Peter Hawkins, John Leary-Joyce and Hilary Lines have been defining the concept of team coaching. Could a systemic approach be the way forward?
The last five years have seen enormous growth in team coaching, but it is still early days in terms of its maturity.
Prior to 2011, team coaching had been noticeable by its absence from most coaching conferences, research reports and literature. Over the following couple of years, the large annual coaching reports started to focus on it, almost for the first time.
In 2012, the Sherpa Report said:
“Team coaching is a newer concept. Large firms have not yet taken the lead in the design and development of team coaching…Executive coaches, both internal and external, are presented with a rather large opportunity. Are they really taking advantage of it?”
The following year, Lynne Chambers, who has been the head of learning and development for a number of large organisations, wrote in the Ridler Report (2013): “I think the whole area of team-based coaching is going to grow significantly in our organization and coaches need to be agile at dealing with the shift from individual to group work, including all the boundary sensitivities and interpersonal issues that this shift may bring.”
Team development and team building have been around for many years in the field of organisation development, however, team coaching is still in its early developmental stage of maturity, similar to where individual coaching was about 30 years ago.
This stage is characterised by: lack of clear definitions of terms; confusion for buyers on the different types of team coaching and the benefits of each, and a lack of defined standards for either team coaches or team coaching training.
There is still confusion between group coaching (of individuals in a group setting), individual coaching of members of the same team, and team coaching, where the focus is on the team as a collective entity and the intervention spans a period of time.
We have heard the term ‘team coaching’ applied to each of these.
In the past six years the three of us have worked both individually and collectively in developing greater clarity to definitions, practice, methods and training in team coaching.
Much of this we have published (Hawkins, 2011 & 2014; Hawkins, 2014B; Hawkins & Leary-Joyce, 2014; Lines & Scholes-Rhodes, 2013) and continued to develop in both short certificate programmes and one-year diplomas, which we have run in the UK and in many countries around the world, including USA, Kenya, Turkey, South Africa, China, Australia and Hungary.
In our work, we have gone further in attempting to provide clarity between different forms of team coaching (Hawkins 2014, pp72-82), showing these on a continuum from team facilitation, to team coaching, to leadership team coaching, to what we have termed Systemic Team Coaching.
We believe it is systemic team coaching that is the most needed by today’s organisations, which also have the greatest shortage of experienced practitioners. We define systemic team coaching as: “A process by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business.” (Hawkins 2014, p80.)
What makes systemic team coaching most valuable to businesses today is that it enables the team to reframe and enhance the way it relates to and serves its business environment, which means placing as much emphasis on how it leads change with its stakeholders as how it functions internally.
Therefore, rather than just focusing on the team’s internal relationships and functioning (the focus of much ‘team building’ work) the systemic team coach works with the team and its members to build their collective leadership, helping them co-create value in their engagement with their stakeholders.
These include the commissioners of the team, investors, those the team leads, customers and suppliers of the team, communities within which it operates and the more than human world the team depends upon.
This approach recognises that the biggest challenges in nearly all organisations today lie not inside the individuals, teams or even departments, but in the connections between them. Working well as a team when the team is together is an important first step to every team member being able to represent the whole team effectively when they engage with the team’s stakeholders.
We have continued through our own practice and trainings to innovate and refine what we have termed Systemic Team Coaching and have published what has emerged (Hawkins, 2014 and Hawkins, edited, 2014).
Five Disciplines Model
In developing systemic team coaching we reviewed the best research on team performance we could find, including Katzenbach & Smith (1993; 1999), Clutterbuck (2007), Kets de Vries (2005; 2011), Wageman et al (2008) and West (2012). From this research and from reviewing indepth the practice of ourselves and our colleagues, Peter developed a five disciplines model of team effectiveness: Hawkins’ Five Cs Model for High Performing Teams.
This model proposes that to be effective teams need to have mastered all five disciplines and that systemic team coaching needs to be able to coach teams both in each discipline and on connecting them.
- Commission Are we clear about what our stakeholders want from us? That may mean the board, investors, customers, communities in which we operate – so the commission comes from a number of sources and you have to be careful about the stakeholder(s) you are not noticing. For example, BP didn’t realise the fishermen of the East Coast of America were an important stakeholder before it was too late. Commission is about understanding why we are here, as determined by the stakeholders we work with.
- Clarifying Receiving a clear commission from your stakeholder(s) is not enough. A great team creates its own sense of collective endeavour – what are we here to achieve that we can’t achieve by working in parallel? What are the KPIs of the leadership team? Not just our individual KPIs, but our collective goals and roles? How do we not only run our functions, but contribute to the whole? Clarifying is all about what are we going to do.
- Co-creating How do we work together in a way that is generative? How do we have meetings where we are not just exchanging pre-cooked thoughts, but generating new thinking that none of us had before we came into the room?
- Connecting Great teams are not just ones that have great internal meetings and relate well together. Where teams create real value is in how they engage externally with all stakeholders (customers, suppliers, investors, sponsors, communities and the wider environment). It is also important that each team member is able to represent the whole team, not just their function, when engaging externally.
- Core learning How does the whole team develop and learn, not just the individuals in it? How does a team take time out to reflect on its development? To ask how does it grow its collective capacity? And how does it become a source of stretch and development for its members?
We have developed several 360-degree feedback questionnaires for teams to give and receive feedback on their performance in each of these five disciplines. The first of these was with Bath Consultancy Group (www.bathconsultancygroup.com), a later version was published in Hawkins, 2014B; and the latest online version has been developed between AoEC (www.aoec.com) and Renewal Associates (www.renewalassociates.co.uk).
These provide data on how the team sees itself, how the stakeholders see it and also both groups’ aspirations for the team, which the systemic team coach and team can jointly explore and use to co-design the team coaching journey.
The questionnaires can also be used to evaluate and redesign team coaching after six months, nine months or a year.
Systemic team coaching is never just a series of events or awaydays, but an ongoing development journey, which continues even when the team coach is not present. It may involve off-site events, the team coach providing process consultancy to the team’s regular meetings, or attending stakeholder engagement events. It may also involve some individual coaching of team members focused on how they can develop their contribution to the team’s effectiveness. This is particularly important for the team leader.
Combining individual coaching as part of the collective team coaching requires careful contracting with the whole team and clear boundary management (Hawkins, 2014, p243).
The training
The western world is not short of external and internal individual coaches, nor of facilitators or trainers. What are desperately needed are systemic coaches who can combine a mastery in coaching and partnering skills with the development to work at depth, combining attention to the individual, team, inter-team, organisation and wider systemic levels.
To train such systemic team coaches is not just about them learning the models mentioned above; not just about learning the tools for each of the five disciplines and when and how to apply them; not just about shifting one’s focus from individuals to the team as a collective entity; but importantly about developing the ability and capacity to think and be systemic.
To make this shift we engage our programme participants in a development journey of three core interrelated parts:
- The ‘what’ of systemic team coaching This involves developing a new set of lenses through which to see a team and its challenges systemically, and developing clarity about the role of the coach as a facilitator of change in this.
- The ‘how’ of systemic team coaching Here, the coach develops a broad repertoire of tools to help the team develop excellence in the five disciplines. The focus is on building expertise and versatility so the coach has a range of approaches on which to draw to suit different situations and cultures.
- The ‘who’ of systemic team coaching In some ways the most demanding of the three, this requires the coach constantly to develop and hone their personal ability to tune into systemic pattern and to use this ability to best help the team. This is also about building resilience: the greatest value that a systemic team coach can bring often lies in mirroring and challenging existing patterns of behaviour. This requires the ability to create the space where tension can be addressed constructively to create leadership value.
Our three-day certificate programme invites participants to start this development process, providing a firm foundation in the core concepts and approaches and applying these with either a live team or a carefully constructed team simulation.
The one-year diploma programme deepens, refines and strengthens team coaching practice by accompanying students as they apply the approaches in an ongoing relationship with a team client over the course of the year.
The programme encourages constant learning through new input, experimentation, feedback, reflection and supervision of practice in live client cases and by working in an intense learning community, which provides learning and application in multi-level systemic thinking.
There has not been one certificate programme or diploma module that has not taught us something new.
- Professor Peter Hawkins is chairman and founder, Bath Consultancy Group and chairman, Renewal Associates
- John Leary-Joyce is founder and CEO, Academy of Executive Coaching
- Hilary Lines is executive and team coach, Touchpoint Leaders
References
- D Clutterbuck, Coaching the Team at Work, London: Nicholas Brealey, 2007
- J R Hackman, Collaborative Intelligence: Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2011a
- P Hawkins, Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership, London: Kogan Page, 2011; 2014
- P Hawkins (ed.), 2014B
- P Hawkins and J Leary-Joyce, ‘Training systemic team coaches’, in Leadership Team Coaching in Practice, ch 15, London: Kogan Page, 2014
- J Katzenbach and D Smith, ‘The discipline of teams’, in Harvard Business Review, March-April, pp111–20, 1993a
- J Katzenbach and D Smith, ‘The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization’, in Harvard Business School Press, Harvard, MA,
1993b; 1999 - M F R Kets de Vries, ‘Leadership group coaching in action: The Zen of creating high performance teams’, in Academy of Management Executive, 19(1), pp61–76, 2005
- M F R Kets de Vries, The Hedgehog Effect: The Secrets of Building High Performance Teams, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011a
- H Lines and J Scholes-Rhodes, Touchpoint Leadership: Creating Collaborative Energy Across Teams and Organizations, London: Kogan Page, 2013
- Ridler Report (2013), London: Ridler & Co
- Sherpa Coaching (2012) Seventh Annual Executive Coaching Survey [online] bit.ly/1SyPU0O [accessed 21 May 2012]
- R Wageman, D A Nunes, J A Burruss and J R Hackman, ‘Senior leadership teams’, in Harvard Business School Press, Harvard, MA, 2008
- M A West, Effective Teamwork: Practical Lessons from Organizational Research, (3rd edn), Oxford: BPS Blackwell, 2012