Team Building, Team Development or Team Coaching?
Welcome to this fortnight’s newsletter. I hope you enjoy it.
Each newsletter I will provide some ideas on how to improve your team’s performance and suggest one challenge for you to commit to.
ONE WAY TO INCREASE TEAM PERFORMANCE
A CEO recently contacted me to ask if I could help with a “team building” experience to get the “team to work better together.”
Probing further, he mentioned he was most concerned about the tensions that had built up between some team members and how this had eroded levels of trust and the team members’ reluctance to speak up and have the hard conversations.
Given the team had been together for 3 years I invited we explore whether a ‘team building’ experience was most appropriate and rather consider the benefits of a team development or team coaching experience.
“What’s the difference?”, he asked.
As a picture paints a thousand words, I drew the distinctions:
Team Building – helps new teams FORM. It enables team members to get to know one another and develop deeper understanding and appreciation of the skills, attributes, and experience each brings to the team.
Team Development – helps INFORM teams of the processes and approaches to ensure team members work more efficiently and effectively together. It helps teams to clarify their purpose, ways-of-working, their meeting protocols and decision-making process.
Team Coaching – helps teams TRANSFORM how they think and act to improve the quality of their working relationships and collective performance. Team coaching helps teams get ‘unstuck’ and learn how to caringly conflict, criticise and challenge one another to access more of their collective capacity and capabilities to bring about new possibilities.
Each of the three learning media matter and achieve different outcomes. Teams get stuck in their habitual patterns of thinking and behaviour, so to achieve breakthroughs, requires transforming the members’ ways of thinking and behaviour. Teams can’t change what they can’t see and through team coaching, they come to see things differently to access new possibilities to collaborate, perform, and achieve what only teams can.
A COMMITMENT
Reflect on what new and different patterns of thinking and behaviour would help your team work better together. Then consider which of the 3 approaches would be most valuable to achieve the desired changes.