6 Challenges of Coaching Virtual Teams & How to Address Them
With the rapid rate of technological innovation over the past couple of decades, the changes we’ve seen in the workplace have been considerable. With increasing frequency, more teams within more organizations are being created with members who are globally dispersed and connected only by technology. As team coaches, we need to learn how to do our work in an ever growing virtual world which means coaching virtual teams. That’s the reality. From the organization’s point […]
Coaching The Team as a System
A team is a living system—more than a collection of individual parts. A team as a system has rules for belonging and behavior. Those rules are not written down in the employee handbook. New team members learn the rules by observing and by touching the hot wire or being rewarded with a pat on the back. A team has an identity and a personality. A team holds certain beliefs and expresses certain values. A team […]
Team Development: What Does It Mean in Terms of Team Coaching?
We’ve all been on teams and observed teams. There is an easy assumption to make that we know what a team is in terms of team development. The reality is, especially in the workplace, the mental model most followed as a team paradigm is way out of date or simply inadequate for the requirements placed on teams today. Team Development Redefined Here is a way to illustrate that situation. Imagine you have a scrapbook of […]
Team Coaching Discovery Success in Six Steps
A successful team coaching project starts with a clear understanding of the need, the fit an agreement on intended outcomes. Both the team coach and the team sponsor know: “where we are; where we’re headed; and how we’ll get there”. We use the placeholder, “team sponsor” for the organization’s role because that initiative may have come from many places. It may have originated with HR Business Partners, OD or Learning & Development professionals. So for […]
5 Essential Competencies For Team Coaching Effectiveness
Coaching a team is enormously gratifying work. It can also chaotic, engaging, turbulent, emotional, fun, frustrating, and surprising. All of that in a very short period of time, sometimes simultaneously. Although team coaching shares similarities with individual coaching or executive coaching it is a very different, public environment with layers of relationships and a unique set of challenges. Team coaching requires a much broader focus as the underlying goal is to improve team performance. The […]
The Business Case for Team Coaching
For quite a while now there’s been a buzz around the subject of “team coaching” similar to what we saw with individual coaching 10 or 15 years ago. Team leaders, concerned about their own team’s performance, are asking for help and hearing for the first time about team coaching. Internal HR business partners and OD specialists are inquiring in their networks and attending breakout sessions on the topic at conferences. Team coaching was a small […]