Friction within a team of healthcare consultants is being felt throughout the organisation. Can a team coaching intervention help heal the rift?
THE ISSUE
Marcus, the HR director in a healthcare organisation, is keen to find an intervention to reduce conflict in a team of consultants. The conflict has built up over a number of years, as two or three consultants have come into the team with a different skill set and more innovative approaches.
There has been enthusiastic championing of innovative techniques and practices, with some positive impact on outcomes. However, as things have progressed, a surprising, persistent and deep level of resistance and division has emerged, splitting the team.
The impact of the conflict is being seen in all sorts of areas and on different stakeholders – rising levels of mistrust, blame, finger-pointing, costly and stressful referrals to the British Medical Association, inconsistent and changing care pathways for patients, and threats of claims for bullying and harassment.
Marcus is struggling to see a way forward. He feels the organisation has tried everything that can be done internally. Marcus deeply believes that the whole team is stronger together, that the organisation would be likely to benefit more widely from the innovative practices introduced earlier if they could be clearly understood and evidenced.
He’s keen to find a way through to resolution and to mitigate the inherent risks. Marcus wants to find out how team coaching might help.
THE SOLUTIONS
Alison Whybrow, Executive coach and chartered psychologist
team coaching even what’s required here? First, who’s your client? How do you define the team? This sounds like a challenging set of issues not easily resolvable through a more traditional team coaching process. It’s taken time for this situation to become what it is today, and a deep systemic response is required.
Stepping back, who does this situation impact? If the dynamics in the consultant team aren’t resolved, this potentially impacts the organisation’s reputation and patient safety, and the CEO and key executive team members need to be on board.
Second what is being asked for and by whom? The CID-CLEAR (Hawkins, 2017) approach to contracting, with a clear demarcation of discovery, offers a way of engaging with the request without committing to an intervention before knowing more. For the discovery phase, we’d co-create a list of interviewees with the executive team and the consultant team. We’d interview widely and without prejudice to build trust, understand the history, context and ongoing impact.
Third, we’d share output from the discovery process with those core to bringing a resolution, include the CEO and key executive team members. Given the depth of the rift, helping people slow down, embody the experience, connect as a group to the full picture and create the shift in the room, are important principles, building a shared, rich picture of what better looks like. Given the depth of challenge, some of the input is more likely to come from interviews, the group embellishing where possible. We’d invite participants to consider what’s needed individually and collectively to move towards that future.
Now, together with HR, the CEO, the executive team and the core consultant team, we’d be ready to co-create the potential coaching interventions most likely to lead to positive shifts in consultant team dynamics.
- P Hawkins, Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership. London: Kogan Page, 2017
Declan Woods, Boardroom psychologist and master coach, ZPD Consulting
Team coaching could help the team re-direct the focus of the conflict as well as create new and agreed approaches to intra-team working, including changing beliefs that they’re stronger operating apart than together.
There’s no mention of the team leader and yet this role is critical to the team’s success and functioning. Crucially, the team leader sets the tone and expectations that team members need to work together and manages individual and collective (under) performance, particularly if patient care is in jeopardy. Bringing in the ‘voice of the system’, including inputs and feedback from the team’s sponsor and patients, could also be useful in guiding the team’s attention on why it exists and whose needs it’s there to serve. The team leader may well need specific coaching support in leading the team in parallel to the team coaching.
The mistrust, blame, and finger pointing are all classic signs of dysfunction. An invaluable tool in a coach’s armoury is their ability to hold and contain the team and its anxieties. Knowing team members will be protected will help create safety and generate more trust between members. Improved dialogue will hopefully result.
A team-specific diagnostic tool, like Middle Circle® for Teams, which I created, can also prove useful both to help members express currently unspoken frustrations and to help create an agenda for change.
Among the 14 drivers of team effectiveness it measures are Psychological Safety and Trust, Optimal Conflict, Recognized Leadership and Team Glue. If delivered in a relational style, the coach can use this to create a contract for successful team coaching and one that the whole team can buy into.