One of the first things I often ask when getting to know a team is: “What’s the point of this team?” followed by “So, how does it add value and who to?” Almost without exception, this conversation leads the team to question its priorities and how they work together. It’s a shift from thinking about (more…)
Two coaches working together with a client team need also to be a team. Indeed, they need to role model good teaming behaviour. It’s now increasingly common for pairs of team coaches to seek supervision together, especially if they have not coached as a pair before. The range of issues they bring to supervision is (more…)
When someone feels they belong in an environment, what they sense around them makes them feel at home. This can involve a wide variety of stimuli. Among these are: The visual environment: for example, how spacious or confined it is, the general decor, pictures and objects; or how people dress; or the amount of order...
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One of the reasons teams struggle to define their purpose is that they can’t work out at which level of aspiration the purpose should be. At a very basic level, pragmatic purpose is about relatively short-term accomplishments and survival. For example: “We’ve got to attract enough customers to stay in business”. Grounded purpose takes a (more…)
When domestic couples are too busy to spend quality time together, it’s a recipe for discontent and perhaps divorce. Relationships at work are different in many ways, of course, but if interactions are overwhelmingly transactional, the same mechanisms of disconnection, misunderstanding of motives and disaffection can easily occur. We spend roughly the same amount of...
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Cultures differ in how much people instinctively gesture, but gesturing is a key part of how humans communicate with each other. They are also, according to studies by Susan Goldin-Meadow, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, key to how we learn. It turns out that the movement associated gestures reinforce learning. Children taught...
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What do you stand for? If you were asked this question out of the blue, how would you answer? If you can’t articulate what you stand for, then how do you expect other people to recognise it? It’s a constant challenge for leaders in every environment. It’s easy to explain strategies and plans, and perhaps...
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One of the everyday challenges for team coaches is that many teams cannot advance without greater psychological safety, yet psychological safety is not something that can be instantly switched on. The members of a team may come to recognise the need for psychological safety, but it can only be achieved gradually, in small steps. Moreover, (more…)
Team coaching is the fastest growing area of coaching. There are around 5,000 accredited team coaches globally and an estimated need for 150,000 in the next few years. The two main professional bodies in coaching, the ICF and the EMCC, have both created accreditation routes to certify coaches, who work with teams. So what’s behind (more…)
Once trust is broken in a team, it is hard to recover. Yet the requirement to collaborate remains as strongly as ever. Mistrust between two individuals affects all the team, with other members either taking sides or suffering the discomfort of trying hard to stay neutral. Mediation or conflict resolution can hammer out a compromise (more…)