Leadership Team Coaching in Practice

Case Studies on Creating Highly Effective Teams

Peter Hawkins, Peter Hawkins

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781789666229
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Mentoría y coaching

A high-performing and cohesive leadership team is essential for organizational success. Leadership Team Coaching in Practice provides an overview of the tools and techniques for coaching leadership teams and shows how these approaches have been applied around the world in a variety of team types and industries. Featuring expert contributions from chief executives, team coaches, team leaders and consultants in organizations including Comair and the UK National Health Service (NHS), this practical guide illustrates best practice tailored to the needs of each organization. The new and updated third edition of Leadership Team Coaching in Practice incorporates the latest research and thinking in the field, including new material on developing the personal core capacities for systemic team coaching.Alongside updates to case studies to offer a long-term view of interventions, the third edition contains new case studies including team coaching in Toyota through a period of transformation. There is a new medley chapter of short case stories that address some of the regularly asked questions by new team coaches and new material that explores ways of creating a teaming and 'team of teams' culture. This book remains an essential resource for executive and team coaches, CEOs, team leaders, organizational development consultants, and those studying coaching as part of a degree or coaching qualification.

14

Assessment and evaluation of teams and team coaching

PETER HAWKINS

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.

(ATTRIBUTED TO HENRY FORD)

Introduction

In this chapter we will start by looking at the importance of engaging the team with collective assessment, so all team members can see the team patterns and explore together the gap between how the team is currently operating and what the world of tomorrow and all their stakeholders need. This provides the collective agenda for the work. Equally important is the evaluation of progress at key stages on the team coaching journey and evaluation of the increased benefit the team has been able to create together – we will look at this process at the end of the chapter.

In training and supervising team coaches for many years, I have become very aware of the challenges for team coaches in assessing the teams they are asked to work with, in both deciding whether to work with them and what approach would be most beneficial. In the early years of my own practice as a team coach, I would carry out the traditional approach of talking to each team member and asking them what they wanted from the team coaching. Too often, team members would answer by telling me what was wrong with their team leader, or their colleagues, and would be unsure what the purpose of the team was. More than one team member said: ‘If we knew what development we needed, we would not need to employ you as team coach!’

I now realize the foolishness of my early approach, as: (a) it is seeing the team members as the clients rather than the team as a whole, (b) it is based on the assumption that the team members know the development the team needs, and (c) it fails to start from the needs of the wider context that the team is there to serve. I started to ask more questions that were an open inquiry that started ‘outside–in’ and ‘future–back’:

• Who does your team serve? And who are your team’s critical stakeholders?
• What do they value about your team and what do they need your team to do differently?
• What are the biggest challenges your team is likely to face over the next couple of years and how does your team need to change to face these challenges?
• In two years’ time, what will your team regret not having dealt with today, or be pleased it did address it in this team coaching?

The other big development in my craft was developing illuminative evaluation (Parlett and Dearden, 1977) and tools that allowed the voice of the collective team to emerge. These included a descriptor analysis (Hawkins, 2021: 355–57), a High-Value-Creating Team Questionnaire (Hawkins, 2021: 350–53) and embodied and creative methods for the team dynamic to display itself (see Chapter 17). All these approaches were a means of enabling the team to listen to what the collective team was saying, not the team leader, team members or team coach, about their collective strengths and weaknesses, areas of development and the journey they needed to go on.

Increasingly I began to bring in the voices of the team’s key stakeholders: their commissioners, investors, regulators, custo...