Positioning Need For Team Coaching

Note: I am a consultant by trade and not a coach. However, I think this practice can also work in the coaching world.

One challenge that I faced early on after going through the initial TCI training was finding the right client and opportunity to introduce the model and the idea of team coaching. Ultimately, I found that in the world of Sales/Marketing/Product teams that I work with, the idea of Team Coaching as a stand alone offering seemed a bit soft and more of a “nice to have” offering.

I decided that since people were used to working with me from a Sales/Marketing/Product consulting perspective, I would continue to work with them in that capacity, but find ways to couple team coaching into my existing coaching work. Here are two examples that were relatively easy sells for me.

The first was working with a larger sales team (about 30 members) and specifically working with the leaders in that organization on a next year planning cycle. They wanted me to help them plan a 3.5 day offsite for the purposes of strategically aligning and planning goals for that following year. It would involve all 30 team members. In the process of designing that for them, I said that if the team were to really thrive in the following year, we should not only plan for the business goals that needed to be accomplished, but also focus on identifying how to make the team itself stronger. We ended up devoted a whole day of the 3.5 day gathering to do the Team Diagnostic results reveal and action planning. The team loved it and the team leaders saw how this was an important part of the strategic planning process. The TCI component was simply baked into the bigger picture.

A similar situation occurred when a customer service team and account management team were struggling with some process issues. I was brought in to solve the business and process issue and quickly realized that there was also a team alignment and communication issue between the two groups. In this case I baked in a Strengths Finders assessment process and used the results to compare strengths (and gaps) for each team and how the difference in approaches and strengths could help the collective group process. Like the TCI example above, I simply attached the team work into the bigger process solving issue.

For both examples, there was not any push back on the team development work. I know that had I tried to sell each of those on a stand alone basis, however, they wouldn’t have materialized.

Moving forward, I’m using this “baked in” approach as a natural part of solving business problems!