Team Dynamics

Team Dynamics

Team / Group Coaching

The Collective Brain

The collective brain is a more productive than the individual working in isolation. Teams that work well together can achieve what individuals simply can’t acting alone.
Group/Team coaching can be very effective in the following ways:

  • Improving communication between team members, and outside the team
  • Reducing conflicts
  • Identifying and addressing negative politics
  • Facilitating alignment of team members
  • Creating harmony and synergy
  • Stimulating creativity
  • Supporting teams to be more effective problem solvers, and decision makers
  • Making teams more flexible and adaptable to changing conditions
  • Building resilience and sustainability

Coaching provides the support, structure and empowerment that enables teams to learn, practice, and integrate new more productive and positive behaviours.
It supports teams to adopt new behaviours and integrate new practices to create sustainable change. A team goes through a process of change to evolve into a more effective and collaborative unit, which is better equipped to deliver agreed targets/goals.

The key aim is improved team performance, and that is measured by the team itself, or organisation. However, from the coach’s perspective, the focus is not so much on specific results, but more on developing a team with transferable skills to enable it to deal with a wide range of challenges successfully.

Every team programme will be agreed with the team leader and or sponsor of the coaching. The programme will then be tailored to meet the requirements of the team, and context.

Broadly speaking the Team Coaching process is as follows:

The Team Coaching Process

Assessment
All team members will undertake a DISC assessment. The results of the assessments will be feedback to individuals and then to the team as a whole. The results will enable team members to understand their strengths and development needs, and how these feed into the team dynamics and effectiveness.
There will also be a discovery session with the team to uncover what is going well, and what needs to change.
From this assessment an action plan is agreed.

Coaching

Team coaching sessions are then offered either face to face or virtually.
The number and frequency will be agreed with the team and sponsor. However commonly the sessions would be for half a day on a monthly or fortnightly basis.

The aim of the coaching is to focus on and improve team dynamics and functioning. The sessions focus on positive team dynamics, but also to uncover the any difficult underlying issues which are compromising the effective functioning of the team. The sessions support the team to understand the impact of these challenges, and also to generate realistic plans to address them, with built in accountability. The team is encouraged to learn from the coaching experience - to recognise unhelpful patterns of behaviour and develop sustainable strategies for addressing them over time and into the future.

The Results

This stage involves measurement and feedback of results of the coaching, as well as a reflection of the learning from the coaching process. In addition, the coaching will result on a team action plan, and a discussion as to how this will be taken forward

Teams agree goals, action plans, and learn from implementing their action plans. There is a continuous cycle of learning from their actions, recalibrating, and taking new actions.

This cycle of action, learning, and accountability is central to team coaching which makes it a perfect tool for ongoing improvement of team performance.
Team members are often in more than one team. Learning from a team member in one team can be transferred to other teams they work in. Consequently, higher expectations and performance can transfer from one team to another and become new standard of expectation for all teams in an organisation.

Return on Investment

Some of the deliverables that can be achieved through team coaching are as follows:
  • Improved patient satisfaction measures
  • Better staff engagement levels
  • Faster integration of teams through an organisational change process
  • Senior leadership team alignment
  • Accelerated product or service development


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