People often ask about the benefits and impact of coaching. The complex and challenging issues we face also create opportunities and a chance to do things differently and better. Both team and individual coaching enable people to focus on the areas that they have identified will have the greatest impact, through developing new skills, attitudes, and behaviours as part the coaching experience.
Team coaching
Uncertainty and complexity emphasise the need for creativity, collaboration, and cooperation and underpins the reasons why team coaching brings many benefits. Creating positive change in the workplace, our community, and politics requires different forms of engagement and interaction.
Leadership is under scrutiny in all areas. Team coaching moves us from outdated command and control and linear thinking to a systems thinking approach with tangible benefits. The coaching methodologies I work with helps teams investigate all aspects of work from purpose to leadership and everything in between. People are looking for different and better ways to work together and do business.
The idea that one person has all the answers is outdated.
Good ideas can emerge from anyone.
Action for change is required by everyone.
Team coaching creates a realistic, flexible, and emergent way of working. It leans into the space of uncertainty and although it can be a little confronting at first, ultimately the response from people is that it is enlightening and useful. Being open, curious and stepping into a level of vulnerability are qualities needed in a team coaching process.
While not all teams may be ready to step into a full coaching experience, in the first instance, there are other educational and developmental ways to help a team establish a coaching mindset and that’s a great start. Team coaching is a space for people to co-create and work through particular dynamics to discover what is alive and needed for the team to do what it has been set up to do in the best and most creative way.
As a director and leader of a team leader shared with me:
I can say that our team were highly engaged and remarked on the positive outcomes achieved through the coaching experience when contemplating the demands and pressures we face as a collective. Upon reflection, the learnings have help us engage better; support one another and narrate our next move so that we remain a highly performing and successful construction team.
I highly recommend Dr Cathryn Lloyd/Maverick Minds in the implementation and facilitation of such team based coaching programs for any business looking to promote engagement and improvement to achieve success in their teams.
Director/Team Leader, Construction Industry
INDIVIDUAL COACHING
There’s enormous traction available through team coaching, and individual coaching equally provides benefits. It’s not an either or, both have impact; just as teams need quality time to reflect on what’s working and where improvements can be made, the same is true for individuals. Individuals benefit from dedicated time to explore their aspirations and identify areas for development or change.
Coaching lets people focus on their strengths and provides support for individuals to stretch into challenging areas. Coaching helps people step away from their habitual ways of thinking and doing, to confidently experiment with the changes they identify. Coaching is a place of creativity, curiosity, discovery and ultimately action.
As an example, I’ve been using Maverick Minds coaching resource Seriously Playful Creativity with a client. Recently we explored the benefits of Disruption, however small. There was a realisation, a shift in thinking, that playing ‘safe’ also meant missing out on opportunities.
Over time most of us develop certain heuristics that enable us to navigate the world efficiently. Sometimes those mental shortcuts may not be as useful in complex and contested situations. It can be hard to see the forest when we are up one tree.
Coaching gives space for reflection and different
points of view and to make considered and informed choices.
Coaching lets us go between “being on the dance floor and getting on the balcony”. This became apparent to a client working in a demanding and complex environment managing multiple projects and people; and with only a couple of coaching sessions underway an early insight they identified was that “coaching helps untangle the noise and competing priorities and provides clarity. It’s enabling me to get better at pausing and asking myself what my team is experiencing and feeling, and what am I feeling”.
This profound shift and reflexive way of working is having a healthy and positive outcome on their confidence and way of being as a manager and leader and is creating benefit for the system in which they interact.