Team coaching is on the rise. But is it all adoption rather than adaptation? And who is leading the demand – coaches or their clients? In this indepth report, Liz Hall examines the state of play in team coaching applications
2018 may well turn out to be the year team coaching truly took off. Increasing numbers of organisations are embracing this approach, more training providers are adding a team application to their offer and growing numbers of coaches have team coaching training in their sights.
However, widespread confusion as to what team coaching actually is, means much of what’s being sold isn’t really team coaching at all. We still have a way to go to define, refine and deepen practice and procurement in this area.
“There’s lots of adoption and little adaptation – clients are adopting existing approaches rather than going back to first principles and deciding what form of team coaching is ‘right’ for them,” says Declan Woods, a leadership team coach, boardroom psychologist and accredited master coach who has carried out extensive research on team coaching with INSEAD (http://bit.ly/2rME9mQ). He cites one large professional services firm which “adopted action-learning sets and re-badged it team coaching without any adaptation to its needs or context.”
On the rise
Woods notes that although there’s “lots of noise about the demand for team coaching, there’s more coming from the coaching community than clients”
And there’s more demand for group coaching than for coaching intact teams, he says. But it is on the up, says Erik de Haan, director of Ashridge Centre for Coaching. “It’s most definitely on the rise. I see that all around me and I see qualifications programmes in this area, such as the ones I am involved with at Ashridge and at the VU University in Amsterdam, growing. There is also less explaining necessary in terms of what team coaching is and isn’t. And there are many more books and articles.”
“There’s increasing demand for team coaching – this was forecast in the Ridler Report and various other surveys, but we’re experiencing it for real now,” says Georgina Woudstra, from Executive Coach Studio, which offers a relational-based diploma in Team Coaching Mastery in the UK, and is currently developing an international version.
The 6th Ridler Report (2016) revealed 76% of organisations expected an increase in team coaching over the subsequent two years, up from the 45-65% growth forecast by participants in the 5th Ridler Report (2013). Some 58% were already rolling out team coaching.
Other training providers also report a rise in demand. These include Ashridge, which offers a team coaching programme for executive coaches and organisational consultants, and the Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC), one of the first providers in this area.
The AoEC’s Master Practitioner diploma in Systemic Team Coaching has been running for nearly eight years.
Dr Hilary Lines, executive and systemic team coach, lead faculty in systemic team coaching, AoEC, says, “We’re seeing more client organisations being prepared to sign up for a sustained team coaching intervention of this kind, often lasting between six and 12 months.”
The number of people enrolling on the AoEC’s three-day foundation certificate programme has increased year-on-year and in 2017 was 94 in the UK alone. It also delivers this programme in other European countries, the US, China, South Africa and Singapore, “a sign team coaching is expanding internationally”, says Lines.
Its year-long Master Practitioner diploma programme, launched in 2010, attracts between 12 and 20 people a year, with participants from leadership development, OD, consulting and leadership roles, as well as coaching.
Confusion
Although more are embracing team coaching, confusion still reigns about what it is. Most coaches appreciate it’s not team building and facilitation, but the nuances often still escape them, and many organisations don’t have a clue.
“Clients ask for what they have experienced before, eg, a team assessment, a workshop where everyone gets to know each other better. [Coaches] need to be prepared to talk about the value of team coaching and to influence the market around what it is. We did this 25 years ago when there was no executive coaching market and we had to go into corporates and talk with them around what coaching was and why it was different to consulting,”
says Woudstra.
She notices a “growing desire for team coaching to be packages, structured and tied up with a bow. This one-stop-shop approach is unlikely to work across different cultures. We need more work to understand what team coaching is and can be across the world, like we have for [one-to-one] coaching.”
Woods agrees. “There’s huge [ongoing] confusion in the market about what team coaching is and isn’t. Team coaching is an ‘umbrella’ concept – there are lots of different practices being carried out under its guise. There’s no agreed on and widely accepted definition and the professional bodies are not yet offering a point of view to support their members and organisations.”
Complexity
Although it’s happening slowly, the tide is turning, with more and more organisations and coaches, catching on to the increased complexity of team coaching compared to one-to-one.
De Haan observes “growing recognition – through research and practice – of the importance of shared reflection in team coaching, ie, of a deepening of thinking, understanding, insight. This follows important publications by Schippers et al. and others on the link between reflection and effectiveness of teams.”
“Clients are slowly becoming more aware of the complexity of team coaching and the consequent need to select suitable coaches,” says Woods.
But he says buyers are often not clear about how to go about the latter. “Given the confused picture on team coaching, it is not surprising that organisations are not clear on how to select team coaches. They still over-rely on the same cadres of individual executive coaches.”
Why team coaching?
Part of the drive from organisations is to get more for their money. Dr Lines says, “More and more client organisations are seeking team coaching as a way to gain greater impact from their coaching investment. A team coaching programme for a team of six is usually less costly and better value for money than six one-to-one programmes, and delivers greater visible impact for the leader and the organisation.”
However, it’s also because increasingly organisations see team coaching as a way to embed learning.
“Some businesses are seeing that developing leaders in cohorts of individuals rarely delivers good ROI because of the difficulty of applying the learning from the programme back at work. They’re beginning to use team coaching as a way of developing leaders so they can hold each other accountable for sustaining changed behaviours in real work situations,” says Dr Lines.
What do clients want?
According to Dr Lines, “More organisational clients are seeking a team coach to work with them in a sustained way over time. These clients seek experience – the proof that you have worked with teams before in this way and that you have the robustness and resilience to deal with challenging team members and team dynamics.
“They also seek someone who can speak in their language and who brings ways of looking at the team that ‘land’ with them. It is important for the team coach to find a way to put the coaching ‘jargon’ in the back pocket. Often an understanding of the client’s sector is important, but not critical,” she says.
“It’s also important for the team coach to be alert to what the client organisation isn’t looking for and to explore at the scoping stage whether they are ready for team coaching. The willingness of the team leader to be coached on his/her leadership of the team, for example, is critical to the success of the coaching.”
Upping the game
According to Woods’ (2014) research, most coaches find themselves ill-equipped to coach teams.
“Those coaches that had received team coaching specific training found it did not prepare them adequately for the demands of coaching complex teams operating in complex environments. A lot of the training adopts a consultancy approach and misses out on the relations between coach and team and between team members,” says Woods.
De Haan says, “Coaches should train themselves thoroughly in team coaching, including group and team dynamics and [derailment] patterns in teams. If they don’t, they should be honest that they are not coaches, but perhaps conveners, facilitators, chairs or ‘builders’ of teams.”
In addition to undertaking dedicated team coaching training and steering clear of “training offering to train Master team coaches in three days”, he advises ‘wannabe’ team coaches to “do some inner work”.
“Teams can draw us off course and it is invaluable to be aware of these ‘pulls’ before we coach a team [where this could happen in front of a team]. This could take the form of personal therapy or deeper psychological training to increase coach self-awareness.”
Working in pairs is a good idea. Woods’ research found “co-coaching [in pairs] is better for the client and offers more protection for the coach. Find a coach that is complementarily different to you and work out [ideally practise] how you will co-coach together.”
Dr Lines says team coaching draws on a number of approaches in the coaching to OD spectrum, including the ability to:
- Be a great executive coach
- Facilitate teams
- Hold a safe space for the team and to hold the mirror to the dynamics
- See and work with the wider systemic influences and patterns that impact on the team’s purpose and functioning
- Partner collaboratively with the team and its leader.
“Any coach needs to take a look at where they are strong and where they need to develop greater competence and agility in these areas. Enrolling on a programme that brings these disciplines together in a coherent
way is a good first step,” she says.
Those interviewed for this article were unanimous in recommending getting a supervisor when delivering team coaching.
Potential pitfalls
Before even starting, check whether the team is ready to be coached – and whether that’s the right intervention.
“The team may need team coaching, but if it is not ready then little will be gained from it,” says Woods.
Many problems are down to lack of clarity of expectations over roles and process. “Ongoing and indepth contracting is vital. For example, making sure what the role of the team coach is in relation to the team leader. There are times when I’ve seen team coaches take over the role of the leader, by controlling group processes, or by giving the team or its members tough messages that the leader is unable to give. This usurps the role of the leader and stops the leader learning how to be different with his/her team – and vice versa,” says Lines.
Another potential pitfall can arise where the coach becomes too aligned with the team leader at the expense of connections with the team, with the risk team members start to perceive team coaching as something they are being coerced into doing by the team leader – coach partnership, according to Lines.
Woods highlights the importance of “checking terminology and that there is shared understanding for the basis of comparison”.
“As different practices are carried out under the umbrella of team coaching, firms may not be comparing like-for-like in terms of coaches’ approach to coaching teams. It would serve both organisations and coaches if they had a [their own] view about what constitutes a team – and an effective one.”
Off the back of researching teams for his doctorate, Woods has created a diagnostic tool: “Middle Circle for Teams™”, which measures 14 ‘Drivers’ of team effectiveness (we will look at this in a forthcoming issue).
Another pitfall is where coaches lose sight of the unfolding dynamics. “[Here] the coach becomes too fixated on delivering to a pre-designed agenda in a team meeting or workshop, and loses sight of the dynamic unfolding in front of her/ his eyes,” says Lines.
“Good team coaches have learnt the skill of slowing down and working with the team where it is now. That is where the most valuable learning and development occurs for the team,” she says.
- Next issue: team coaching case study
- See also Georgina Woudstra’s regular column on team coaching (this issue)
- Join Dr Hilary Lines for a Coaching at Work masterclass on Building Shared Leadership: The Practice and Presence of the Systemic Team Coach