What role can team coaching play in the climate change agenda? In the latest Talking Teams column curated by Team Coaching Studio (TCS), Catherine Andrews and Tamsin Tweddell share their insights
When TCS CEO Georgina Woudstra invited us to write a response to the question of what role can team coaching play in the climate change agenda, we were delighted. Both of us have worked in sustainability and environmental impact throughout our careers, and as team coaches some of our work is with organisations and teams that want to think about how the climate and ecological crisis relate to their businesses, and what they can do in response.
Our delight stems from the notion wrapped up in the question: that climate change is an agenda which teams can, and do, think about, and that team coaching has a role in enabling this focus.
This is a challenge
This may seem like we’re stating the obvious but as team coaches we work with teams and organisations that are occupied with specific and critical business challenges that stretch the team’s resources and capabilities. This sense of resource constraint exists alongside an underlying belief that the realities of climate change are a business externality: not the work we are here to do, nor a responsibility of our team or our organisation. Yes, there’s awareness of the paradigm-shifting nature of the climate challenge and the importance of understanding a business’s climate impact but working on this would be a distraction from our core mission, or too difficult, or unlikely to have a positive impact on financial performance.
There are increasing numbers of frameworks to help businesses integrate climate-informed thinking into their strategies, such as B Corps (a rigorous certification given to companies that commit to positively impact all stakeholders – workers, communities, customers and the planet), ESG (environmental, social and governance) or science-based targets. These initiatives all underpin the business-critical role of social, environmental and economic performance in creating long-term, sustainable value.
However, our experience is that it remains challenging for teams to engage with climate change for many understandable reasons.
Here are a few we’ve been given:
- The team has an overridingly important business goal that’s already too big for the resources they can muster
- How can the team find the headspace to start engaging with such a complex, confusing, contested and mutable issue?
- Team members really care about this agenda – but are climate change concerns really relevant to their day-to-day priorities?
- For a small organisation, the scale of the climate and ecological crisis feels too big and way beyond their control.
This is where team coaching can be agenda changing. Engaging with team coaching can enable the team to have the difficult conversations that get behind their busyness and align around what they really need to achieve.
Working with a team coach can frame and create space on the agenda to think about climate in a way that complements and deepens the team’s goals. A coach can give the team permission to start a discussion without being clear about where it’ll take them. Emergent conversations are possible with the support of a team coach.
Building capability
While teams may feel their agenda is already too full to include space to respond to the climate agenda, the mindsets and capabilities that team coaches help teams build to better deliver on core purpose may also enable them respond to the climate crisis.
Team coaching can build organisational capacity to work with complexity and uncertainty while cultivating emotional resilience, and ultimately, support meaningful action in the face of the unknown. These are the very capabilities needed to respond to the ambiguity of climate change.
Faced with overwhelming complexity, such as presented by the climate and ecological crisis, our minds naturally crave simplicity. We seek easily digestible narratives and binary solutions. This instinct, while understandable, can result in inadequate responses. We recreate the world in shades of black and white, fuelling polarisation and hindering our ability to engage with the intricate web of interconnectedness that defines our planet and our societies.
“All models are wrong … some are more useful than others” (Box & Draper, 1987), is a useful reminder of the limitations of our need to reduce and simplify. Team coaching gives teams space to acknowledge the shortcomings of mental models, encouraging them to shift from debating simplified models towards more open dialogue. It empowers teams to question assumptions, and embrace messy complexity, fostering an environment where every individual’s unique perspective contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex whole.
- Case study – Tamsin
Tamsin worked with a team to deliver the UK’s most energy-efficient public building.
The construction project team consisted of members from multiple different companies and disciplines, each with their own priorities and commercial pressures. Tamsin’s coaching challenge was to align individual goals with the shared sustainability vision, enabling the more collaborative approach needed for a successful outcome. This contrasts with the business-as-usual approach where different disciplines operate in silos and commercial pressures tend to pit team members against each other; weakening essential interconnections and degrading potential sustainability outcomes.
Adopting a systems approach, Tamsin helped the team see that both they and the building being created are complex dynamic systems, raising awareness of the role of the system in project outcomes. Tamsin helped the team recognise that one member had pivotal expertise but a very low influence in the team which undermined their ability
to deliver. Awareness of this dynamic helped the team change its approach, elevating the individual’s voice and integrating their knowledge into the project’s core.
By helping team members recognise how the interfaces between all their responsibilities were critical to project outcomes, Tamsin enabled them to collaborate more effectively together. Breaking down siloed thinking, enabled truly innovative design ideas to emerge.
Emotional resilience
Climate change stirs a range of emotions – fear, anxiety, doubt, anger, even despair – that often lie beneath the surface. These uncomfortable feelings may be difficult to express in a working environment. However, repressing such deep emotions may hinder a team’s ability to think into the big challenges inherent in climate change.
Team coaching can foster emotional intelligence within teams, giving individuals permission to acknowledge and articulate these challenging emotions. Through safe and supportive spaces, team members can become more self-aware, build empathy for each other, and cultivate emotional resilience, enabling them to confront the unknown together. Similarly, leaders can be encouraged to acknowledge the limits of their knowledge – a crucial trait in the face of climate change’s formidable challenges.
The climate crisis is not a problem we can solve in isolation. It’s a stark reminder of our fundamental interdependence: with the planet, each other, and the communities we inhabit. Where organisational structures and societal narratives can obscure this underlying reality, team coaching can act as a catalyst for recovering that sense of connection. Through dialogue and reflection, teams can learn to listen deeply to each other, acknowledge diverse perspectives and build a sense of collective responsibility.
The impact of team coaching extends beyond individual teams. When teams develop their capacity for complexity and emotional resilience, their influence ripples outwards. They become champions of collaboration within the organisation, inspiring others to embrace new ways of working and leading. This cultural shift towards collaborative intelligence and emotional agility accelerates the organisation’s response to the climate crisis.
Broader alignment
Many teams are tackling stretching organisational challenges that may allow little headspace for the enormity of the climate crisis, and which they struggle to connect with their core mission. Team coaching can bring a systemic lens that supports them to locate their core purpose within this broader frame.
Some approaches we have used encourage teams to think about the planet as a stakeholder in their business and to work out how to reflect the non-human world in core business practices. This may enable the team to align with an accountability to the planet, as part of its core purpose.
The enquiries a team coach offers to the team can assist them to engage with wider systemic questions that connect a climate change agenda with their team purpose and their role as a team.
- Case study – Catherine
Catherine was approached by the new CEO of a UK charity working in food poverty who was struggling to unite their leadership team.
They were split over whether to raise the charity’s voice on climate change or challenge the business policies of a number of its partner organisations, and the impact this would have on their work with beneficiaries.
The coaching involved working with the Board and senior team to revisit the organisation’s three-to-five year strategy. A place was created for the planet to join the dialogue, as a stakeholder, and for all team members to imagine the exchange between planet, beneficiaries and organisation, both in the present and seven generations into the future. This enabled all members to step back from closely held positions and adopt a wider, more systemic view of their current options and develop a sequence of steps, with checks and balances, that reflected a shared plan of action.
Conclusion
Team coaching can support reflective space that takes teams beyond the day-to-day busyness, align on their priorities and understand how the externalities are integral to the long-term success of their purpose. It can help develop the psychological and cognitive capabilities that will enable teams to engage with wicked problems including, but not only, climate change. Team coaching conversations can allow space for emergent conversations about how these two systems – organisation and planet –connect with each other.
This is how we think team coaching can be agenda changing. We’d love to hear your views.
Reference
- Box, G. E. P., & Draper, N. R. (1987). Empirical Model Building and Response Surfaces. John Wiley & Sons
- Catherine Andrews and Tamsin Tweddell are Learning & Development Specialists, Executive & Team Coaches and Team Coaching Studio (TCS) faculty in Brazil. TCS is an organisation founded to provide a pathway to mastery for team coaches. Visit our website: www.teamcoachingstudio.com