Teams are hot; coaching is hot. So it seems only natural that the two should come together. A recent US survey by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) found that teams are used “both to drive change and for direct business results”. It also found that “team coaching” was the single most cited recommended intervention. But what is it? Research in the UK by Professor David Clutterbuck, unveiled at the CIPD’s annual Coaching at Work conference recently, indicates that much of what passes for team coaching is more akin to team facilitation. “In my conversations with people who were really facilitators, I would say that 20 per cent had taken the title of coach because they could charge more, or it sounded sexy. The rest didn’t have a clue what the difference was,” says Professor Clutterbuck, senior partner at Clutterbuck Associates and co-founder of the European Coaching & Mentoring Council.
He says the distinction is analogous to the difference in chemistry between a catalyst and a reagent. The catalyst (facilitator) accelerates the change but remains unaffected; the reagent is part of the reaction and is changed in the process. Eileen Arney, adviser, learning, training and development, at the CIPD, says: “‘I think it [this research] is going to lead to an interesting and helpful debate. At the moment, we don’t have enough clarity about the distinctions. “Team coaching is usually about helping a team work towards an objective; the process comes up with agreed performance objectives, and involves working with the team towards these.” She notes that facilitation is more likely to involve “working with the team to identify strengths and weaknesses and help them understand the dynamics”. Chris Grant, director of facilitation and coaching at consultancy , says the team specialist has to be adaptable. He cites a case in which he worked with a senior team whose members had stopped talking to one another. “Their manager was a workhorse who didn’t enjoy communication. What tended to happen was that he would cancel team meetings and
no one would talk to him.
“If this had been a situation where, for interpersonal reasons, the team had arrived at a block that was difficult to get round, I would have set in process some facilitation. But this was more about coaching, because they needed to build the capacity to communicate,” said Grant, who facilitated the bank and retail Chip & Pin implementation programme. A clear contract is essential, says Paul Jewitt-Harris, director of consultancy and product development at Lane. “You might be asked to facilitate a conference or meeting, where there’s a certain agenda that has to be got through. I’m not sure that as facilitator I would be contracted to challenge goals in the same way that I would as a coach. As coach I might look at what’s needed, rather than the efficiency of the process.” Patricia Wheeler, partner at the Atlanta-based Levin Group, a coaching and consulting firm, points to the distinction with consulting as well as from facilitation. She was recently hired by the top team of a leading corporation, and found that she needed all three skills: consulting, facilitating and coaching. She offered advice on good practice in leadership development a consulting role and she facilitated a discussion on leadership development. “The coaching was about helping them to look at the next steps; the desired outcomes, 10 years down the road.”
This was more than strategic planning, as she helped them identify their roles, prepare for them, and begin the communication strategy. A unique role of the team coach is the delicate balance of using information from one-to-one discussions, while respecting confidentiality. David Tinker, business coach and director of Apian Coaching, says: “Let’s say, in a one-to-one discussion, someone tells me, ‘I have to be much more open, less of a victim.’ I will be observing but it’s up to him to open up, otherwise it would influence what people say to me in the one-to-one.”
Team exercise
There are growing indications that team coaching is far more than simply a ‘feelgood’ exercise. International IT group LogicaCMG, for example, uses team coaching combined with individual coaching and internal mentoring to assist in the integration of acquisitions and mergers. Group HR director Nigel Perks says: “It’s more than facilitation: it’s working with the team on how it can be more effective. We’re working with the business plan: what do they hope to achieve? It’s helping them understand who their new stakeholders are, especially as they’re moving into a new organisation.” This has been used to bed down LogicaCMG’s acquisition of Portuguese firm Edinfor, and will be used for the newly acquired WM-data of Sweden. Team coaching cannot be fully discussed without reference to sport, where many of the concepts originate. Jewitt-Harris says it is important to understand some differences: “A sports coach is often passing on skills; in team coaching in business it is getting them to come up with skills themselves.” David Clutterbuck says the focus on dedication and high performance, borrowed from sport, has benefited many business teams. But there are major differences: “Sport is about stars, but if you start identifying people in business as stars it creates resentment,” he says. “Also, sports teams gear themselves up for the occasional peak performance. At work, you need consistently good performance.”
Care needs to be taken when borrowing terms from sport. And in general, coaching and facilitation pose challenges when it comes to definition. But it is a mistake to believe that because the concepts have a subjective element, they are impossible to pin down. Clear contracts and definitions are achievable. So are impressive business results.
Learning points
Facilitation
Typically a clear, limited focus
- Limited involvement of facilitator with team: role as catalyst
- The ‘team’ may be a group with a tightly defined remit, and little on-going interdependence
- Emphasis on process
Coaching
- Role and objectives may evolve
- Close involvement and rapport between coach and team members
- Focus on strengthening group and individual skills
- Emphasis on performance
Martin, A and Bal, V The State of Teams Center For Creative Leadership research report (2006)
Case study 1: An international virtual team
The pharmaceuticals division of a multinational company was trying to establish a more joined up campaign strategy across countries in order to improve sales and profitability. There were six country sales managers managing campaigns and personnel internationally with teams of between 20 and 50 people. However, the team members had not responded at all to the global head of campaigns, who was becoming frustrated.
The company brought in Sharon Bajer, from SKAI Associates, a leadership consultancy, who began by observing a team session and giving the group feedback. Bajer ran three quarterly coaching sessions. The first was designed to help the group decide what they were there for and how they were going to work. This session transferred responsibility away from the leader to the group members. They helped design the sessions and had to facilitate part of them, following some skills training. The second session addressed this in more depth with more training. The third session focused on communication skills. The outcome was the creation of an effective self-managed team. The team was able to get through at least three times more work than previously. The working climate changed from bored and petulant to dynamic, creative and business-like.
From the forthcoming publication Coaching the Team at Work, published by Nicholas Brearley. Reproduced with permission
Case study 2: Land Rover
Peter Wall, education training and development manager at Land Rover and Jaguar, owned by Ford, used team coaching for the joint UK–German group responsible for the Range Rover product launch in 2003. “It was particularly complicated,” he says. “As well as the normal difficulties that all teams get into, there was the added complication of language.” He began with one-to-one coaching support for the team leader, based at Land Rover in Solihull, West Midlands, and then team coaching with his UK leadership team. There had been tension between the German and British teams, resulting in potentially damaging assumptions being made by both sides. “It had all stemmed from a bit of mistrust. When you get into the final stages of a vehicle launch, things get tense. It’s human nature.”
But he says the breakthrough came with a combined UK/German two-day workshop, with a 50-strong membership comprising all the leaders in the project. “I asked them what success looked like for them as individuals,” he says.
He encouraged the team to delve beyond the obvious project deadlines to define personal development outcomes, and describe how they felt about working with one another. “They began to realise that they all wanted the same things,” he says. “Instead of looking at what was different, they were looking at what was common.” Coaching was deployed, rather than facilitation, as it involved challenging assumptions and changing the dynamic, rather than simply oiling the wheels of an established process.
Case study 3: Bovis Lend Lease
Bovis Lend Lease is a project management and construction company operating in 40 countries. The Scotland-based senior management team of three executives contracted with David Tinker, director of Apian Coaching, to be the team coach. He began with 360-degree appraisals, before moving to team and individual coaching, and included work with a couple of internal stakeholders. He says: “They are hard-nosed Scots, who come from a pretty tough construction environment. For them to talk about how they felt, and to talk honestly about their expectations, and to recognise more about their different styles, required a big shift. “So we were there in a hotel by Loch Lomond. I went off with each of them, one at a time, to talk about the 360,” he says. This enabled him to understand in some depth what each individual felt about their role, the company and what they wanted from each other. The next phase was for the three of them to meet with the other stakeholders; then a month or so after that Tinker met with the three of them again. What were the results? Gordon Anderson, operations director Scotland for Bovis Lend Lease, comments: “We have developed a deeper level of trust in each other and improved our ability to listen, challenge and communicate effectively about key aspects of the business. The coaching process has been an act of leadership in itself as others in the organisation are now prepared to take on a similar learning process.”