Afterthoughts: Team Coaching for Collective Performance and Change

On Tuesday, September 16 we gathered for an evening with Michelle Chambers on Team Coaching for Collective Performance and Change, and she opened with a question: think of a team you know that has talented people but isn't performing as well as it could. What's getting in the way?

The room's answers were familiar:

• communication

• purpose

• trust

• psychological safety

• ego

• resources

• individual styles

When these things differ across a group, that's exactly what holds teams back.

Her provocation for the evening:

"If we develop excellent individual leaders but don't change how they work together, what happens?"

We learned why team coaching is effective in the times we face, when to use team coaching, and what a team coaching journey looks like from insight to sustainable impact.

Systemic Team Coaching

Individual capability, team capability, and collective/organizational capability build on each other. Team coaching is a tool built specifically for the whole framework. It develops team dynamics and breaks down barriers, enabling better conflict management and innovation. Team coaching benefits the organization through adaptive capacity.

Michelle highlighted the foundation of systemic team coaching: Peter Hawkins' definition, which says in part, "A process by which a team coach works with a whole team in order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together."

To make it concrete, she split the room into groups and assigned each one a scenario: a newly formed leadership team that doesn't understand each other's working styles; an experienced team that avoids difficult conversations; a leadership team that needs to make a strategic decision; a senior team with strong individuals stuck operating in silos. Each table had to decide which intervention the team actually needed. What came out of the debrief was nuanced: real situations are messy, and a combination of interventions often serves a team best. But across every scenario, team coaching had a role to play.

Michelle explained the process by which a coach works with a whole team to improve their collective performance and how they develop their collective leadership to engage with all their key stakeholder groups to transform the wider business. Our "move as a trio in a larger organism" activity helped us experience the concept in real time: teams managing themselves well internally still produced chaos at the level of the larger system when they are not being coached as part of a whole.

This engaging, active, and energetic session provided fantastic "light bulb" moments.

A case study of a not-for-profit really hit home. The organization had cycled through three executive directors in four years, lost a major funder, lost most of its board, and was running on a toxic, siloed culture , and then got hit with COVID and a ransomware attack. A year into team coaching: funding restored, the audit passed, a full board back in place, and significant measured gains. In the team's own words: "We are a caring committed team dedicated to supporting one another and to doing our best for our clients and families that we serve." Attendees found the story of hope and resilience inspiring.

Many valuable resources were shared and discussed, including a "Team Worlds" matrix that maps productivity and positivity along high/low axes. This and much more has been generously provided for attendees by Michelle, which you will find in a follow-up email from CCCE.

Michelle closed with a question worth contemplating: What is one team coaching lens you will bring into your work differently? We invite you to share your answer in the comments, or tag us with your thoughts on LinkedIn.

Thank you to Michelle for a session that was as hands-on as it was thought-provoking, and to Sana for hosting. We left with a sharper sense of where individual talent ends and team performance begins.