“The ability to take half a day out at that senior level is a great luxury, given the workload of the characters in the senior teams,” Jardine says. After carrying out a number of successful toe-dipping exercises over the past three years, the EC is embracing team coaching as a way to encourage self-directed learning, create high-performing teams and increase the consistency of its training and development offer EC-wide.
Team coaching is also a way to “health check” senior employees and to “wean them off their dependence on individual executive coaching”, he says. The EC employs around 30,000 staff. To date, some 250 senior people have received coaching. The commission has a strict selection process to maintain the quality of coaching provision, with a core pool of 15-20 coaches.
UK-based Alun Jones and John Campbell-Ricketts, who work within this preferred supplier pool, were asked to roll out team coaching after coaching a range of leaders, including director-generals, deputy director-generals and heads of units, all of whom tend to be in charge of entities comprising 70-2,000 employees.
The first major step towards team coaching took place in November 2006. One of Jones’s clients, a director, asked him to deliver an event for 70 people to launch the concept and follow this up with a specific team coaching event for her heads of units. Jones had already started one-to-one coaching with the director the previous March.
In from the cold
None of them had ever been involved in coaching: “We were going in completely cold. Whatever we had done before in the UK, we had to do something quite different,” Jones says. He notes that when he has done team coaching elsewhere he has been dealing with people “who are conversant with coaching principles, who have had one-to-one coaching and realise the value of coaching in an organisation”.
“Here we had none of this, so it was a risky category,” he says. “We were also dealing with heads of units who were fairly sceptical about any new management techniques, particularly one called coaching, so we had resistance to what we were doing.” Another factor was the accession of 10 new member states and the fact that the director was from one of these states.
“This was a completely new experience for the director, who was working in a new field, exposed to a new job, and going in a new direction with three different director-generals in an 18-month period,” Jones explains. Jones and Campbell-Ricketts started the team coaching programme with a day’s introduction to coaching for all 70 staff.
They gave an overview of coaching but also allowed staff to carry out practical coaching exercises to get a better feel for the processes involved. Feedback was satisfactory, which encouraged the director to go for a team coaching programme with heads of units. Individual sessions were held with each head to identify their key issues, including the impact of the director’s leadership style and values on the way they managing their teams.
“For example, they saw themselves as a heterogenous group with very little commonality. This made team coaching even more difficult because they felt they had been put together as a group by the director with no rhyme nor reason. There were lots of different cultures and nationalities, including Greek, German, French, two Brits and a Latvian,” says Jones.
Legacy of experience
Four out of five of the leaders were approaching retirement and, despite some initial resistance, they eventually realised they had a legacy of experience to pass on to their team colleagues and that they could also individually take these coaching skills beyond the workplace, says Jones.
In the heads of units’ team coaching workshop, which included the director, Jones and Campbell-Ricketts looked at leadership styles, organisational climate and personal/team values. Useful supporting tools included Hay Group’s organisational climate tool, and its managerial styles questionnaire.
“The idea is that the leadership/management style is linked to the organisational climate and the style of the leader influences the climate and potentially the way the team can start to own their own development,” says Jones.
The initial team coaching event was held in March 2007 for the heads of units, followed by a further directorate workshop in November. It was agreed that the director and heads of units would act as coaches. Participants were encouraged to explore identified directorate issues. They used a coaching conversation tool in groups of 8-10 people, addressing topics relevant to the organisation’s needs.
To ensure full involvement, each participant was allocated at least three three-minute turns to speak, during which time nobody else was allowed to speak. One person was responsible for timekeeping. This activity alone was a way of developing further their understanding of a “coaching culture” in the workplace.
Making ‘allowances’
Jardine explains that the team coaching process is similar to individual coaching and that the agenda is very much up to the boss of the participating unit. Typically, there are team coaching “allowances”. The coaching tends to be rolled out over four days, made up of a two-day module and four half-day events. Issues under the spotlight might include teambuilding, implementing a unit’s work programme, the relationships within the team or the future vision of the unit.
The EC has invested heavily in teambuilding events over recent years but the outcome and quality tend to be inconsistent, Jardine says. “To a great extent, events are flavoured by the personality or skill of the trainer and we were not getting consistency, whereas with team coaching we are getting a fairly consistent process, the client runs the show and there is no escape from that. If you are working with Belbin team roles, for example, you can escape by being entertained by the model,” he says.
Jones adds: “If you imagine an onion cut in half and have the team at the centre, the teambuilding tends to touch the outer core of the onion whereas team coaching gets to the core; it’s more sustainable. Essentially, we make sure the issues are the team’s, not the trainers’, then use coaching techniques to help them address these issues themselves so they then own them, not the external coaches.”
Keep it simple
Jardine agrees that while team coaching can be effective, it can be tough to provide. “With our multinational background, and with 27 different national perceptions, the cultural issues and different behaviours bring complexity; it can certainly be challenging,” he says. Many of the participants are not working in their mother tongue and some not even in their preferred second language.
“They could find it hard to express themselves, yet the whole business of language is a crucial aspect of coaching,” he adds. Jardine thinks coaching in this environment highlights a key message about the need for simplicity and very simple language.
Coaches need to check in more with the client, and when they are asked to intervene, they should make sure that any toolkit they draw on is multicultural, such as the Grow model or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, he says.
Coaching supports the EC’s reform programme, launched in 2000, which included the introduction of a new appraisal system. “Coaching was, and is, a clear lever to strengthen and move forward the reform programme, helping senior managers to think about their development and give them some insight and feedback,” says Jardine.
Back in 2001, EC employees typically had one day’s training a year. By the end of 2005, they were getting 10 days. Now it’s 11. “Clearly, we can’t go on increasing the volume of training, and in the next four or five years we will use much more internal expertise,” he says.
The EC plans to work with Jones to train up some 10-12 senior staff as internal coaches. Jardine envisages these people to be senior directors one level down from director-general, typically in their fifties, “who have had a number of coaching sessions and are convinced that coaching is great, that they got something out of it and that they now want to work as a coach”.
If this pilot proves successful and culturally appropriate, the approach could be rolled out further. “We’re convinced it’s a good idea but it might not work because we’re talking about senior managers coaching each other,” Jardine says. Feedback on the process has been positive, he adds.
“Team coaching is very, very useful. People like being pushed by coaches to focus on the real issues for them. Sometimes it’s a case of, ‘It’s all very well, but it’s different from the reality of
day-to-day life at the EC,’ whereas with team coaching you’re pushing people towards what is perceived as useful.”
Learning points
Jones’s and Campbell-Ricketts’ tips for introducing team coaching in a multicultural environment:
- Take time to explain the process and develop a common understanding among participants.
- Get commitment from the top and ensure the main sponsor has received one-to-one coaching.
- Teams should be no larger than 12-15 people.
- Identify upfront the team’s issues via a questionnaire or interview.
- Allow a minimum of four days’ work on coaching a team.
- Establish the team’s ground rules and values linked to behaviours.
- Examine the leadership and management styles and establish the team’s current organisational climate.
- Weave in peer coaching and team coaching practice.
- Follow up on measures of success identified at the outset.
- Use the team coaching to help embed a coaching culture.
- Formally evaluate the process.
Volume 3, Issue 4