CEO Today Magazine September 2019 Edition

www.ceotodaymagazine.com 24 SPECIAL FEATURES Coaching now accounts for around 12% of the average learning and development budget and many organisations now have well established programmes. This is a testament to the outstanding results achievable and yet in spite of its popularity, coaching still tends to be positioned as a corrective intervention, something that a person requires as a ‘fix’. Even for individuals, the more positively positioned the coaching, the greater its impact and this is especially true for investments in team coaching. Teams are working to deliver a shared purpose, so coaching a team provides its members with an opportunity to enhance existing skills, develop greater awareness, collectively learn and grow and ultimately, to achieve the group’s maximum potential. According to Patrick Lencioni, the author of ‘Five Dysfunctions of a Team’, top performing teams have certain traits in common. They share a sense of humility and with this comes the ability to sustain positive conflict. There is mutual trust between members and the common desire to become a learning team, reflecting on past actions and whether they could have been improved upon. All these traits require the team to accept a certain level of vulnerability, to be able to collectively question whether they are doing the right things and if they could be doing things better, all of which can be developed through team coaching. From Good to Great Identifying when to offer team coaching is not cut and dried, but there are some indicators to be mindful of. Firstly, it’s arguably human nature for well- established teams to become complacent - especially at the top of an organisation - in terms of what they are learning and how they push each other on. Through team coaching, established groups can un- learn what no longer serves them and accelerate learning new capabilities, not just individually but as a team. They also re-learn how to hold each other to account, individually and as a single entity and do so in a systemic way. The resulting ‘connectedness’ and ‘groundedness’ they develop gives them the capacity to avoid any associated ‘blindness’ to external issues that can set in and other common ‘CEO disease’ traps. For HR leadership, it can be difficult to identify when to introduce team coaching. In many situations, there are no tell-tale signs that a team has ‘gone off the rails’ and rather than simply correcting existing Practical Tips for Coaching a Top Team Helen Battersby, Executive Coach Aziz Corporate