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Team Coaching - A Role for Professionals
Business coaching is a field
that’s experiencing rapid growth. One of its primary functions is to
create the circumstances under which performance improvement can happen,
and when the client is a team, coaching has been proven to be highly
effective.
Team coaching begins with the assumption that the team is already
functioning and is able to follow external guidance to improve its
performance. Setting up a team is not a coaching role; the coach is
there to identify problems and help the team find solutions. The
eventual outcome will be that the coach departs and the team functions
at a level consistently higher than before.
Just as the team leader has a
special function in the overall context of the team, so does the team
coach. The leader’s job is to coordinate the activities of the team and
serve as a conduit to management; the coach’s role is to assist the team
to develop itself.
When the coaching process is carried out correctly and professionally
the results can lead to outstanding success. Here are some of the ways
in which team coaches can help their clients:
1. Clarify and Simplify
The coach can help the team acquire a comprehensive and uniform view of
itself and its goals, removing any misconceptions and helping all team
members gain a clear focus on where the team’s going.
2. Identify Problem Areas and
Remove Stress
The coach brings an outsider’s perspective that is free of prejudices
and can objectively spot areas where something is inhibiting the team’s
progress and causing team members to be stressed. By working through
these problem areas the coach removes stresses and thereby helps direct
the team’s energies.
3. Encourage Moves Forward
Team coaches often see good ideas that have been proposed but then
failed to proceed for one reason or another. The coach is in the unique
position of being able to encourage a reconsideration of these ideas and
recommend their implementation if they are in line with the team’s
goals.
4. Gain an
Expectation of Success
Too often a team is found to be wandering in search of a goal rather
than expecting to achieve it. The coach can enter the picture and create
an expectation of success – a feeling among all team members that their
work will (not just may) result in achieving the goals that have been
set.
5. Encourage
Good Communication
Without good communication a team will fail. Every member needs to
clearly understand what they’re supposed to do and what they’re going to
accomplish. They also need to be given reports of progress along the
way. The coach can stimulate the team’s internal communications and make
everyone aware of what knowledge needs to be shared.
6. Improve the
Team’s Effectiveness
The coach’s external viewpoint will quickly spot any roadblocks to
maximum effectiveness, whether caused by people, personalities or simply
a fear of failure. The coaching process can remove the roadblocks and
make the team members collectively more effective.
Coaching a team is not like coaching individuals. The aim of team
coaching is to unify the members of the team into a force whose energies
are directed toward achieving a common goal. This is generally
facilitated by making the most of the coach’s external perspective and
by overcoming barriers to progress that have been erected within the
team.
A special relationship can exist between the team leader and the coach
if the structure of the team permits the leader to have sufficient
independence and authority. For example, if the team is too large to
permit attention to be given to individual members the team leader can
be used as the channel for instructions and directions.
Where many coaches go wrong when working with a team is that they let
themselves become a member of the team, losing their independence and
authority by getting too close to their client. In turn, the coaching
outcome is usually less than optimal.
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