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Team Coaching – Launching a Fresh Approach for Our Time

As organisations build momentum towards some form of return to a physical working environment, the spotlight logically falls on teams and teamwork.  What will team work look like given that some team members may opt to work from home whilst still needing to work productively and collaboratively with their colleagues who have chosen to work in the office?  How will chance opportunities to collaborate, connect and create ideas happen?  How can teams capitalise on improving working relationships from a work and social perspective?  So many questions and yet so many potential opportunities to power up teamwork now and into the future.

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Team Coaching: What’s in a name?

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

 

 

design-thinking-workshop

Experiencing Design Thinking – to really know something, you need to experience it!

We’ve had some fun with our conversations and recordings about design thinking and chatting about the component parts of the process.  However, there comes a time when talking about something in a theoretical way is not enough; taking action is the next step to learning and so to help people understand the concept of design thinking, we have designed a brief introduction to the process that we will facilitate online.

As we know design thinking is a collaborative process, aimed at helping to solve real world, wicked problems that do not have one specific solution.  Also, any solution that the design thinkers propose should be able to solve the problem-owners’ pain points or enhance what works well by co-creating potential opportunities.

The context for our experiential workshop is the current Covid-19 world. From the many conversations we are having with people it is clear that they are struggling with lockdown restrictions and the impact on businesses, the workplace and home. A common theme across these environments is a loss of motivation and a struggle to live and work in purposeful ways.

We want to provide time and space for participants to focus on what is important to them and to try and reignite something of their individual passion that perhaps they took for granted, pre Covid-19 times.  Whilst we do not have answers or ready-made solutions, by experiencing how design thinking can help to address tricky problems, people may find a way to re-energise their lives in some small way for the better.

As professional coaches and facilitators, we know the value in helping people and organisations to be the best that they can be and that is why we are passionate about design thinking and the benefits it can bring to peoples’ lives.

Join us on the 8th December, 2020 from 10.00am to 12pm UK time for our taster design thinking experience.

Reigniting Passion and Purpose

Are your colleagues and peers feeling low and demotivated as a result of our Covid restricted world? Do you need to create new energy and a focus on success in these challenging times? Using design thinking methodology, this short 2-hour, experiential workshop will help you to explore creative ways of revitalising yourself and others to reconnect with their purpose and a passion to deliver/succeed.

conflict-resolution-level-7

Conflict Resolution: A new perspective

The desire for organisations to innovate has become deeply embedded in the organisational psyche; whether that be private, public or not for profit type organisations.  The word innovation appears in vision and mission statements, in lists of value statements and in key performance indicators.  Innovation is the new ‘change’.

 

Level Seven has always been interested in helping organisations and individuals to be the best that they can be especially within the backdrop of improving innovation, leadership development and personal performance https://www.level7live.com/leading-the-human-interface-of-innovation/ As professionals working in the area of talent development, we use coaching and conflict resolution skills on a regular basis.  https://www.level7live.com/conflict-resolution/

 

As a result, we have become increasingly fascinated by the systems within which people operate, in particular the impact of individuals on teams, and of teams on innovation performance. What has emerged for us is a strong interest in how positive conflict resolution can be applied in the context of innovation performance and team coaching.

 

Studies on innovation in the workplace have been conducted from many perspectives, including, business performance, leadership performance, team performance, individual creativity to name but a few.  We are specifically interested in two areas that we believe impact on successful innovation performance.  The first is how conflict in teams can be seen as a positive concept and second whether using a process of conflict mediation within a team can have a positive impact on innovation performance.

 

We are undertaking our own research project that focuses on the human factors of innovation in a team environment concerning relationship issues between different stakeholders.  We will investigate what issues arise that put people into conflict with one another; how they have attempted to embrace these issues in positive ways whilst still working with the usual constraints such as budgets, timescales and evolving needs of users and customers.  What are the stumbling blocks to successful innovation and what have teams done to overcome them?  Drawing on models of team coaching, we will explore how these models can be synthesised into a process of conflict resolution such that the team’s innovation performance can be enhanced.

 

If you are located in or around Northamptonshire or Cambridgeshire and think that your teams would benefit from the insights that taking part in our team conflict resolution research can provide, please get in touch at info@level7live.com.