Systemic team coaching for high-performance teams

A team's special working capacity first requires a clear understanding of membership and purpose. In the team there is a sense of belonging and a shared picture of why and for what the team exists.

In addition, every team member needs their place. This creates security, also in the psychological sense. Finally, teams ensure a balance in the distribution of influence by not allowing any member to instrumentalise the group.

Wimmer (2022) describes the result of this process as follows: “Having reached this modus operandi, the group finally follows its very own melody, composed together in its process of self-creation.”

In systemic team coaching, the team is supported in looking at the development and negotiation processes of its own team formation and in making itself, as a group, the subject. This creates a space that offers time for the necessary team development.

Interventions serve to set processes in motion. They put questions of membership and belonging at the centre, let the team look at its reason for existence, encourage reflection on how members work together and provide opportunities to practise negotiation processes.

Team development is a process that works on the interplay within the team, as well as the interplay with other organisational units and with the organisation's networks. Team development includes different consulting approaches. Team coaching is one of them.

Team development is therefore the broader term. Within this framework, team coaching refers to the support in which the team makes itself, as a group, the subject.

Team coaching pursues four objectives. First, it creates the conditions for the team to mobilise its potential and deliver high performance. Second, it builds the capacity to deal with conflict.

Third, it creates awareness of strengths and development needs in the team. Fourth, it gives the team the tools to make better use of its strengths and work on its development needs.

So that the team can mobilise its potential and deliver high performance, team coaching uses four perspectives.

The first perspective sharpens the team's reason for existence. The question “Why does the team exist?” serves as an entry point for strengthening its sense of purpose.

The second perspective is: finding one's place. It looks at whether every team member has their place in the group and whether members feel safe. This includes whether every member dares to be open at all times, even if it makes them vulnerable, and whether members can rely on one another.

The third perspective concerns boundaries and interdependencies. This is about the team's relationship with other organisational units, collaboration with other departments and the influence that the team and the organisation as a whole have on each other. It also looks at the frameworks of observation and evaluation the team uses to make its environment understandable and reduce its complexity.

The fourth perspective is balance. It asks about the quality of cooperative relationships in the team, how disagreements are handled and how communication and decisions take place.

Team coaching proceeds in five steps. It starts with clarifying the assignment and setting objectives. This includes recording the initial situation, describing the problem and jointly defining objectives.

This is followed by a joint analysis of the team situation. Through observation, listening, surveys or interviews, the team's situation is examined in greater depth. On this basis, the team coaching is prepared and the coaching process outlined.

In the third step, intervention and development, work with the team begins as part of the coaching process. The subsequent reflection looks at how the insights from the coaching can be translated into everyday work and what effect can be observed. An evaluation concludes the process.

Promoting communication and collaboration is one of the approaches for improving team dynamics. Making communication in the team a topic creates space for a valuable dialogue about collaboration. Two perspectives are a good place to start.

The first focuses on practice: how the team communicates, how decisions are made, when communication tends to happen situationally and what meeting routines exist for.

The second focuses on perception, that is, how communication in the team is experienced. In discussion with the team, what should be kept, changed or dropped is worked out together.

Conflicts are part of the picture and, handled correctly, can contribute to productivity. The basic prerequisite for using conflicts positively is psychological safety. Team coaching therefore discusses how the team deals with different perspectives, how it views conflicts and how it behaves in situations fraught with conflict.

According to Edmondson (2014, 2020), psychological safety describes the shared perception among the members of a team that no one will be rejected, excluded or sanctioned by the team for a constructively critical statement.

The term describes the experience, and thus the expectation that guides action, of being able to speak up with relevant ideas, questions or concerns. The working environment is perceived as safe enough without seeing one's own self-image at risk.

The ability to change is an essential competence of high-performance teams. To learn it, it is important to actively involve the team in the change process.

Six questions structure this involvement. It must be clarified why the change is necessary, where the journey is heading and what the target picture looks like. It is also discussed what the path to the goal should look like and what is needed for the change to succeed.

Then there is the stocktake: what already exists in the team, what still needs to be developed and how. Finally, the team decides what it will pay attention to during the journey.