Styles and approaches to Team Coaching

There isn’t one way of doing team coaching

Team coaching isn’t a single technique. There are different schools, with different premises, and the choice depends on what’s in front of you. Always applying the same grid is convenient for whoever is running the session and not much use to the group.

Below are the recognised approaches, with a note on when each is needed. Our work almost always starts from the first one.

The experiential approach

You learn by doing, and you think about what happened afterwards. The group faces a real situation, with an objective and a time limit, and whoever is running it doesn’t intervene while things are happening. They intervene once they have, because at that point there’s concrete material to work on.

It’s the approach our whole method is built on, and it’s why team coaching here doesn’t begin in a training room. The practical difference is that nobody has to describe how they behave under pressure: it has just been seen, and everybody saw it.

In the literature you’ll also find it as action learning.

The systemic approach

It looks at the team as part of a larger whole, made of processes, constraints, culture and relationships with other functions. It’s needed when the problem the group brings into the session doesn’t originate inside the group.

That happens more often than it seems. A team arguing about priorities sometimes doesn’t have a relationship problem: it has two managers handing it incompatible objectives. Working on the relationships, in that case, moves nothing and wastes everybody’s time. The approach runs in four movements: you map the system and how its parts hook together, you gather feedback on how it’s performing, you redesign the parts that produce the wrong result, and then you watch what the change actually does.

The strengths-based approach

It starts from what people can do rather than from what’s missing. You map the individual talents, make it visible to the whole group who is good at what, and redistribute the work accordingly.

It’s the approach that leans most directly on the Assessment, because without a measuring instrument that map stays the opinion of whoever drew it. It works well with demotivated groups, less well with groups in open conflict.

Emotional intelligence

It works on the ability to recognise your own emotions and other people’s, and to regulate them. You use it when the knot is the relationship: communication that jams, conflicts that keep coming back to the same subjects, group dynamics nobody manages to name.

Appreciative inquiry

You reconstruct the moments when the team genuinely worked, understand what was present on those occasions, and try to recreate those conditions. It runs in four phases with names worth keeping: discovery, where people tell the stories of what went well; dream, where the group describes a future it would actually want; design, where that turns into plans somebody owns; and destiny, where the team looks at what it has achieved and says so out loud. It’s the reverse of the method that starts from the problems.

Useful with groups that have a difficult period behind them and have got to the point of describing themselves only through what went wrong.

How you choose

Not at a desk, before you know the group. The choice gets made after the assessment and after the first session, once you’ve seen how the team actually works rather than how it says it works.

In practice the approaches mix, and the most frequent sequence is always the same: first the experience in the field, then reading what surfaced, then work on the strengths you saw.