How to think about it.
Limiting mindsets to team coaching
Think of it this way
Team coaching only needs to happen when the team first forms.
See attachment team development constraints
The best teams engage in lifelong learning and development (think of your favorite successful sports team).
Team coaching only needs to happen when things are getting tough.
If the 1st time you address relationship issues is the divorce court, you have left it to late. As one of my favorite CEO’s once said, “The best time to mend the roof is when the sun is shining”.
The performance of the team is the sum total of the team members performance.
A team can perform at more than the sum of its parts or less than the sum of the parts. It is important to focus on the teams added value. What is it that their collective strength brings to the organization.
Team coaching is about helping the team members relate better to each other.
Team coaching is also about how the team relates to all its stakeholders and is aligned to the wider organization.
Team coaching is about the team having better meetings.
Team performance happens with the team, or the sub-parts of it, engage with the collective task and the teams stakeholders. The team meeting by itself is the training ground, not the match.
Team coaching only happens offsite in away days.
Team coaching can be assisted by off-site away days but the core development happens in the heat of working together and with stakeholders.
Team coaching is about helping the team members trust each other.
Absolute trust between humans is a unrealizable goal, particularly in work teams. A more useful goal is the team members trusting each other enough to disclose their mistrust.
Team coaching is successful if it helps create a team with no conflict.
Too much or to little conflict is unhelpful in a team. Great teams can creatively work through the conflicting needs in their wider system.
Once can only coach teams who work together at the same task.
A team is defined by having a shared enterprise that cannot be achieved by the members working out of connection with each other.
Team coaching is a end to itself.
Team coaching is only valuable when it is linked to improving the teams business performance and its contribution to the performance of the wider organization.
