Elevating your Coaching: Team Coaching
Imagine elevating the capabilities and results of the traditional coaching one on one to a whole team. If an individual gets outstanding results from self-exploration on setting clear and well-defined goals, establishing good plans and then executing, what would be the results from applying this same methodology to teams? From my perspective, I think it would be amazing.
That is why it surprises me how Team Coaching has not grown as fast as individual coaching, probably the reason is that some great facilitators are doing it? or that organizations are not hearing about it? or maybe it is because professional coaches were not trained specifically on how to handle Team Coaching to work with more than one person at the same time?
Team Coaching presents different challenges from individual coaching and requires coaches with additional tools and skills that will help a team, work towards the same goal. I thought it was important to differentiate that group coaching and team coaching are not the same. In group coaching you might work with several individuals, but they all have their personal goal. In Team Coaching you work with a group of people working towards the same goal.
Part of Team Coaching is similar to individual coaching since it involves helping the team to define the goal that will be adopted by all team members, also exploring the value behind that goal and using many of your coaching skills and standards like rapport, observation and listening, confidentiality, rhythm of the process, commitment and measurement.
What is fascinating is all of the new things that come into play when you have the dynamics of several individuals participating at once. As a Team Coach you need to manage a new concept of Psycogeography involving how each person manages physical location and personal space. You also need facilitation techniques to manage the group and the individuals, since some of them might be masking emotions or ideas, exercising different levels of assertiveness, different levels of personal disclosure and bring a lot of diversity in roles, generations, emotional skills and cultural backgrounds. Today teams work virtually all over the world making these differences more profound.
You also need to understand and manage the stages of a team model to be able to coach the team as they go through forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. This involves dealing with conflict, manage conflict I should say, and perspectives.
Finally, what will elevate your coaching as with individual coaching is that you practice and master not only being a coach but also being a team member and a team leader to understand all the different teamwork dynamics.
More learning and more practice are required yes, and also more rewards because helping teams reach their goals is one of the best ways to elevate your coaching and create a higher impact in the world with high-performing teams getting as your individual clients, outstanding results.
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