Case Study: In-house Coaching Team Leader Program
The Challenge
An international company with a team of internal coaches approached Organisational Coaching Hub (OCH) for help in upskilling some of its coaches by training them in team coaching. Impressed with our methodology and insight, they opened the program to the whole of their team, increasing the value across their organisational stakeholders.
This case study looks at how we delivered our Coaching Team Leader Program for an in-house team, following the 4Cs of organisational coaching; Connect, Consider, Change, Close.
Connecting
Our coaches initially connected with the team leader to understand their need and what outcomes they were looking to achieve. Following this initial conversation, the leader decided to invite her whole team to attend the program.
The next phase was for us to engage with the whole team, inviting them to buy-in to the program. It was important that they were able to attend as volunteers rather than through direction. This proved to be an important starting point as everyone committed to the learning process from the outset.
All members of the team were internal coaches and, even though some were more keen and able to than others, all wanted to learn to upskill to be a team coach.
Consideration
With everyone on board, we then ran our Coaching Team Leader Program in-house. This is a hybrid program spanning six half-day modules over a 2 month period. The program design features provide specific benefits:
- Hybrid program – skills and confidence to coach teams online and in-person
- 2-months duration – ability to apply the learning with on-going support from faculty team
- Multiple modules – ability to reinforce and embed learning alongside the teams they were coaching
- Experiential – No case studies. We use the participants’ real team coaching experiences to explore and support the challenges of team coaching, making the impact very real and pragmatic.
Early on in the program we invited the team to consider if they were an Inter-Dependent or Extra-Dependent Team, and they all identified they were an extra-dependent team.
Because of our experience in this area, this made supporting and developing the team, as developing team coaches, much easier. Understanding the two types of team was also vital as some of the coaches were working with different types of team, and we were able to explore the different team coaching approaches as a result.
Change
During the change modules within the program, participants brought their real-life experiences of the teams they were working with. We used these examples to experiment with team coaching methods, simulating the dynamics and exploring different approaches that the team coach can make.
This experiential process had real-world impact as it was easily appreciated by the team and application was so much easier. While other coach training providers use simulations, at OCH we choose not to. The danger is that simulations usually have rehearsed answers and expected outcomes.
The power of using real and live participant scenarios is that no-one knows what will happen next. This is the real art of coaching. Our focus was therefore on how the team coach engaged, remained flexible, yet with the team purpose as a guiding light.
Not only did the individual coaches develop key team coaching skills, but the program enabled the team themselves to explore their teaming approach in a most powerful way – live with the support of the faculty.
Close
At the end of the program, all the coaches confirmed that they had massively increased their awareness of teams, team coaching, team dynamics and the part they can play.
They recognised that the team is the client, rather than the team leader. They were “inspired” with creative ways to stimulate discussion and emergence of issues within teams. And because we covered Inter-Dependent and Extra-Dependent Teams, they could understand their own dynamics as different from many of the teams they planned to coach.
