Team coaching helped one council team become more goal-focused, more cohesive and more reflective, with greater organisational confidence in its ability to lead with the future in mind. Georgina Woudstra reports
I was brought in to coach the senior leadership board by a council CEO who’d been in post for one year. His view was that the team was currently reasonably effective but not fit for the future.
The council was facing significant changes, including a rapidly increasing population in the borough with a high percentage of residents with greater than average social needs. At the same time, budgets were being cut by up to 20% a year for the next three years. It was clear the council would not able to ‘salami slice’ a bit here and a bit there to make the savings; the organisation required a complete transformation in how it was structured and operated.
The senior team he’d inherited operated in a traditional way, with executive directors focused on leading their departmental silos. In the future, instead of protecting their turf, they’d need to collectively make decisions for the good of the community and the whole organisation.
While the initial briefing conversation was with the CEO and the HR director, in my view a team coaching contract needs to be established with the team as a whole. I understood that various team members had used team facilitators in the past, but weren’t clear on the difference between facilitation and coaching.
What’s more, there were significant issues around trust between several members of the eight-person team. With this in mind, I decided to conduct one-to-one interviews with each team member first, with two objectives:
1) To start building trust with team members by forming a relationship, seeking to understand their view of their world, listening to and addressing any concerns they had about team coaching and giving them a felt experience of working with me.
2) To explore their thinking on how the team could benefit from team coaching and what they would want from me as team coach.
I then met with the team and repeated the process with the same two objectives in mind with a view to co-creating a simple team coaching initial contract, including:
- A collective view on the initial objectives for the team coaching
- My role as a team coach – how I would work with them and the boundaries of my role
- The team coaching process (ie, it takes place over time with periodic team sessions plus individual coaching for team members between team sessions)
- How I would work with the CEO, recognising his specific role as the team’s leader
- How the effectiveness of our team coaching would be measured
- Confidentiality, logistics, fees, terms and the next steps.
At this stage I was also looking for the level of commitment the team had to the team coaching. Similar to a chemistry meeting in one-to-one coaching, I do not expect the team nor myself to commit to the team coaching until this step is complete.
With a ‘good enough’ contract in place we began the team coaching.
The five objectives for the team coaching were for the team to:
- Shift from a departmental model to a collective model of organisational leadership
- Clarify and commit to their purpose and goals as a senior leadership team
- Become more cohesive as a team, developing their relationships and building trust
- Make decisions and execute them collaboratively
- Be seen by their stakeholders (the public, political leadership and staff) as an effective and cohesive team to
lead the organisation through to its 10-year vision.
The work begins
We began our work together with a two-day team session. In this initial session the team wanted to develop their purpose and goals and to agree how they would work together going forward. They also wanted to get to know each other more as people.
As my role was team coach, not team facilitator, I chose not to run this as a two-day workshop, with me creating the agenda, designing the exercises and facilitating. I coached the team to agree how they would go about organising these two days themselves to achieve their objectives. Initially they were annoyed, as they had expected I would facilitate the session: this enabled me to reclarify my role as team coach.
As a result, the team created a high-level agenda together and they shared out the task of designing their own workshop and organising themselves. I asked for 30 minutes at the beginning of each day to contract for how I would work with them over the two days, a 30-minute check-in after lunch, and a 30-minute review at the end of each day.
The two days were productive. The team showed up with a high level of ownership and commitment. They were well-prepared and fully engaged.
At the beginning of the first day, we collectively agreed that my role would be to observe them in action and to share these observations at the lunchtime check-in and that I would not intervene until then.
During the morning the team members spent some time individually sharing why they worked at the council and what was truly important to them as individuals. They also developed their team purpose. My observations were that they seemed genuinely interested in each other as people and I felt moved by their commitment to public service. I also shared that they appeared to move very speedily through the purpose exercise and that it seemed to me that they had arrived at an organisational purpose, not a team purpose. I wondered whether these two factors were connected and if this was their intent?
The team debated these questions and eventually determined that a team purpose would clarify why they exist as a team rather than as a group of departmental heads. They decided to continue working on their purpose, which was easier said than done, and also agreed that I would continue to observe but they would ask me to step in if they got stuck, which they did!
New-found purpose
After some time going around in circles, frustrations were rising and a team purpose seemed no clearer. They turned to me and I asked them what was happening between them that was sending them around in circles. I asked them to reflect on the process rather than appoint blame. They reflected that, while they did not interrupt each other (respect is one of their values), they were waiting to speak their own view and their proposals and ideas were not building towards anything.
I asked what they could do differently, and they said, “actually listen to each other and build ideas into a collective view”. I encouraged them to try this and to see it as an experiment and proposed that I invite them to pause after 15 minutes to see how it was going. They didn’t need 15 minutes – they arrived at their team’s purpose in 10!
With a new-found and growing confidence in their ability to work collaboratively as a team, they moved to their next agenda item. I asked them to clarify the outcome they wanted from the next piece and to agree how they would go about it before diving in.
They said the next piece was to agree their goals as a team, and that one team member had prepared the session. I invited them again to clarify what they wanted from the session and how they would go about it. This led to a discussion where they realised they had different perspectives on goals.
Some thought the team’s goals were a sum of their individual departmental goals; indeed one team member had her team pre-prepare a presentation to talk colleagues through at this session. The leader and two other members had anticipated they would be seeking collective goals. I asked them to consider their team purpose and whether this would shed light on the goals. After some humour, they agreed that collective team goals were needed.
The session continued over the two days with me, as team coach, offering questions and observations, inviting reflection and dialogue to support collective meaning-making. In other words, coaching the team!
By the end of the two days, the team reported having a clear purpose and goals and working agreements, as well as increased confidence and skill in communicating with each other.
One team member said, “When I was on my way to the session yesterday morning, the sceptic in me was saying, ‘here we go with another away day where we achieve very little that makes a meaningful difference’ and now I feel utterly different. It feels like we can really work out together how to be the team we need to be.”
We agreed a date for our next team coaching session in one month’s time, and also agreed to one individual session each between to enable each member to think through how he or she could personally contribute more to the team’s effectiveness.
We continued on this basis for one year, with each session building on the last, iteratively agreeing the objectives for the session and my role and approach with the team.
So what?
Sometimes I am frustrated by the claims to outcomes which are clearly a result of much more than the team coaching. However, what I can say is that the team achieved their original five objectives and more.
The aspects that the team report were most impacted by our coaching were:
- the team members take more time to reflect, listen to each other, build on ideas and have better quality dialogue and decision making
- they consider themselves each to be responsible for leadership of the organisation rather than their departments. Indeed, they now see themselves as inter-changeable and stand in for each other at internal and external meetings as a way of demonstrating this
- those in the tier below them are starting to follow this model and work more collaboratively with colleagues too
- they are more focused on their goals and priorities as a team and the organisation has become more focused as a result
- in its organisational climate survey, the top team had gone from 42% to 95% in being seen as a strong and cohesive leadership team and from 27% to 85% in organisational confidence in their ability as a team to lead towards the future. The team also report that they need to do more work on cascading effective team leadership through the organisation and continuing to build stakeholder confidence in their ability to face into the future.
Reflections
As in most team coaching situations, there is a strong temptation and perhaps invitation from the team to step in as a facilitator. While facilitation can be extremely helpful, in my experience, awareness, ownership and responsibility increase when a team is coached rather than facilitated, where the expectation can be that the facilitator drives both the model of team effectiveness and development and the process.
However, I believe that this approach is not suited to all teams and situations. It requires a team whose leader is open to being coached, and who is willing to focus on developing the team’s capacity for team working and a leader who wants to focus on task and content is unlikely to maintain the developmental momentum between sessions. It also requires a ‘good enough’ team coaching contract and plenty of re-contracting and process contracting.
In terms of the role of the coach, this approach requires that the coach is able and willing to dance in the moment, and to lay down the desire to facilitate and control the process. For coaches who experience a high level of anxiety when coaching teams (see “Fear Factor” by Declan Woods, Coaching At Work 9(5), pp29-31) it may be better to start with team facilitation employing some coaching skills such as powerful questions and direct communication and to build from there.