What is Team Coaching? A definition

Let's start with defining Individual Coaching

Too often when people think of a “coach,” they visualise an expert sharing their superior knowledge.  Sports coaches or famous business people might spring to mind with the knowledge and track record to "coach".  

In reality, this is better described as one-to-one teaching by an expert because the expert has (and is expected to have) more knowledge and more power - power to decide the agenda and greater knowledge about the topic. But coaching is very different.

Coaching is about discovering new learning within the person being coached - the learner. To use a Co-Active Coaching term, they are already creative, resourceful and whole. Discovering new learning involves exploring the learner themselves, their relationships and their context. This exploring leads to new discoveries, which in turn leads to new options and opportunities for action, resulting in the outcome of learning: change. The coach prompts and supports this learning/changing process, through techniques which derive from not knowing the answer: listening, presence, powerful questions, reflecting and stimulants such as challenge and creativity. The coach is a catalyst; the power and knowledge remains with the learner. They decide the learning. They decide the change.

A coaching conversation leads to learning at a deep, fundamental level, heightening awareness, choices and action in areas of purpose, capability, values, and identity.  To paraphrase the International Coaching Federation's definition of coaching:

Coaching is partnering with a learner in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential.

So what's Team Coaching?

Like individuals, teams need differentiated conversations to explore their purpose, their capabilities, values and identity so that they can make new choices and take different action. So on the face of it, Team Coaching isn't much different than Individual Coaching. But teams are very complex - they are more than an individual, and they are (mostly) less than an organisation. And according to the International Coaching Federation, they are single entities, not to be confused with multiple individuals.

For instance, too often teams are identified as people reporting to the same manager. But this is a group calling itself a team, not being a team. In this context collaboration is a "hub-and-spoke" transaction rather than mutually transformative, because the power and knowledge is in too much in the hands of the manager.

Real teams hold the power and knowledge mutually - it's distributed and shared in ways that mean everyone contributes and feels like they belong - even if such teams consist of people with different line managers. Because real teams have clear purpose, defined in conjunction with their stakeholders, to create value that benefits them and their stakeholders, and which could never be created individually.

A Team Coach therefore partners with the whole team, as a single entity, defined by it's purpose, membership and collaboration. The process involves discovering and developing the team, including what membership makes it whole, which stakeholders define the purpose and value to be created, and how the team collaborates to realise it's real team potential.

Partnering as a Team Coach doesn't require greater knowledge or power than the team i.e. experience in the sector. But partnering does require an appreciation of teams as a single entity, their dynamics, their systemic nature, their creativity and resourcefulness. It's a catalytic relationship that stimulates the collaborative learning and change of the whole team.

This means Team Coaching is the joint endeavour of a team with a coach to discover new collaborative learning that better serves the purpose of the team and its stakeholders.

Are you a team coach? Or a team leader?

What is your definition of team coaching?

Check out our Coaching Team Leader program.