liberating team potential

We provide team coaching and facilitation at all levels.  This can take a number of forms, although the following are typical:

• Team development events that focus on building relationships
• Coaching and facilitation of teams whilst they tackle the business issues they face.  The team explore and learn about their relationships and processes whilst they are working on these business issues

We work primarily with the latter.  In our experience leadership and management teams enjoy this as it deals with real and important matters as well as developing their teamwork.  Working on team thinking patterns and behaviours alongside the business agenda increases the transfer of learning as well as achieving tangible business outcomes.  We still have fun in the process – enjoyment comes from developing greater mutual understanding and releasing the energy and potential of the team!

We normally work with a team over a number of meetings.  We design a process that supports the particular issues, facilitate the meetings and coach the team on their relationships and task processes throughout.  Observation and feedback on the team engaged in their work is interspersed with input and discussion around the team process.

Our combination of organisational and psychology backgrounds means we can make timely and relevant interventions to bring about real change in how the team works.  Team coaching focuses on the real strengths as well as the difficulties the team has when they are engaged in their normal meetings and work.  We understand the complex dynamics of groups and organisation systems and help the team to understand the invisible influences on their way of working.  We help the team to build on its strengths as well as overcome relationship barriers to progress.

A typical process for working with a team is:

• An initial meeting and contracting with the team leader
• Short meetings with individual team members to understand the team needs and success criteria
• A series of meetings with the whole team to do the work
• A further follow-up meeting after three to six months to review progress

Where appropriate we can support the team development work with psychometric tools and personality inventories, such as the Type Dynamics Indicator.  These can help with conversations about team behaviours - please see our psychometric profiling page.

We normally transfer some of our own facilitation skills during the work with teams, so that they become more able to manage their own process and continuously improve.  We are happy to partner with HR and support them in continuing the work once we have completed ours.

Often our work is part of a broader change program, perhaps as a result of a change in strategy.  There is a strong overlap between this work and the organisation development work we do.