Building a Team’s Capacity for Learning & Growth

The Team 360 View – deployed after the Team Diagnostic and/or as a baseline to track progress during coaching – offers a practical, time-efficient tool to learn how other stakeholders experience or are impacted by a team. Carried out by the internal or external team coach, the Team 360 View helps a team build stronger relationships with stakeholders and provides a reality check to the team’s own perceptions of progress.

But what if team members themselves initiated such discovery by direct face-to-face meetings with stakeholders? As a team coach, I am on the lookout for opportunities for a team to take steps to support their own learning and growth, and to adopt the essential components of a learning organization:

• become adept at learning;
• expand the team’s capacity for creating better/desired outcomes;
• foster collective learning through action review; and
• seeing the whole together

One could argue the results of a Team 360 View, while providing invaluable feedback, may deny a team the huge learning that comes from translating curiosity into crafting and using relevant open-ended questions in direct interaction with key stakeholders – and observing the energy, tone and meaning behind the feedback.

Of course, this approach is more time-consuming than the Team 360 View AND typically requires teams to be coached in discovery and the art of giving and receiving feedback. In my experience, the ROI can be significant. Team members learn to become less reliant on the team coach and deepen their awareness and skills developed in post Team Diagnostic coaching by reinforcing their new knowledge through direct action. I introduce the activity as an exercise:

Exercise

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Introduction:

Most teams are not growing or learning yet we know there is a strong correlation between learning and performance. Though action – the execution of a plan – can produce results, a focus on learning will typically help a team achieve even better results. Teams need to deliver on goals and this requires a focus on action and learning. Without learning, we find teams are not ready or nimble enough to adapt to new challenges.
• Many teams make the mistake of not looking outward because they’re often so much going on in the team itself! An external focus is needed just as much as looking at the team’s internal strengths and challenges.

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Step 1

– Coach facilitation:

• In small groups (depending on the size of the team), invite team members to brainstorm a) what would you like other stakeholders to be saying about this team? and b) how might you find out what other stakeholders think about this team? In other words, what questions would you like to ask? (As the team’s coach, I remind teams to think about business results and the attitude or energy they experience when they interact with the team).

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Step 2

– Synthesize the output from the brainstorm breakout groups. Notice the energy.
Is the team genuinely intrigued or simply going through the motions? Invite team members to come up with next steps – now that they’ve come up with a list of what they would like others to be saying about them and a few questions they may put to selected stakeholders.

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Step 3

– Agree on a process – how many stakeholders, who will meet whom, what specific questions will be posed, how the feedback will be synthesized, by whom etc.

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Step 4

– Offer the team tips for crafting good open-ended questions: establishing rapport with the stakeholders; how to receive feedback, even when it can be critical or negative.

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Step 5

– Re-group after all the stakeholder meetings have been complete. This coaching session should focus on a) the content of the feedback from the stakeholders and b) what team members learned from conducting the feedback meetings – AND how such learning may be sustained by the team?

Summary:
Teams are typically busy and focused on achieving against clear goals and purpose. Taking time out to conduct discovery that an assessment tool or a coach might be able to achieve on its behalf may seem an unaffordable luxury. However, the learning team members get from coming up with the process and embarking on discovery with key stakeholders paves the way for teams to lock in the importance of paying attention to task and process; learning from doing; using learning to increase the capacity to deliver on goals; and to promote inquiry and dialogue. Teams must learn how to learn and not just when a coach is around!