Is your organisation ready for internally sourced team coaching?
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Teams are the cellular structures that make the corporate body work. Without teams, it would be next to impossible to organise large, complex tasks. Yet teams rarely perform as well as they might. This may be because they are too big (the optimum size of no more than eight goes back to our ancient ancestors, who learned that they could only keep seven others in sight and coordination when hunting). It may be because they do not have the resources or skills that they need to do the job. But most of all, it is because a team is a complex, adaptive system, in which a failure of any part of the system has a disproportionate impact on the system as a whole.
Our research over 25 years into how teams function and what it means to be a high performing team identifies six critical areas that affect team performance:
The interdependence between these areas means that everything affects everything else. For example, a lack of clear purpose may make it more difficult to obtain resources from key stakeholders, leading to conflict about what the team does. This in turn leads to sub-optimal processes, confusion about what new knowledge or expertise the team needs and a culture that blames the team leader for everything. Of course, a lack of clear purpose may also be the result of poor leadership – and so the wheel turns!
Working with uncertainty and complexity should be the territory of coaching. Yet, the world of coaching has been relatively slow to adapt from a one-to-one perspective to a team coaching perspective. It takes a much greater level of skill to coach teams. Moreover, much of what is sold as team coaching is not coaching at all (more facilitation or team building) and coaching the individuals within a team is not the same as coaching the team as an entity in its own right. Indeed, it is possible to improve the individual performance of team members while reducing the overall performance of the team!
To date, almost all team coaching is delivered by externally resourced coaches, with varying levels of competence. I know of only a handful of organisations that have developed internal team coaching resources. The result is that this extremely valuable resource is limited to teams at or near the apex of organisations, when it is needed at all levels. New teams and project teams, for example, can hit the ground running, if they have effective team coaching. Average or good teams can become exceptional, if they learn how to leverage what they do well and apply it to areas of relative weakness.
The challenge for organisations in all sectors is that, as the environment in which they operate becomes more uncertain and more complex, teams at all levels need the ability to respond both faster and more effectively. So, a top-focused strategy is like keeping the head warm while the body freezes.
Given that team coaching, when done well, is highly demanding in time (a reasonable average is about six hours of preparation and/or individual coaching for every hour of collective coaching) and therefore an expensive intervention, the advantages of having an internal capability are obvious. But how do you persuade your experienced internal one-to-one coaches to take on this more demanding role?
One of the great selling points is the learning that internal team coaches gain from this level of coaching, that they can apply in their own teams. Leaders, who are also team coaches, learn to take a different perspective on their leadership role. With very few exceptions, almost all the functions of leadership can be distributed within the team, leaving the leader free to concentrate on the most value-creating aspects of his or her role.
Once you have an internal team coaching resource, it needs maintenance and continuous development. When you bring in an external team coach to work with a very senior team, insist they pair with an internal team coach, rather than bring in another outsider. The benefit of this is that both coaches learn from each other – the internal coach acquiring new tools and techniques; the external learning more about the organisation. Establish a peer network, where they can share experiences and use each other as sounding boards. Hold an annual review with the team coaches together, to explore how the organisation can make best use of them.
If you are concerned that your internal team coaches will not be as good as externals, rest assured. There is no credible evidence that external coaches – for individuals or for teams – are automatically better than internals. Indeed, internals are likely to be better supervised and have the advantage of understanding the organisation and its mores.[2]
Your internal team coaches have one other, important role. They are the front line of an organisation’s efforts to create coaching cultures in teams. They fulfil this role not just through formal team coaching, but by the role model they provide and the many informal conversations they have with other managers across the organisation.
In summary, building a cohort of internal team coaches is a wise investment that will pay increasing dividends as organisations become even more dependent on the performance of their teams.
David Clutterbuck, 2019
[1] Hodge, A and Clutterbuck, D (2019) Supervising team coaches: Working with complexity at a distance. In The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Caching, Eds Clutterbuck, Gannon, Hayes, Iordanou, Lowe and MacKie, pp331-342
[2] There is, of course, an argument for preferring an external for coaching the top team, where independence from power structures is desirable.