Are goals in team coaching a help or hindrance, asks Sebastian Fox in the latest in this series on team coaching curated by Team Coaching Studio

 

Let me put my cards on the table. From the earliest days of my training as a coach, helping clients set goals early on in a coaching engagement had pretty consistently been part of my coaching practice.

The GROW (Goals, Reality, Options, Will/Wrap-up) model had been drummed into me! There are plenty of authors who consider coaching primarily a goal-orientated activity (Grant, 2019). However, as I’ve been studying and analysing the literature on coaching and goals as part of my doctorate, I find myself increasingly questioning whether setting goals at the start of a coaching engagement (or, perhaps, at all) is always best serving the client’s needs, particularly in the context of team coaching?

In this article, I explore this question and whether a more nuanced approach might be more appropriate and, if so, in what circumstances.

When talking about goals, I mean any specific outcome intended to be delivered through the coaching. Such goals can take many forms, the most common of which tend to be SMART-type goals, that is, performance goals, but many different ones are defined in the literature (eg, Grant, 2019 mentions more than 20). However, I think the reason why performance goals dominate is that when working with teams in organisations, many are already familiar with performance goals so these are a commonly understood way to articulate what the team (or organisation) wants from the coaching and, typically, can be measured in some way (was the goal achieved, or not)?

However, this approach raises some immediate questions:

  • Which goals are we talking about? The original ones or revised ones that emerge once the coaching is underway?
  • How can we be sure that the team is setting the most appropriate goals unless we have a clear understanding of the wider system and context in which it’s operating?
  • How can we be sure the goals were achieved (or not) simply due to the coaching?
  • How appropriate is it to assume when working with teams that there’s a linear cause-and-effect relationship between goals set, actions taken and outcomes achieved?
  • What might the team learn during their coaching, without any specific goal?

A further issue arises when considering the timing of goal setting. Often, the aims of the intervention are agreed – if only in principle – with sponsors and the team leader before the coaching has really started and the team is subsequently asked to come up with their overall coaching goals for the programme in the first couple of sessions.

But how often as team coaches are we working specifically on those programme goals? If we believe our role as a team coach is to help the team create awareness of what’s emerging for them in the moment, the ensuing dialogue may be around something quite different to the goals set. Stern (2004 p150) observed how this could unfold in therapy sessions describing them as an: “often ambling, loosely-directed process of searching for and finding a path to take, of losing the way then finding it (or a new one) again, and of choosing goals to orient to – goals that are only discovered as you go along”.

It’s debatable how appropriate it is to set goals for a coaching engagement until the coaches and team have a clear understanding of the context and system in which the team operates.

 

Performance or other goals?
To be clear, I’m not saying setting goals per se is necessarily unhelpful for teams (though establishing them too early may be).

One of the things I’ve observed, however, when working with teams and talking with team coaches is that while we tend to focus on performance goals in one form or other, there are many other types of goals in coaching. These include learning goals, higher and lower order goals, and proximal and distal goals (Grant, 2019).

The interesting point is that there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that setting performance goals may actually be demotivating, and team members may be more motivated by other goals, notably learning ones (Clutterbuck & Spence, 2016). Despite the focus by many authors and practitioners on coaching to improve performance (Peters & Carr, 2013; Hawkins, 2021; Widdowson & Barbour, 2021), others emphasise that team coaching is about learning and change (including Bennett & Campone, 2016; Woudstra, 2021). In that case, would it make more sense to establish some learning-centred goals for the team, instead of performance goals?

Sills (2006) makes a very similar point with her contracting matrix. In this, she talks about the difference in contracting with clients for the work’s direction, depending on the client’s self-awareness and how verifiable the outcome would be.

 

Practice points
Taking these and other issues with goal setting into consideration, I’m unconvinced that setting specific goals at the outset of a team coaching engagement is always the best approach for a team. Some questions which may help you think about this in your own practice include:

  • When is appropriate to set goals for the programme?
  • What sorts of goals are in the best interests of meeting the team’s needs?
  • How will you know if the goal/s has/have been achieved?
  • Would it be better not to set any specific goals, but simply agree general areas or topics to start a dialogue?

By considering these questions when working and contracting with a team, it may help them, and you, be clear about the congruence between any goals set and the team’s real intentions for the coaching programme.

 

About the author

  • Sebastian Fox is the head of research at the Team Coaching Studio and a director at brownfoxconsultancy.
    www.teamcoachingstudio.com

 

 

References

  • J L Bennett and F Campone, ‘Coaching and theories of learning’, in T Bachkirova, G Spence, and D Drake (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Coaching. London: SAGE, pp102-120, 2016
  • D Clutterbuck and G Spence, (2016) ‘Working with goals in coaching’, in T Bachkirova, G Spence, and D Drake (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Coaching. London: SAGE, pp218-237, 2016
  • A Grant, ‘Goals and coaching: An integrated evidence-based model of goal-focused coaching and coaching psychology’, in S Palmer and A Whybrow (eds.), Handbook of Coaching Psychology. Abingdon: Routledge, pp34-50, 2019
  • P Hawkins, Leadership team coaching: Developing collective transformational leadership (4th ed.). London: Kogan Page, 2021
  • J Peters and C Carr, High Performance Team Coaching: A comprehensive system for leaders and coaches. Friesen Press, 2013
  • C Sills, Contracts and Contract Making. Contracts in counselling and psychotherapy (2nd ed.), pp9-26 London: SAGE, 2006
  • D Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: W W Norton & Company, Inc., 2004
  • L Widdowson and P Barbour, Building Top Performing Teams. Kogan Page, 2021
  • G Woudstra, The Art of Team Coaching: A comprehensive guide to unleashing the power, purpose and potential in any team. Team Coaching Studio Press, 2021