Research from two business schools and a management school in the UK has shed light on how to define team coaching, which although becoming more popular has suffered from a lack of distinction from other team interventions.
Rebecca Jones from Henley Business School, Uwe Napiersky from Aston Business School and Joanne Lyubovnikova from University of Liverpool Management School surveyed more than 400 practitioners to provide a solid definition of team coaching, illustrate overlaps with other interventions and identify what distinguishes team coaching from other team interventions.
The project has uncovered eight team coaching themes:
- Achieving a common or shared goal
- Focus on team performance
- Team learning and reflection
- Team coaching activities to improve collective capability
- Focus on teams as an interconnecting system
- Requirement for advanced coaching skills
- Use of traditional coaching techniques
- Longer-term intervention
The paper, ‘Conceptualizing the distinctiveness of team coaching’, was published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology. It defines team coaching as “a team-based learning and development intervention that considers the team to be a system and is applied collectively to the team as a whole. The focus of team coaching is on team performance and the achievement of a common or shared team goal.”
Team learning is empowered via specific team coaching activities for self and team reflection, facilitated by the team coach(es) through application of coaching techniques such as impactful, reflective questioning which raises awareness, builds trusting relationships and improves communication.
The research seeks to help coaching practitioners undergo further research into team coaching, allowing easier quantitative measurement of its success, and providing a theory to guide effectiveness.
It seeks to help organisations, HR, and learning and development professionals by providing a deeper knowledge of the intervention and enables them to see when and where team coaching would be appropriate.
- Read the paper here: http://bit.ly/2I65wim