynamics, the zoom-out consciously encourages interaction with the entire team to enable fluid communication within the team. This means that communication with individual team members is secondary and serves only as a stimulus for key interaction among team members.
