Latest / Courage into Clarity / Team Coaching the Courage to Work Differently
Transcript
- Jackie: Welcome. A few weeks ago I was sitting with a team and if you looked at them on paper they trusted each other, they liked each other, they rated their skills as a team higher than almost any group I've worked with and yet the thing that they scored lowest on was agreeing how they actually work together and linked to making decisions and delivering. I guess that's the thing I want to talk about today, the paradox, because I notice it in a lot of places. Good people, real good will, and still something isn't moving. So what might be holding that back? So hello and welcome to Courage into Clarity. I'm Jackie Grier, Jax to some of you. And this is the podcast where we talk honestly about leadership, about teams and about the courage it takes to see things as they really are. Today's episode is a bit closer to home than usual. I want to talk about team coaching, what it is, what it isn't, and why more and more organisations are investing in team coaching. I want to share what I'm noticing when I walk into rooms with teams right now. and I want to tell you something more personal about the courage it took for me to change the way that I deliver this work and my curiosity around this work and building a new framework and a new approach to working with teams. So make yourself a cup of tea, I've got one. Let's begin and let's have a chat about what team coaching actually is. I guess it's easier to say probably or start with what team coaching isn't because I think that's where a lot of the confusion lies. It isn't a team building day. I've nothing against an escape room or a good dinner or an activity on a lake building a raft. They have their place. But a fun day creates warmth, it rarely creates change. Team coaching isn't a training course. know, training gives people knowledge. Most of the teams that I work with already know what good looks like. Knowing isn't the problem. It's applying it that's the problem. And it isn't individual coaching done in a group. That one really matters because it feels quite different. In individual coaching, the client is the person in front of me. But in team coaching, the client is the team itself, the whole system. And that's what attracted me to team coaching, the working with the system. So what is it? Theme coaching is a structured, facilitated process over time, to give it a definition, that helps an intact team see itself clearly and act on what it sees. So I'm not just working with what people say they value, I'm working with what actually happens between them. The patterns, the habits, the conversations, the mindsets, the defensiveness, the conversations that happen in the corridor after the meeting take place in the room, rather than being delivered after the meeting itself. So here's a way I often describe it to clients. Every team has two meetings going on at once. There's the meeting on the agenda and there's the meeting underneath another agenda. Who speaks first? Who goes quiet? Which topics everyone quietly steps around? how people are feeling, what stops them speaking up, what's happening to their mindset, what's happening to their bodies and their presentation and their reaction to others in the room. So team coaching works with that second meeting. In practice that usually looks like a few things. So the way that I start a team coaching process is by doing a diagnostic first. I ask the team to tell me honestly and anonymously how they experience working together. Not to grade them, but to help us have a shared mirror of what it looks and feels and is like in this team. do some facilitated sessions with the whole team, might speak to the leader and some key people before those sessions as well to get some thoughts to back up the data and we work with the data live in the room so the team has conversations around what it actually feels like in this team right now that maybe they've been putting off because they've been too busy or they've not seen it as being part of performance or delivering. We'd often give time in between then to try some things out after those sessions, make some commitments, small changes in real working time. We could even do some observations of some meetings and how the team are working. And then we would come back and look at what happened. Now that's a really important part because so often with team interventions, particularly team facilitation or training, there's a couple of events or a one-off event or a couple of days. there's no follow-up. So it can be very difficult with the busyness of organisations to hold people accountable, to get change to really happen, to get people to really engage with new processes or start to develop new habits. The other key point about team coaching is that we work very closely with the leader. because the leader is a really key part of the team system. They're not outside it. That's so important. And one of the things that I love about this work is that the leader doesn't get to stand at the back of the room. Not that I've actually experienced many leaders who would do that, but they're in it with everyone else. They're usually having some coaching perhaps one-to-one alongside the team solutions to help them lead the team through the decisions that they've made through. the commitments they've made to embed in perhaps a new way of working. And the best leaders I've worked with really welcome that. So they find that challenging, it can be sticky at times, but actually, you know, they really find it beneficial to have that support to support the team and its growth. I guess the key word in all of this is time. know, a single session can open up a door, but behaviour changes when people really practice something new together in the real pressure of work and then reflect on it. And that's where the return on investment lives because the other thing that team coaching takes is of course financial commitment. It's not a one-off process. It does probably cost more than a team workshop, but the return on investment and the benefits are generally more if the team really commits to it. So that I guess brings me to the next question. Why would I invest in team coaching for a team in my business? You know, it's quite new, it's quite a new principle. What are the benefits of actually taking that team coaching process forward? is a fair question. And I want to answer that properly because, you know, I've sat on the other side of that table with teams and budgets are tight and I know that the team will feel better isn't a business case. So let me put it in the language perhaps that's more appropriate for someone holding a budget would recognize. So every team has a hidden cost. It doesn't appear on a balance sheet. but it's there. It's the decision that gets revisited three times because nobody really agreed the first time. It's the project that stalls because two functions each think the other owns it. It's the brilliant senior person who quietly leaves because they never felt heard. It's the customer raising an issue because deadlines are not met. It's the well-being being impacted in a team because people are working so hard to try and achieve something but they're not necessarily working smartly, they're just doing more. So there are many factors which are the hidden agenda or budget that crop up with teams and I've come across a lot of those over the last few years and how the cost of a team works is often far greater than the cost of coaching. So here's what I see. when team coaching really works and when somebody makes that commitment to a longer term relationship on supporting the team and the growth. And if I think about, you know, teams nowadays, there's such a massive expectation on what they deliver. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You know, they're often quite wide and large. They're often a mixture of remote and face to face and there are so many dynamics that play in to maybe disabling how they work more effectively. But what I see when people do team coaching and in some of the teams I've been working with recently is that faster decisions, cleaner decisions tend to be made. So teams stop circling, they agree who decides what, if they don't agree they agree to disagree, which is a good thing about a team too, it's not always about being positive. And they stop re-litigating and going over and over tasks and things actually get done. There's less duplication and rework, so when roles are clear and roles and responsibilities is a big part of team coaching and when they're clear across functions people stop doing others work and they also execute things with a pace. Alignment isn't a nice to have, it's what lets a team move quickly without breaking things. I think one of the big factors and obviously a massive cost to organisations is that when teams are working well after team coaching and in a positive place is that we get retention of good people. So many of the industries that I work in, you know, getting good people in their trade, in their craft is really key and it's a very competitive world. So keeping them once we've got them is really key. So and obviously there's a cost to that too. And people stay in teams where they feel they can be themselves, where they feel they can be open, they can do their best. work, they can be more vulnerable, they can accept and discuss when things are challenging and they can be really honest about what's going on and not trying to hide circumstances or situations. And that ultimately affects how they are under pressure. So teams resilience under pressure improves because teams that can talk honestly when things are calm are the ones that hold together. So when things get hard, that's the most important time for teams to be able to talk really honestly. And what gets in the way of that is our mindset, our belief in ourselves. than others or which links directly to how psychologically safe we feel and the habits and patterns we have around our own behaviours that maybe stop us speaking up when things are difficult. So leadership capacity with all these things improving gets freed up. So when the team owns more, the leader stops being the bottleneck and gets their thinking time back. Now that's the bit that I find really interesting about team coaching and really appeals to me is that the key thing and if you look at people like Peter Hawkins, he directly quotes about the fact that it's really important to give the team the ability to own their dialogue. So I am not the expert in the room as the team coach on what they're doing. I'm not the expert in their business in their their world But I'm I'm there to support them to own their dialogue so that they become the expert on themselves And I've seen that happen recently in a large energy engineering team who We talked about the session we were doing and you know one of the challenges back was you know, well, what do you know? about our industry. So it's not for me to know about their industry, yes to know some of how they work and the high level but I don't need to know how to build something as an engineer to help an engineering team work more effectively. There's actually a wider body of research behind this too. So Ruth Wageman and the late Richard Hackman spent years studying senior teams and one of their consistent findings was that how a team is set up and launched really matters enormously. So coaching amplifies the good conditions, it can't replace them. And that's why I always start with a diagnostic and with the team's purpose, not with an activity. And linked to that I would definitely always have interviews with the leader and key members of the team and if there was time and budget permitted everybody in the team to have a short interview to really get an understanding of how people are thinking and feeling and what they want to get out of the solution so that they're committed going forward and not feeling like they've just been told to turn up in a room. So that's a few reflections on team coaching. And if I think about, a client situation here recently. So I worked with a construction, ground construction organisation recently, who are going through an enormous amount of change. They've had many years of new leadership teams, new members of staff. They've been taken over into a larger group. Their performance needed to increase. They had lots of legacy work that was going on. And we used the team coaching session and the interviews and the diagnostic to really give the team a way of clearing the air, clearing the air, getting a sense of what was really going on for them right now and how it felt in that team, including new members that are just joined. So some had been there a long time, some were new members, some were midterm. But, a real mixture in the team to really come to together and air what was going on, how they were feeling, and then to think about... that clear direction on a way forward and the purpose that they needed to define for them to do that. So that was one example of using team coaching in a time of change and that ongoing support is still happening. I'm working with the team leader individually who's new in the post as well to help him form the leadership style that is helpful for him in this situation and bring the amazing strength that he brings from his other experience into leading this team forward into a positive and real growth space. So I want to say something about investment, I guess, because it matters to me. I don't really like selling off, selling one off sessions and walking away. I will do it. And of course, I'll do it as a way of introducing to the team. But I do try to say to people when we're setting up, a commitment going forward and doing more will absolutely bring more return on your initial investment. If I'm self-sufficient, It's also more satisfying for me to work with a team and to see the growth and not to just do something and walk away. You know a single day can create great conversation and then everyone unfortunately goes back to their inbox and the busy busyness of our organisational world and often the old patterns return because habits don't change unless we do something. If we don't do something nothing will ever happen. So it's nice to be able to stay long enough with the team to see the change stick to help them define what that means for them. And that's why I've designed my team coaching journey is a journey with different levels depending what an organization needs, what their investment potential is and how much they want to have us staying alongside the team throughout, you know, maybe what's the growth. So sometimes I might be a coach, sometimes I might be a challenger, there will be a bit of facilitation. I could be an advocate, could be a leadership mentor, supporter, but you know if an organisation is going to invest in its people I'd love to give that commitment to get that investment returned. So let me talk a little bit now about what I'm noticing in clients. This is interesting I guess you know over the last few months I've been working with a real mix of teams so it's an engineering team technical team very much made up of engineers scientists project managers finance and commercial teams charity team the construction team and a team in the sort of people in HR and education All very different you would think very different pressures and to a degree there are but there are definitely similarities but yet you know some patterns really keep showing up and I'd love to share a few of those with you and I don't think these patterns are new they're things that I've noticed before but I think the longer I work with teams more intensely I work with them the more I notice these patterns appearing and becoming very very common. So the first one won't be surprise to everybody, it's how we all feel. People are busy, but often happy. And I guess that's the paradox that I opened with. So again and again, people tell me they love the work, they feel valued, they like their colleagues, but in the very same breath, they say they're stretched, swamped, pretty demotivated. So what I've learned is not to rush to fix the busy, because the goodwill is real, it's an asset. But it's also hiding something. So when a team is that committed, they will absorb pressure for a long time before anyone says out loud, this isn't sustainable. And part of my job is to make it safe to say that sentence, both as a collective, but also as individuals. Now that might be down to, you know, habits that people have around how they work, needing to or wanting to please other people. So taking on things. It may be about proving their experts in things needing to feel competent. may be just pace is something that people like working and we may find that you know a way of managing energy you know at pace transfers across into other areas of their lives and that can often be because we're not stopping or allowing ourselves to stop to really notice how we're feel teams. The second thing I guess that I notice is often in teams, the trust is very high. People are very nice to each other, you know, they like each other. There's some honesty, but there's maybe not really clarity coming from that honesty. There's an honesty that they're comfortable with, but not necessarily honesty about what's really going on for them individually. be thinking about being more open about having shared ways of working and making decisions effectively, efficiently and getting that clarity to go forward. They like working with each other but we don't want to rock the boat. So I find that quite fascinating because it tells us that liking each other isn't the same as agreeing how we work. And you can have a team full of goodwill that still doesn't know who owns what. And honestly, a high trust team is the best place to start. The foundation's already there. You know, we're not building trust from scratch. We're putting it to work. But what gets in the way of trust is a feeling of insecurity, lack of inclusion, maybe lack of control and that's our stuff as individuals playing out as a collective. But what we're able to do in team coaching is pay attention to the individual mindsets and attitudes that are going on in the team and help it then become a collective mindset and attitude to take things forward. I guess when we get to that point we're also then starting to at systems within a system. So everybody comes to that team with a history, with a pattern, with habits, with a system behind them and we're working with all those systems in that place to help pull together an effective system in that team. So the third thing I guess is that the friction often lives at the edges. So within the team things often feel good. It's at the boundaries that it gets hard. So people talk about picking up the slack for others, priorities that don't line up across the business, standards applied differently depending on who you're working with. This matters for any leader listening. Sometimes the issue you're trying to fix is inside your team isn't inside your team at all, it's in the system, it's around it. So team coaching helps you see where the real boundary problems sit and which areas conversations need to happen with the people outside the team. So that could be stakeholders, that could be customers, that could be senior leaders in the business, that could be people who are being led by that So it could be families, could be colleagues and peers within the organisation. So there are many people that can influence the boundaries and the edges of how a team works. Fourth I guess is the leader can be the bottleneck and they usually know it if they are. I say this warmly because actually the leaders most that I work with are really good leaders and they wouldn't be coming to us for team coaching if they were feeling more defensive and less open to feedback and looking at how the team's working and how their role is key to it. you know teams that I work with often describe their leaders as very approachable, trusted as advocates, they've got our backs. But quite often, in the same breath, the team will say, can you let go a little bit? Can you let us take a bit more? Can you trust us? We don't need you to check everything. We can take some of the initiative or can you just be clearer on the direction that you want us to go? So the courage takes is necessary on both sides. to trust the team. with decisions they're used to hold and the team has to step up and own them when that shift happens. It's one of the most I guess freeing things I see so when you see people coming together and I've seen leaders in teams you know really being vulnerable and open and asking for very honest feedback and even you know coming at the end of sessions and standing in front of the room and committing to making things different going forward so that you teams really feel like they've been heard and that's obviously really key. Teams, I guess, again, they want to get ahead of things, but not necessarily all in the same way. And this probably links to the pace and the busyness. So they tell me that they're often feeling reactive. They're firefighting. You know, they want to be proactive, strategic, shaping outcomes rather than chasing issues. But, you know, they want to be ahead of it, not chasing it. But, you know, here's the nuance. It's rarely unanimous. There's always a few people who are content with how things are and there are a few new joiners or maybe a couple of weeks in who are still working out what the team dynamic and speed even is. So good team coaching doesn't steamroll those voices it brings them in some of the most useful insights I've heard this year have come from some of the newest people in the teams because they have a fresh perspective on what's going on in the team and they can see patterns and habits that others have got you. to. I guess if there's one thing that ties all five of those together is this. know, none of the teams were stuck because they lacked strategy or talent. You know, they're good, high performing teams. They're stuck because sometimes it takes courage to be really open, to name what's really going on for you and everyone around you. And once they did, you know, I really saw more clarity come remarkably quickly from teams. Even teams that were feeling pretty stuck and demotivated. And that I guess then leads me to why I'm loving doing this work. So, I've been working with teams and with leaders for over 20 years now. Many organisations in many ways, from behavioural models to mindset to more team coaching to strategy to facilitation to individual coaching. And I have to say I'm really enjoying team coaching more right now than I ever have any of those areas. And part of it, I think, is the shift. that you see when you've been in a room when it happens and also the time I think that you really get to know the people and the team and the patterns and when you know you see someone saying something that everyone's been thinking. and there's a silence maybe and then instead of defensiveness someone else says yes I agree or the energy in the room changes or there's a strong challenging conversation and you feel the team stop being busy and start talking and noticing each other and being more human that's the thing that I really love the connections that get built in a team through team coaching I think are so powerful and really stand a team in good stead to move forward and I don't think I'll ever get tired of that. I guess something else about team coaching that I like is the variety. So working with different teams in different organisations, know, teams that want the data first, show me the evidence, teams that want to carry their mission and feel the weight of that mission and purpose, and others that have got to do difficult things like turning a business round or making a massive transformation project happen and losing colleagues and having very difficult conversations. All different languages, different needs, but very much human needs. And I think that's why I feel that what we do in team coaching really counts because people feel like they've been seen and they've been heard. And I guess part of it, if I'm honest, goes right back to where I started. So before the team coaching, well, coaching generally, I was a nurse and a health visitor and I spent many years walking into people's homes and seeing families as systems, understanding, maybe I didn't understand so much then, but I do understand now that you can't help one person without understanding everything around them. So team coaching feels a bit like coming home to that. I'm not fixing individuals, I'm helping whole systems understand themselves and watching people realise that they're capable of more together than they thought. And that's a real privilege and a real joy. So pause there because I'm just reflecting and thinking about my personal journey to get to this team coaching place. I want to tell you something about me for those of you that don't know me because it would feel a bit hollow to spend half an hour talking about courage without sharing where I've had to find it myself. So for a long time I was part of building something with other people in my previous business, I co-founded a practice and a business, I was a partner and a shareholder. and I hosted its podcast and I'm generally proud of what we built and I really absolutely believe in what that business does because it really underpins a lot of what I'm talking about today which is shifting that defensiveness that stops teams you know really opening up to each other feeling psychologically safe or engaging in a more open way. But last year I decided to step away and step away completely because I I just felt my purpose lay elsewhere. I really wanted to focus on something that brought me alive. It wasn't easy, you know, I had good colleagues, good team members and friends and it felt like a huge risk to step away and at my age of 63 to learn and do something new but it really felt like I needed to fill a gap between how I wanted to work with teams and how I was actually delivering at the time. And I knew there was more out there to learn and explore, you're never too old to learn, and I knew that I needed something to motivate me and engage me and really bring me joy and deliver to my purpose going forward. So I took the step to step away. I went and did a team coaching course at Henley Business School, which I'm just completing now. And that was very illuminating to think about delivering in a different way, to question what I had done for many years. It challenged my self belief, my competence. Did I actually know as much as I thought? And as I've gone through the journey, I realize I do and I'm building on that now. also did something I've wanted to do for a long time which was my yoga teacher training because a big part of my philosophy in team coaching and working with individuals is ensuring that we look at people's well-being so not just their mental ability but their psychological, emotional and physical well-being and ability as well and yoga which is obviously a very ancient philosophy really links to that you know how we think about ourselves and others and the practices we take and the speed and pace we work or do our practice and our breathing and everything that goes with the yoga philosophy really fits I think with the team coaching philosophy as well. So they were all really important things to do this year before I you know went into becoming a coach who rather than parachuting in for a day and working with a team wanted to work in a way that was fully unmistakably mine and really looked at all all areas of team systems and life. here's what I learned in the process. The thing I think that became the foundation of everything I do now is I guess I'd always assumed you get clear first on what you do and then you find the courage to act. You plan then you leap. Although probably people that know me would say I'm quite courageous without planning but that has been my downfall sometimes in the past. But definitely what I found was it turns out to be the other way around. I didn't get clear and then become brave. I had to be brave first. I stepped away, I left some space, I used that space to learn and heal and engage with new learning and then I made the decision that I wanted to do what I wanted to do and then the clarity came. So courage produces clarity, not the other way around and that's where courage to clarity came from. The four stage framework, courage, clarity, alignment and in that order always, although we may dart around in it, is really key to that philosophy and really key to I think the outcomes that I'm looking for people when I'm engaging with them in team coaching or coaching. So courage is about really having the willingness to name what's really happening in a team. as an individual, a collective practice, deciding to be honest, noticing your own defensive habits and patterns and blocks and what stops you speaking up, using your body as a messenger to help realise when you're feeling defensive or not, using your breath to help you calm down so you can be non-defensive, clearing the brain by slowing down, working at a different pace and having dialogue and feeling supported and connected with others. people. Clarity is what emerges once things have been named. It can be about purpose, can be about roles, it can be about team identity, individual identity and about what really matters in the team. And then alignment is about the team getting behind that clarity together across its sub teams, across its systems and functions and all around it. And then action of course is the change behaviour in the real work sustained over time. guess that's the bit that I sometimes used to feel was missing. So we would do a lot of shifting and awareness and trying to change people's behaviours and habits but then what did people really do with it? How did it really impact the team and the performance? How can you measure that? How can you really feel that as an individual in a team and see that in the results and in retention etc in the team? So I guess, you know, courage doesn't mean throwing people in at the deep end. It's a strong word. I would never start with the hardest conversation. We obviously build safety first. know, people need to feel safe to be themselves before they'll say the thing that really matters. And courage grows in the safety that we create in sessions. It doesn't replace it. So when I sit with a team and I watch and I find they find their courage, I recognize something, you know, been there. I know how uncomfortable that moment is when you want to have that conversation, someone's going to be upset, someone may not want to do things the way you want to, you may be challenging some assumptions, you may be questioning someone who you've never questioned before. But actually, what's on the other side can be so powerful. So changing how I deliver this work was the bravest professional decision I think I've ever made and I've made a few. I'm known for my bravery but it's made me a much better coach. I think I'm much more authentic. I was even you know very open recently in a team with a team of engineers. I made a big mistake in the room so I challenged someone on what they said in the room and then he said yeah but that's on your slide and I hadn't paid attention to the detail which is not a strength. of mine and I owned it and I realised that that's the best way to be really authentic and to model to teams how you want them to show up in session so I laugh about it now but in that moment I was a bit hot and flushed and panicky but I did manage to catch my breath and move forward. before I let you go, I want to leave you with three questions. Take them into your next team meeting or just sit with them on your way home. What's the conversation your team keeps stepping around? The one everyone's thinking and nobody's naming. Two, where does the friction really sit inside your team or is it at its edges and who needs to be in the room to fix it? It's not always who we think. And then lastly, what would your team need to feel safe enough to be brave, to be courageous because that's where clarity starts. What do you need to provide for your team for that to happen? So if you're a leader or something in today's or just an individual and you want to have a chat and something in today's episode landed, the busy but happy team, decisions coming back, friction, I'd love to hear from you. A good place to start might be a discussion around your needs. We might look at the team diagnostic, but we might just have a coffee and a chat and get to know each other a bit and find out if there's a shared way of working and starting point for us all. So you can find some more at courageintoclarity.com, the website, bit more information. Thank you for spending this time with me. If the episode was useful, I'd love you to share it with someone. That's the best way to help this podcast grow. So I'm Jackie Grier. This has been Courage Into Clarity. And remember, you don't need to be clear to be brave. Be brave and the clarity will come. Take care, everyone. See you next time.