A team coach faces a familiar situation and needs to decide whether the team is ready to be coached. Given the facts, would you coach them?
The Issue
You have been invited to meet the human resource director (HRD) of a FTSE 250 insurance business. You have a very close working relationship with her having been contracted as a team coach on several occasions in her last two organisations.
The HRD is commissioning team coaching on behalf of the CEO. The company tried team coaching a few months earlier with the four members of the executive leadership team and 20 of their direct reports, which was agreed between coach and CEO directly.
The CEO reported this was a “nice” experience but lacked alignment with the business goals and any real impact. Nothing changed as a result and some business units continue to underperform, each blaming the other for this. Levels of confidence and trust are low across the leadership team.
The HRD is new to the organisation and does not yet have ‘the ear’ of the CEO. She is unclear on his requirements for team coaching currently but under pressure to source a significantly different – and better – approach to team coaching now.
The HRD has gleaned that the CEO wants a one-off team coaching awayday for all 24 leaders again with a hard-hitting team coach to “shake them up” and turn performance around.
Is the team ready for coaching? Would you agree to coach the team?
The Interventions
Declan Woods
Leadership team coach, ZPD Consulting
Intervention is needed to improve performance, but is the team ready for coaching? Two ‘readiness’ frameworks1, 2 can help guide the coach.
There are several areas I’d explore:
- Underperformance What’s the cause? Does this need to be addressed with key individuals or the team before coaching starts? Improving performance is the CEO’s/leaders’ responsibility, not the coach’s. It’s important the coach avoids taking on this role from the leader and that performance issues do not hijack the coaching.
- Team size The team is too big to be coached effectively and it’s not clear how the ELT and their reports are inter-dependent to be coached together.
- Commitment Team coaching is rarely successful as a one shot. Change takes time. I’d want to learn why previous coaching was not successful. Careful contracting around expectations and roles can avoid overlap. While coaching can be challenging, I don’t believe it’s the coach’s role to shake up the team. How can the team and/or its leader do this?
- Coach factors The coach has a very close working relationship with the HRD, which may conflict the coach with the team. The coach should be clear on who the client is and quickly establish an open relationship with the whole team.
It’s rarely clear-cut as to whether a team’s ready for coaching. I’d clarify mutual expectations early on and contract roles and outcomes. Build in ‘Go/No go’ points in the team coaching process so either party can stop at pre-agreed points.
1 C Carr and J Peters, High Performance Team Coaching, USA: InnerActive Leadership Associates Inc, 2012
2 D Clutterbuck, unpublished, 2015
Dr Hilary Lines
Team and executive coach, AoEC
his is less a question of team readiness for coaching than of what is the underlying issue, and the best way of helping this client system. A quick fix, in a one-off workshop, will not deliver sustained change. My decision to engage will depend on:
- The CEO’s willingness to explore the roots of underperformance, including the impact of his/her own leadership
- Gaining clarity about current structure: Where are strategic decisions made? What is the role of the wider leadership and what goes on across these boundaries? Where is it most powerful to start the coaching?
- Agreement that the work starts with an enquiry into what’s going on – involving the executive team, wider leadership and key stakeholders, especially the board
- Willingness to contract longer term, depending on the outcome of initial enquiry and discovery work.
Many coaches over-focus on team relationship dynamics and pay little attention to external pressures and their impact on strategy and focus; I suspect the last coach did too. I would test my assumption with the CEO, and make clear that any ‘shaking up’ must be led by him/her, with me partnering as team coach. Using a systemic perspective,
I’d explore1:
- The business context
- How the team attends to stakeholder demands, current and emerging
- The clarity of shared endeavour, purpose and strategy
- How well the team handles conflict, uses diversity, engages with the wider business – and what are the barriers to it.
I’d propose collating data from one-to-one interviews and an online tool,2 sharing at a first workshop to enable the team to explore barriers to performance and the scale of the task, before contracting.
1 P Hawkins, Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership, London: Kogan Page, 2017
2 Team Connect 360 online feedback tool: www.aoec.com