Systemic and Team Coaching Programmes

The Challenge:

Coaching has traditionally operated in business with senior leaders, high-potential people on accelerated career rises, or underperforming employees put on Personal Improvement Plans (PIPs). The way organisations deploy coaching tends to map the individualistic perspectives of the Western world: 

• Team leaders tend to do one-to-ones with their team members, 

• Organisations tend to cascade the organisation's delivery objectives to the annual objectives of individual leaders/team leaders (Management by Business Objectives), 

• Project Managers take individual accountability for delivering projects on time, etc.

As organisations deal with more complex challenges (i.e. challenges where the solutions are not known or even apparent at the start) and in changing landscapes, they need to organise and stimulate the collaboration of cross-functional skills in teams. 

Isn't it paradoxical that the need is for better collaboration, yet we only tend to organise and coach at the individual level? 

Organisations are changing, and the role of leadership is changing. Although it is still misunderstood, coaching is evolving too. The tipping point of the change is the emergence of Knowledge Work, where creativity is mixed with production, where most workers are white-collars, and where the challenges are so entangled that no individual can centralise and coordinate all the solutions. Unfortunately, the challenges have progressed quicker than the traditional worldviews, which remain focused on leadership accountability instead of systemic accountability. 

Expected Outcomes: 

The time has come to think in terms of "Systems" and, with it, intentionally work on the dynamic of teams, develop new systemic leadership and support it with a new form of coaching: Sytemic and Team Coaching. We bring you our extensive experience building high-performing teams, from three decades of working in Tech, where teams are the norm, and formal qualifications in Systems and team coaching to match theory and practice. 

From our interventions, you can expect: 

• Intentional engagement in teams talking about the health of their relationships and performance as a team, 

• Increased engagement and accountability of all team members, 

• Mutual accountability, skilful exploration of differences in support of progress, instead of avoidance of conflict, 

• Enhanced meaningful collaboration in the teams and across teams, 

• Clarity of relationships and roles in the team and matrixed relationships, 

• Alignment to upholding excellence and realising the strategic directions, focus on outcomes, 

• Change in leadership style from coordinating the execution to setting the context for the work to flow through the system, 

• Less fire-fighting and regained time for enabling meaningful breakthroughs for the business. 

Our Differentiated Approach:

Our approach is systemic first and by default: 

• Systemic, as in understanding the system and mapping how the system is in a relationship supporting business outcomes. At a team level, it means what is the role of the team in the value chain creating an outcome for the customers,

• Systemic, as in working with teams at all levels. Operational teams, leadership teams, temporary squads, governance teams, etc. Teams are the unit of the organisation, and their relationship should be organised in line with the mission. We look to take the work to the teams rather than assemble the teams for the work (projects), 

• Systemic, as in working with leaders to detach from hands-on coordination of the work and stimulate the system to organise instead collaboratively. 

From those perspectives, we co-design an approach with you, whether we work with one team or the whole organisation. 

We also believe that although frequent sessions with the only purpose of discussing how the team is performing are essential, the needs go beyond pure coaching, and collaboration needs exploration in the purposeful contexts of aligning to excellence and strategic directions. Our ability to mix a coaching stance and a purposeful intent is genuinely unique.

Service Format:

We start with an advisory phase where we interview people, review where the system is at, and discuss your ambitions.  

We co-design a set of interventions with you and run them on the cadence with the relevant teams, teams of teams and leaders. For best practice, we deploy several coaches to avoid conflicts of interest (notably when mixing leadership and team coaching). 

We aim to work on 6-month cadences. It allows us to make increments of progress while gauging how the interventions work, adjusting periodically and repositioning if necessary. 

Please get in touch to be intentional with your teams' performance.