Coaching a Supercharged Team

It is almost too easy to be hyper-efficient as an individual.
Technology and tools have enabled individuals to have so much power to
affect change and this individualised world that the notion and value of
working in teams is becoming increasingly muddled. However – when you
see a supercharged team that is working towards a goal – it is easy to
see that you can move mountains and still have time to have a bit of
fun.

Team management seems increasingly complex as people come into
meetings writing emails and responding to issues with a range of
electronic devices and we never really have a long enough attention span
to take time to understand the bigger and larger, more complex
issues.

Teams are also often distributed across multiple geographies and the
closest that people get to being a team is a focused conference call
where people dial in from across the world to “share” their perspective
on a project or implementation. It is as if the shards of the image that
we all need to move forward never gets put together in that crystal
clear moment that catalyses everyone to the change that we want to see
collectively happen here.

Project managers, consultants and advisors get paid to tell us little
bits of what we already know or suspect is the big picture of where we
are going. We will spend more time to re-invent ideas rather than
getting input from those around us so as to leverage the collective
wisdom of the experience of colleagues that work in our industry and
that can benefit from understanding the thinking process that guides our
collective effort going forward. Our jargon becomes our comfort zones
and we resonate, zoom-in and hit it on the head as often as we can.
Executives send out video clips to connect thousands to this quarter’s
direction and to “reach-out” to the people.

Email, cell phone messages and IM politics rule the day. Who gets
included and excluded determines a whole lot of what you are going to
put your effort into and the oh-so-measurable KPA drives what will be
looked at, at all. Weekly meetings around a range of projects seems to
be rehashes of what we have left undone and serves to depress rather
than to inspire.

The luxury of thinking seems to have been replaced by large
spreadsheets which already highlights the issues and to which a
“one-pager” will outline the ultimate solution. These get done at 2 am
in the morning and logged into an innovation database for a KPA bonus.
Data driven decision-making outweighs feelings and intuition with
half-baked ideas that just require a bit of encouragement being totally
unfashionable.

Do we think too little? What are we doing to connect teams to the
ideals of the organisation and how do we create the inspiration required
to create magic in this new age of corporate achievement?

We are all willing to agree that strategic alignment and company
culture is the new frontier of management. We employ the best talent,
ensure that their values are congruent with the corporate culture and
then we sit at the measurement line, waiting for the results to pour in.
Yet – how much time to managers spend to build the vision and re-enforce
the company direction? More often, we forget that people still need to
have a sense of what they can do to contribute to the bottom line. By
putting in “self-starter” in the job-advert, it will not mean that the
top achiever gets there without support and without having some ideas
that may shape the outcome.

Most managers have forgotten to be coaches and leaders. Multiple
studies have shown that there is a lack of congruence between what
leaders view as essential behaviours in organisations and what is
actually practiced by both those leaders and organisations. This
contributes to high staff turnover and poor general performance.

Managers and leaders need to remember that they are coaches. A coach
is someone that intensively guides and instructs the organisation on its
direction. He or she connects the organisation to its direction. They
not only connect the organisation to that direction but he or she is
also someone that brings out the value of the talent in the organisation
towards this direction. The coach achieves the results – not by playing
in the game, but by standing outside of it and making sure that all the
players understand how to respond to various situations and
opportunities.

So how can we take responsibility for creating more opportunities for
innovative thinking, unleashing the potential of individuals and teams,
and aligning the organisation to its goals?

The basic idea is that every opportunity in which we interact with
others – we create an opportunity to connect others to the
organisational direction.

Some of the practical steps that can be used to connect and inspire
others include

Connect you to you. Understand what you want to
achieve.

Rather than multi-task, hopping between calls or writing one document
after another, sit down and really think about what you are achieving
and what you want to achieve. Where are the gaps? What do you know and
what do you not know? What is working and what still needs to get done.
Discuss your ideas with one or two people and get a sense of what they
think about it. Given enough time you should have a clear idea of where
you want to end up.

Connect you to others. Understand who is on the playing
field.

The best way to inspire someone is to take time to understand who he
or she is. Have you really thought about the people that work with you?
What are their abilities and their direction and how does this fit in
with what you want to achieve? Have you asked them and had meaningful
conversations about whom you are, whom they are and where things need to
go? By putting yourself in their shoes you can understand where they are
going.

Connect others to you. Put yourself out there.

By linking with others and sharing ideas and supporting people – you
build relationships that inspire others. If you do this with your vision
in mind, then everyone starts slowly but surely building towards the
ideas you starting putting forward. It is important to link yourself to
people “above”, on the same level and “below” you. By moving from just
doing your job to being a contributor to other people’s jobs you start
turning yourself into a shaper that will have the power to work with
people to achieve team ideals.

Connect others to the vision. Be the champion of the
vision.

People do not connect to ideas that they do not believe in. This is
important to understand. If your vision does not align to the vision of
others you may have to share your vision and convince others or you may
have to look at how both parties can achieve their respective visions
through contributing. The vision needs to be re-enforced at every
opportunity and different aspects of it may have to be discussed from
time to time in more depth to make sure that we all understand the
implication of this vision at the present moment.

Connect others to others. Let the vision free.

For a vision to be shared – more than one person has to become the
champion. If everyone in the whole organisation can share in a vision,
it becomes a very powerful force for change. One team created a space in
their regular meeting in which one or more people could tell something
about themselves and it was amazing how much this positively influenced
the team dynamics. They also discussed what connects themselves to the
vision of the organisation and how they can contribute. The interesting
aspect of this was that they did this every week and this activity
gained its own momentum and those individuals became leaders in their
various environments.

While this describes the “big process” that needs to happen – it is
also important to use a simple coaching model in our daily conversations
to ensure that we move forward towards results. The “GROW” model is one
such coaching approach that may be beneficial in structuring
conversations around goals.

Grow stands for Goal, Current Reality, Options, Way forward and is a
step by step process for having coaching conversations. The steps to a
coaching conversation are outline below.

Establish the Goal.

A grow conversations starts out by remembering what we want to
achieve here. Some people are clear about their goals, some are not, so
the first step is to establish the goal.

Examine the Current Reality

The next step is to find out where we are. Sometimes it is important
to challenge what is being said and find out what the real reality
is.

Explore the Options

This brainstorming phase creates a range of options, innovations and
strategies for getting to the goal. Moving beyond that we think it
through and consider the implications of pursuing different options.
This is often the most critical phase in a coaching conversation.

Establish the Way forward

If the first few steps went well we should be a position now to
really know what can be done and the next step is to commit to the
actions that will achieve those results. Any barriers need to be
investigated and may lead to more goals, more exploration – until the
solution is clear.

So – the task of super-charging a team is not to set bigger KPA’s,
have more consultants or be more aggressive on how they get measured,
but rather to get everyone to fully understand and agree on what needs
to happen to achieve the vision.

It may be tempting to think that this is the task of the top person
in an organisation – but it is the task of everyone in the organisation
to connect with others in the organisation in a way that builds clarity
on the way forward.

And the next meeting where everyone sits and gets reminded of the
vision – they will all know that we are in it together and that we are
all working towards this ideal that is built and shared by all. The
vision will move forward because a team can achieve exponentially more
than an individual.

This article has shared some of the tools that teams will need to
build a central direction and the skills that each of us can use to make
an effective contribution to the team environment.