This webinar is an exploration of how team coaching is considered to be productive. With an absence of research in this area, the team coaching literature is dominated by well-known practitioners advocating a specific model or process for achieving, for example, high performance, better relationships, or removing what’s getting in team members’ way. These practitioners generally consider how useful the coaching has been based on whether the goals have been achieved or not.

This is, however, problematic. Which goals are being used to judge success? The ones which were agreed at the original contracting stage, or new ones that are agreed subsequently when the team’s needs become clearer? When is the right to assess goal achievement: at the end of the coaching, or some time later when the team has worked on changing what needed to change. Whose opinion is being considered, since team members, the sponsor and the stakeholders may all have differing views on whether the goals have been achieved, and how well. And how to assess what the team may have learned, or the insights developed, which have been hugely useful to the team but did not form part of the original goals?

Based on Doctoral research amongst team members and team coaches, this webinar will explain an alternative lens through which for looking at team coaching to address these questions. Through describing a framework for team coaches to use in their practice, it will offer some guidelines for different ways in which team coaches might think about their coaching sessions, and what they may wish to pay attention to. It will suggest alternative ways to think about what impacts how team members perceive the sessions to be productive, and how focusing only on specific factors such as the “system”, “relationships” or “dysfunctions” may not always be in the best interests of the team. The webinar is aimed at practising team coaches to help them develop their reflexive thinking about their own practice.

The learning objectives are for participants to:

Learn what team members and team coaches find to be productive in their coaching sessions;
Understand what influences these perceptions of productive sessions (what factors are considered important in making a team coaching sessions productive);
Understand different ways of thinking about team coaching other than through a specific model or achievement of high performance, better relationships or other specific goal agreed at the outset.

Illuminating the shadows