Four Benefits of Team Coaching That Drive Results
Much of my executive coaching practice involves coaching leadership teams and/or some of the individual leaders on these teams. This work includes facilitating leadership team retreats and coaching, along with other coaches, members of the team in a series of one-on-one sessions.
I’ve found that team coaching using this approach serves the members by embracing both leadership development and performance improvement philosophies. Coaching helps people improve their individual and leadership effectiveness. What enterprise leaders want to see is individual improvements translating into better team and organizational outcomes.
Focusing on the team as well as its members delivers improved organizational, team and individual outcomes in a more holistic way with multiple benefits.
Four Benefits Leadership Team Coaching Delivers:
- Improves Team Cohesion. Removing the distractions of the workplace and bringing team members together in one space is an obvious advantage of a team retreat. Beyond the opportunity to interact personally with colleagues, however, retreats often include common experiences that break down barriers and allow for greater understanding. These experiences may include individually taking common assessments and having a skilled coach facilitate discussion about the results with the entire team. Through such directed activities, team members come to better understand their diversity of styles and personalities using a common language. Barriers come down; greater understanding and respect for differences increase.
- Increases Engagement and Inclusion. Effective retreats begin before team members even assemble. Facilitating coaches solicit input from team members well ahead of the retreat with pre-meeting questions that ask individuals about their ideas for top growth opportunities and other organizational imperatives. Answers are consolidated for confidentiality and shared with the entire team as pre-reading for the retreat. These advance preparations enable team members to arrive at the retreat with an understanding of where there is agreement, as well as where there are divergent opinions on key items. The result is increased engagement and more inclusion.
- Advances Alignment, Commitment, and Accountability. A facilitated retreat 1) leads to more in-depth discussion and results in greater alignment on the most important team objectives; 2) encourages commitment based on active participation in designating the top goals, and 3) defines accountabilities for top goals — who will do what by when. Alignment, commitment, and accountability to team goals generates a greater likelihood of achieving them.
- Ties Individual Goals to Team Outcomes. When team coaching results in well-defined outcomes to be achieved, coaches working with individual team members can build upon the process. They have more information to help their clients link individual goals to desired team outcomes. Personal engagement and commitment are magnified as a result.
In my experience, team coaching serves to combine both leadership development and performance coaching. For the team and its members, it ties together team goals with individual desired objectives. This leads to improved individual and team performance – a winning combination for any organization.
How can coaching help your leadership team improve cohesion and develop its members to achieve both individual and team desired outcomes?
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Lance Hazzard, PCC, CPCC, is a certified Executive Coach and Executive Team Coach helping people and organizations achieve success. Lance and Eric T. Hicks, Ph.D., co-authored Accelerating Leadership, published in June 2019. Lance is Executive Coach and President at Oppnå® Executive & Achievement Coaching. More information on the book, Lance and Oppnå® Coaching can be found at the links below: