Team Coaching Passion, Purpose and Sustainability

Refereed Paper

UFHRD 2015 Conference

Cork, Ireland

Team Coaching – Passion, Purpose and Sustainability

Dr Julia Claxton

Principal Lecturer, Leeds Business School, Leeds Beckett University, UK

()

Dean Horsman

Senior Lecturer, Leeds Business School, Leeds Beckett University, UK

Dr Crystal Zhang

Principal Lecturer, Coventry University, UK

Abstract

Purpose

To understand the organisational learning from introducing team coaching into a healthcare organisation. Team coaching in this project is where the team coach is separate to the team leader.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodology is using grounded theory to find emergent themes from qualitative data derived from focus groups and interviews. Participants were team coaches, team leaders and the leader sponsoring the initiative.

Findings

Team coaching benefitted teams in terms of their relationship dynamics, their team behaviours and skills, their thinking and their decision-making.

Research limitations/implications

This relates to only one organisation specific to healthcare.

Practical implications

This research will help organisations to consider if team coaching is something they want to pursue and if so what to expect when introducing it.

Social implications

Team coaching can be used in any context where there are teams and this paper helps to develop the concept of team coaching where the team coach is separate to the team leader.

Originality/value

Practitioner and consultancy theories and models for team coaching abound but there has been very little collection of evidence for the impact of team coaching. This paper contributes to understanding how an organisation experiences using team coaching and how it impacts organisational learning.

Keywords (between 3-6 keywords)

Team coaching, healthcare, organisational learning

Contextual Background

In recent times the UK has been challenged to consider large failings in delivery of an effective health service (Francis Report 2013) and it is suggested the focus was on the 'hard' human resource systems such as change, pay, pensions, terms and conditions and redundancy instead of on the 'soft’ human resource systems of culture, leadership and values (Royles 2014). The response to the Francis Report, from the UK Government, highlighted the importance of effective teamwork, staff contributions, engaging and empowering staff, and creating a supportive culture where staff feel able to speak up, challenge and take forward changes for the benefit of patients. This is seen by many senior people within the NHS as the way forward to ensure an effective health service provision.

For a number of years now the national health service (NHS) of the UK has invested heavily in many organisational development (OD) initiatives around organisational change, organisational culture, employee engagement, employee empowerment and effective teamwork. In developing these organisational changes, a lot of time and resource has been given to developing individuals, managers and future leaders through initiatives like action learning sets, internal coaching cultures, leadership frameworks and development. Linked to the development of individuals and teams is a real grounded commitment within the NHS to develop future leaders and managers who have authentic and distributed leadership capability and capacity. Indeed, the NHS Leadership Academy, UK, have recently developed a new Healthcare Leadership Model (2013) which shows nine dimensions of leadership behaviour with self-evaluations and 360 degree feedback tools to help staff who work in health and care to become better leaders. Its purpose is to help all NHS employees understand how their leadership behaviours, in a distributed leadership sense (West et al., 2014a & b; Bennett et al, 2003) affect the culture and climate in which they and their colleagues work. Whether they work directly with patients or not; what they do and how they do it affects the organisation, the quality of care and service provided and the reputation of the organisation itself.

Aim of Paper

In this changing context and with particular focus on team development, team dynamics and team effectiveness, team coaching was introduced into some organisations within the NHS as an organisational learning experience. The aim was to find out what benefits team coaching could offer towards better working teams. Team coaching in this research is where the team coach is separate to the team leader.

The concept team coaching is a relatively new concept which has developed from coaching and from team development but which is different to both of these. However, “it seems that team coaching is being used to describe a wide variety of interventions that include facilitiation, consultancy, team-building and counselling” (Clutterbuck 2014). There is not yet an established academic literature or theoretical framework for this concept, although this is developing through the writings of Hawkins (2014), Clutterbuck (2009, 2013), Woodhead (2011), Hackman and Wageman (2005), Hackman (2002), West (2014), Kets de Vries (2005) and others. The main limitation of the work on team coaching is that there is a differing role of the team coach, sometimes the team leader, sometimes the team members and sometimes an external person. Along with the clarity of differentiation of the type of team coaching there is also only a small amount of empirical evidence to show the experience of using team coaching and the impact it has. The research, described in this paper, contributes to the limited empirical work in that it examines in detail the experience of team coaches, team leaders and the organisational leader of introducing team coaching into one of the organisations in asking the question:

What has been the learning experience from introducing team coaching into an organisation of the NHS?

It is hoped that this paper will be helpful to organisations wishing to embark on the journey of introducing team coaching.

Literature

One-to-one coaching

There is an established and increasing academic literature base on one-to-one coaching from which team coaching has come and it is useful to look at work on coaching. Passmore and Fillery-Travis (2011, p.74) define coaching as

“a Socratic based future focused dialogue between a facilitator (coach) and a participant (coachee/client), where the facilitator uses open questions, active listening, summaries and reflections which are aimed at stimulating the self-awareness and personal responsibility of the participant.”

In this definition, it is suggested that the term ‘Socratic dialogue’ refers to the belief held by the coach that the coachee already has within them the answer to the question or is able to identify a route to discover the answer. Thus the role of the coach is not socio-educational, but is more guided discovery, with the skill of the coach in shaping questions and focusing attention on the next step of the journey. Coaching within the workplace, taken from a psychological perspective, may be defined as

“…a solution-focussed, result-oriented systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance and self-directed learning and personal growth of the coachee” (Grant 2001, p.8).

These two definitions of coaching reflect the more common work around one-to-one dialogue between coach and coachee and the challenge is how this work can be used for group and team coaching.

Team coaching

Although one-to-one coaching is a well discussed and defined concept in the academic and practitioner literature, the concept of TEAM coaching is relatively new (Wild, 2001; Ascentia, 2005; Hackman and Wageman, 2005; Field, 2007; Clutterbuck, 2009, 2013; Hicks, 2010, Woodhead (2011). The term team coaching is used frequently in the context of athletic coaching (Beattie et al., 2014), but has been recently extended to hi-tech industries (Anderson et al., 2008; Rezania & Lingham, 2007; Liu et al., 2009, 2010) and to health care professions (Rowland, 2010; Woodhead, 2011; Godfrey et al., 2014; Godfrey & Oliver, 2014). Woodhead’s (2011: 103) paper sought to contribute to the literature on team coaching by utilizing it as an intervention to support and enhance team working.

Most of the development work around team coaching has been through practitioners and consultancy firms offering corporate and executive coaching on an individual and team basis. One UK-based company, TPC (The Performance Coach), who offer team coaching to organisations and who were very involved in this NHS initiative, state:

‘Team Coaching is a powerful development intervention that brings individuals together to develop their own skills, awareness and learning as a team, helping them to learn how to become more effective, efficient and focused in reaching agreed performance objectives.’

Passmore and Fillery-Travis (2011) suggested that group or team coaching is too close a concept to Action Learning Sets and group facilitation to usefully distinguish between them, whereas the coaching programme that Woodhead (2011) undertook was a symbiotic intervention of team coaching and facilitation. Passmore and Fillery-Travis (2011) also found that the use of such methodologies has been actively explored and described in the team coaching context such as Vaartjes (2005, p3) who suggests that:

“Executive coaching may be one-to-one or one-to-group based, usually occurs over time and often over many months, and seeks to achieve both tangible and intangible outcomes. Such coaching also recognises that the personal qualities, knowledge, experience and skills of the coach are essential to the creation of the collaborative, developmentally focussed, client-centred relationship that is assumed to be critical to outcome generation.”

Woodhead (2011) concluded that her research gave insights into the particular attributes of team coaching that may enhance team working by:

-  Providing a forum for dialogue and thereby improving communication;

-  Giving focus and clarity for shared goals;

-  Increasing trust and collaboration that allows participants to see beyond each other’s professional image, and

-  Enabling a systemic understanding and approach to problem solving, decision making and commitment to achieving collective outcomes;

-  Helping to develop personal and interpersonal relationships and dynamics;

-  Breaking down barriers, creating a sense of belonging and a deep, empathetic understanding of each other.

Clutterbruck in his foreward to Hawkins latest book Leadership Team Coaching (2104) describes the role of the team coach to include:

-  Helping the team to discover its identity

-  Helping the team clarify what it wants to achieve and why

-  Helping the team come to terms with what it can’t or shouldn’t do, as well as understand its ‘potential to achieve’

-  Helping the team understand its critical processes (how it makes decision, communicates etc)

-  Helping the team access its suppressed creativity

-  Helping the team develop collective resilience

-  Helping the team monitor its own progress

Team leader as coach

The work of Hackman and Wageman (2005) in their theory of team coaching provides a model to consider the functions that coaching serves for a team. It is not intended to consider specific leader behaviours or leadership styles. It identified the specific times in the performance process when coaching interventions are most likely to have their intended effects and reviewed the conditions under which team-focused coaching is or is not likely to facilitate performance. The focus of this theory, like Clutterbuck (2009, 2013), is that of the manager or supervisor being the coach of a team that they have direct responsibility for.

Hackman and Wageman (2005, p.269) describe team coaching through the manager as:

“direct interaction with a team intended to help members in the co-ordinated and task-appropriate use of their collective resources in accomplishing the team’s work.”

Also with the same emphasis of coach within team, Clutterbuck (2009, p.19) sees team coaching as:

“a learning intervention designed to increase collective capability and performance of a group or team, through application of the coaching principles of assisted reflection, analysis and motivation for change.”

Team coach as separate role

There is limited academic writing in the field of business and management on the team coach having a separate role to the team leader. This separate role is one where the team coach uses the Socratic based future focused dialogue for the whole team as an entity. To support this research Kets de Vries (2005), cited in Ward et al, (2014), carried out leadership development at a well-known international business school. Their participants went through a process that consisted of an initial day of group coaching, in groups of four or five, and then a follow-up hour of individual coaching the following day. Each group was assigned a leadership coach with psychodynamic training and experience in facilitating groups. For this project the Team Coach is not normally the manager or leader of the team and is normally separate from the team contracted to work with the team over several group sessions. A definition for the team coaching carried out in this project was not sought or established but it is useful to see where team coaching, using a separate team coach, has been used elsewhere.

Also, of this type of team coaching Anderson et al (2008, p.41) carried out work at Caterpillar, and define their team coaching approach as:

“team coaching is a holistic approach for creating meaningful and lasting change for individual team members, the team as a whole, and the organization that the team serves. It is a multidimensional change process that utilizes the core principles of individual coaching in a team setting.”

There is also some research using this method in the NHS (Woodhead 2011) where a small case study explored how coaching a small team of three team leaders within a Radiology team (from the main disciplines of medicine, nursing and radiology) supported team working. The team were asked to reflect on and describe their experiences of being coached and how this supported them in working as a team. It substantiated team coaching as an intervention in enhancing team working and highlighted some of the elements that contributed to this.

Team coaching and leadership

‘Team coaching is an act of leadership’ (Hackman and Wageman, 2005, p269). It is an act of leadership which is part of distributed leadership. Distributed leadership in this capacity according to Bennett et al. (2003, p.3) is an

“emergent property of a group or network of individuals in which group members pool their expertise.”

Increasingly in today’s corporate environment, according to De Meuse “…it appears it is the team – not the individual – who holds the key to business success.” (2008, p.1). In the health care sector, staff must work together across professional boundaries to deliver high quality care, particularly as the complexity of health care increases and co-morbidity becomes more common (West et al., 2014b). According to West et al. (2014a: 2) The King’s Fund has argued that “we need to move on from a concept of heroic leaders who turn around organisational performance to seeing leadership as shared and distributed throughout the NHS.” This report goes on to make it clear that it is the NHS Boards’ responsibility for developing a collective leadership strategy to ensure that is understands the leadership capabilities required in the future, how these are going to be developed and acquired, and what organisational and leadership interventions will enable them to be delivered. This requires organisations to develop individuals and teams able to work collaboratively for the greater good of the population they serve.