A team is defined by its purpose, a strong collective aspect and high mutual standards.
By analogy with individual coaching, team coaching involves helping the team identify its own responses to
the questions, tests (external constraints) and challenges (necessities accepted freely) it has to face.
In a systemic vision, coaching involves supporting a subject system (in this case the team) in its
existence and autonomy so that it can itself understand an object system (improving internal processes,
developing collective operational performance and, more generally, the sustainable growth of the team
towards greater maturity).
Team coaching represents a particularly operational component of change management and team
transformation, with the shared construction and adoption of new operating processes and methods enabling
it to achieve what the system requires of it.
Coaching addresses teams in a phase of evolution or transition faced with a progress and performance objective. The purpose of this support is to optimise processes and collective operating methods for sharing information, making decisions and taking action from the perspective of sustainable growth and performance. Team coaching is an especially relevant mode of intervention when implementing learning organisations, supporting executive committees, steering cultural and organisational change, developing the maturity of existing or newly constituted teams (mergers/reorganisations), sharing the objectives of project groups and reinforcing the cohesion of global, multifunctional, multidisciplinary, multicultural teams.
Improving collective performance
Mobilising around a shared vision
Developing team cohesion and maturity
Optimising operating methods
Bringing out new solutions
The coach is the mirror of what happens at the heart of the team. An observer of the process rather than an
actor, they walk alongside the team to help it transform an undifferentiated potential future into a
probable outcome to be invented and constructed. They enable all the elements and the system itself to
communicate in a safe space and time by establishing boundaries, operational rules and communications
protocols. They confront the group in operational situations over time, regulate tensions, observe and
formalise processes and rewrite them to improve collective operation and increase productivity, performance
and maturity.
The working method proposed for team coaching unfolds as follows :
The support provided during team coaching is engineered in a tailored process. The number and length of the
sessions are defined based on the issues following an examination of the context and the manager's
objectives with the team. The process generally takes place over time (between 12 and 18 months – a shorter
period would not be enough to for the changes to become well established, and a longer period would threaten
the team's autonomy and the manager's authority).
Team coaching often involves a pair of coaches, if possible a man and a woman, as the combination balances
their polarities and offers a broader space for psychological transfer. This approach can also optimise the
management of groups and subgroups (facilitation, testing, support), widen the scope of the coaching
intervention, energise interactions and increase the capacity for creativity and improvisation in response
to the group's complexity.
Exploratory phase : Contractual arrangements
An interview at which the client (HR department – manager's line manager – decision-maker) and the manager explain to the coach the outlines and expectations of the support expected. Following this interview, a contract is submitted to the parties involved. Above all, the contract specifies the means to be used, framework, working methods, format, duration, the cost of the service, rules and terms rather than objectives, because it is the team itself, during the initial diagnostic sessions, that defines its priorities and objectives and how it expects to achieve them.
Scoping phase : Diagnostic
This scoping/diagnostic session takes place at the first meeting with the team (operational meeting, seminar
or specific workshop). Scoping involves presenting the intervention objectives to the team (manager) and the
mechanism to be used (coach) and proposing a framework and working methods: the role and approach of the
coach, steps in the process, operating methods, communication rules, the interactions between the tools
provided, ethical rules and confidentiality.
The diagnostic is produced by the team with the coach's help. It aims to assess the challenges, understand
the difficulties to be overcome, evaluate the team's level of maturity and finally approve the coaching
approach with the team.
At this stage, depending on the context, the coach will explain their operating model :
The team facing the coach in a series of individual
and collective interviews and dedicated meetings (outside the company and its operational
constraints).
The team with the coach supervising normal working
meetings, followed by debriefings and action plans.
Implementation phase : Coaching actions
The team coaching process involves an alternation between contextual tools for team meetings, individual
and/or collective interviews, supervising operational meetings, working seminars at regular intervals,
dedicated workshops for subgroups and debriefing sessions. Regular progress assessments encourage team
members to express themselves and revise the scope of the operation. They are also a means of preventing
premature attempts to seek solutions, raising awareness of problems and resolving any resistance or doubts
about the coaching operation.
Depending on how the coaching progresses, the coach may use team-specific tools including, but not limited
to, feedback and feedforward, which are essential for the success of a team; synergistic questioning,
inviting members of the team to discover the strength of collective action for themselves; systemic
resonance, enabling invisible problems in how a team functions to be interpreted based on its behaviour; and
confronting the team with the transgression of the established rules, whether they are implicit, explicit or
cultural. Similarly, work to share practices, evaluate contributions, optimise interfaces with other teams
and benchmark competing teams often opens up stimulating new perspectives or reference systems that can lead
to better collective operation and stage-3 maturity.
Review phase : Closure
This is an important time. It consists of the final evaluation session, conducted with the team and the manager to assess the progress made in relation to the objectives (qualitative and quantitative), which everyone has helped to achieve. Where relevant, this includes validating an action plan to be carried out by the team totally independently to extend the beneficial effects of the coaching in a dynamic of long-term growth.