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Coaching Currents |
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Dear Subscriber, Welcome to the latest issue of "coaching currents from dbcoach"! Each month, this newsletter will offer you some thoughts and ideas based on my experiences as a coach. Have you heard of team coaching? I attended a team coaching training last week and I learned a lot about teams and how to coach them effectively. I want to share some of my learning with you. Who knows, it might spark some ideas as to how to make your teams more efficient. Please know that I will be happy to discuss team coaching with you. I hope you find this edition of the 'coaching currents' both practical and inspirational. Feel free to share it with colleagues and friends. Warmly,
You might wonder: What is team coaching? How does it differ from team facilitation and team building? Let me first define what a team is: "A team is a small number of people
with complementary skills who are committed
to a common purpose, performance goals, and
approach for which they are mutually
accountable." A team can be as small as 2 people or as large as 50. Most often teams are groups of people between 3 and 15. Have you ever considered your family to be a team? You might be more familiar with the concept of a team in sports, i.e. football or basketball. Most of us work in teams in our jobs, sometimes functional teams, i.e. all the sales people in a certain area, sometimes cross-functional, i.e. people from sales, marketing, product development, manufacturing, engineering, etc. to bring a product to market. Likewise, a professional in private practice (physician, attorney, retail store owner, etc) has a team of people to work towards a common goal. Regardless of what type of team, a team exists to produce results. Effective teams have the ability to adjust with speed and agility to changing needs. A high performing team generates trust and confidence and an environment that encourages performance. Teams can use support in the following ways: Team facilitation is useful to solve a particular problem. Team building is an event, a one-time get- together often offsite to encourage communication. Team Coaching is a process including the assessment of the team by using the 'Team Diagnostics Tool', an offsite team coaching experience and a process of follow-on team coaching for the team to monitor progress and providing a venue where team members can hold each other accountable. Conversations a team is not having are usually in the way of the team excelling. Team Coaching provides a process to allow those conversations to happen. The idea is to build on the team's strengths in regards to their productivity and their positivity, meaning their already existing positive attributes. In addition, it is important to view the team as its own system rather than as a group of individuals working together. During the team coaching process teams have an opportunity to negotiate team contracts and experience the roles and responsibilities of other team members for greater understanding and awareness. "When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team performance, excellence becomes a reality." ~ Joe Patemo Isn't excellence what we are all striving for, individually and with our teams? I want to invite you to take a close look at the teams you are a part of and to examine how the team experience can be improved. Following are some questions I want to challenge you to ask yourself. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about how to move forward: db@dbcoach.com What teams are you a part of? What makes
this group of people a team?
This month's newsletter photograph is the result of team work of four 12-year-olds. They had a blast building the iglu and obviously were highly productive and creative. In case you were wondering, all team members are sitting inside the mouth!
"Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results." ~ Andrew Carnegie
"The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High- Performance Organization" by Jon R. Katzenbach, Douglas K. Smith Description: Motorola relied heavily on teams to surpass its competition in building the lightest, smallest, and highest-quality cell phones. At 3M, teams are critical to meeting the company's goal of producing half of each year's revenues from the previous five years' innovations. Kodak's Zebra Team proved the worth of black-and-white film manufacturing in a world where color is king. But many companies overtook the potential of teams in turning around tagging profits, entering new markets, and making exciting innovations happen -- because they don't know how to utilize teams successfully. Authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith talked with hundreds of people in more than thirty companies to find out where and how teams work best and how to enhance their effectiveness. They reveal: The most important element in team success Who excels at team leadership ... and why they are rarely the most senior people Why companywide change depends on teams ... and more Comprehensive and proven effective, The Wisdom of Teams is the classic primer on making teams a powerful tool for success in today's global marketplace.
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