Team coaching

Enable team development through coaching

Supporting people's performance and team development are just as important a part of a team leader's role as running the business. In fact, in an ideal world, team leaders would spend at least 70% of their time on team training. In these tight staff days it's not always possible to delegate all task-oriented activities, but the more the leader can be a coaching manager, encouraging people to think for themselves, plan ahead, and create their own solutions, the more you will see the team working together, rising to the challenge and accomplishing extraordinary things. On the contrary, the more a manager corrects the team and interferes with team decisions (which is about directional management rather than Teamcoaching), the fewer people will bother to think for themselves and team development in terms creativity and performance of people will slow down.

Team development: creating possibilities

To develop a team to its full potential, the coaching manager must create an environment in which people are encouraged to cultivate their own ideas, supported to take risks, and mistakes are treated as a learning curve. It should also be a place where people can have fun! Happily, creating a fun environment is the easiest part of the process, because if people have the space to develop their own performance and have the satisfaction of having taken risks, overcome challenges and learned from the results (be it success or success) failure), then the fun part happens by itself.

Your search for rules and instructions on team development may be starting from the wrong place. A team can only develop itself. The coaching director's contribution is to create the space where that can happen and then get out of the way, leading from behind to coach team members when they need it. This is the secret of successful team development.

The most common resistance to coaching that I hear in organizations is "I don't have time to train." There is a misconception that each team activity will take longer because listening to people takes more time than telling them what to do. However, once the time and effort has been invested in learning managerial coaching skills (which can take as little as a month), the team's behavior and relationship with the leader will begin to change. If people know that when they approach their manager for guidance they will be asked to suggest solutions themselves, they will very quickly form the habit of thinking things through before approaching the manager, presenting solutions and not problems. The coaching manager will know how to build trust in the relationship so that team members are not afraid to ask for information when necessary. The coaching director's time is freed up to be spent envisioning, exploring new perspectives, and driving the business, not to mention improving work-life balance. Individual performance will take care of itself - there is no strain or effort involved in team training.