In our last blog we introduced the idea of our Team Coaching model, based on design thinking principles that we have called DESIGN coaching. In this next blog we want to examine the differences between Team Development, Team Building, Team Facilitation and Team Coaching.
When we started exploring the world of team coaching, we were confused. We could see so many synergies amongst these team interventions and at first felt was it just a matter of semantics over what the intervention was called. But we felt we had to stay true and authentic to our coaching roots particularly as when we are working in the coaching education arena, we take great care to help our students be clear about differences between coaching and mentoring or training or counselling or consulting or therapy. So, it reminded us that we need to be clear about the differences between these various team interventions available to help teams work through issues about effectiveness, performance and productivity.
We experienced a few ‘false starts’ in our quest to understand these differences and heard different accounts ranging from – ‘team coaching is not intervening in any way and letting the team work it out for themselves’ end of the continuum to ‘you observe the team in action and then provide them with your views and action plan on what they need to work on’ end of the continuum.
Neither of these views resonated well with us so we turned to the ICF team coaching competencies and found them helpful, particularly as they compare and contrast the different interventions or modalities and assess them against criteria such timeframe, process, growth area, team dynamics, expert/ownership. Here is the link to the ICF team coaching competencies:
https://coachingfederation.org/team-coaching-competencies
Our DESIGN coaching model aligns with the ICF view of team coaching except for the timeframe. We presume our timeframe to be shorter but are open to the needs of the team and would rather be guided by their needs and perspective.
In design thinking terms we are at the prototyping and testing stage of our model and will have more to say in future blogs on how the model is being applied in the real world of team coaching. We would love to hear your experiences good / bad / ugly about team coaching and what specific challenges or opportunities you are currently facing.
Please feel free to get in touch to continue the conversation
info@level7live.com