By Andy Chandler, Barefoot Coaching CEO
Barefoot’s Executive Team Coaching Programme is now in full flow, with senior leadership teams across multiple sectors realising that building an effective team takes hard work and commitment. As a team coach, I want to share five truths about team coaching to shine a light on this growing and effective coaching discipline.
“There’s no ‘i’ in team, but there are 5 in ‘individual brilliance’”. So quipped one of my clients who heads up a senior leadership team of five people. It’s a funny line and she’s got a point. Many of the teams I work with have become part of a team not through their innate team skills, but often because of their individual ambitions and abilities.
Building an effective team requires each member of that team to acknowledge that an effective team is far more than just the sum of its functional parts. However, ultimately, change comes from the individual team members being prepared to release their hold on how they normally behave in the team and have the courage to try something new. The team changes when the individuals do.
It’s not quite the Emperor’s new clothes, but it’s not far off. Teams can habitually tell themselves stories to make sense of their current circumstances. I was working with a team recently who, at every opportunity, told a story of how the previous team leader got them into ‘this mess’. Left unchecked this dominant narrative continued to build strength and distract from the real issues and solutions.
When I first started working with this team I was met with sustained attempts at getting me to believe this story. It would have been easy to simply collude and go with it – but that’s not why I coach teams and it’s not what this team needed. I simply asked them to suspend that story for a minute and consider whether there may be other truths about the current situation. I dared to counter the story, and whilst it was uncomfortable, it enabled the team to become unstuck and see the whole picture.
This happens more regularly than you might believe. I’ve had two-day session plans become utterly irrelevant within five minutes of interaction with the team, to team leaders announcing that they’re leaving the team at the start of a three-day session.
As a team coach these moments still shock, but they happen, and learning to accept them is a challenge and opportunity. The presence of a team coach means that it is perfectly possible for the team to benefit. In the previous examples, the teams benefitted in the following ways: for the two-day session that became irrelevant – this created room for a shorter but far more useful session focussed on issues that the previous session plan simply wouldn’t have acknowledged; for the sudden and surprise resignation of the team leader – we created a deeply respectful session to enable the team to receive and process that news first and foremost and get ready to welcome a new team leader!
As a team coach I can feel myself reeling even writing these words. But from my experience, it’s true. I worked with a leadership team over 18 months and throughout that time I used my entire toolkit. This team became a focal point for my own supervision and caused me a great deal of angst. I just couldn’t work out why they weren’t making progress and the less progress they made, the harder I worked.
After much soul searching and sharing my perspective with the team, we all acknowledged that this was not a team that wanted to make progress and no amount of team coaching was going to change that. I tried my best but they didn’t want to change.
A previous tutor at Barefoot used this phrase as their mantra. When it comes to team coaching this feels so true. Working with a leadership team in London, they were in the middle of a heated and sensitive exchange, when some complete strangers walked into the room, cut through the circle where the team were sat, and walked out of the door on the other side of the room.
As they did this there was complete silence from the team and from the intruders. Once the strangers had left there was stunned silence initially followed by the team continuing their heated discussions as if nothing had happened. As a team coach I had a hunch, so asked them, ‘what just happened?’. They stopped talking and almost as one they shared that they are so used to being interrupted and thrown off track that they just took this brief incident as perfectly normal. Data. This team struggled with having boundaries. Everything is data, even strangers walking into the room.
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