Team Coaching

As well as coaching individuals, Orion undertakes team coaching, recognising that fruitful relationships are the product of more than one person and do not exist without a broader group, organisational and systemic context.

Just as in sport or theatre, business teams need to blend different types of people with complementary but sometimes contrasting skills in a way that promotes a common goal. Team coaching can help teams as they articulate and sharpen those goals and can be at the heart of the adoption of cultures and behaviours that support their achievement.

Team coaching is more than coaching a leader to lead his team and more than just standing in front of a team and reiterating their common goals, although both of these activities may be incorporated in an assignment.  Peter Hawkins defines systemic team coaching as ‘a process by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business. We keep these many facets in mind as we work with clients and our approach to team coaching includes:

• Initial research with individuals both in and outside the team to establish its way of working, its reputation and other key elements of the team profile
• Reflection and exploration with the team around their individual behaviours and resulting team dynamics
• Support around adoption of team goals and behaviours that can accelerate their achievement
• Consideration to the wider stakeholders and context to help prepare the team to be resilient as they promote change

By going through these steps, we help the team embed an improved way of interaction so that it is able to monitor itself and make sure changes in behaviour are sustained. This type of team work can also form a valuable framework for simultaneous individual coaching.
 
When it is right for the client, we can also use psychometric profiling to help a team to understand itself more fully and to become more effective.

At an organisational level, we can work with management teams to take these ideas a step further, and we can design and articulate programmes that embed coaching as a central management tool, one which engages all employees to align their efforts towards the organisation’s wider goals.