We all understand the importance of teamwork. But often teams suffer from a lack of alignment around their intended mission, which is counteractive to their purpose and effectiveness. Listen as Ralph and Bill explain how group coaching can help produce improved output by identifying areas of misalignment – and creating alignment – within an existing team.
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Bill Berthel
Welcome to the Get Emergent Podcast. The Get Emergent Podcast guides leaders to creatively strengthen relationships and improve performance of their leadership and those that they lead. We like to provide concepts and ideas that you can turn into pragmatic experiments to help you develop your higher potential in your work and in your leadership. And we hope that you’ll find some better practices to apply in your work. I’m Bill Berthel.
Ralph Simone
And I’m Ralph Simone.
Bill Berthel
Ralph Our mission is to raise the consciousness of individuals, leaders, teams and organizations. And in this episode, we want to talk about teams. One way that we can help teams or groups really make significant progress or breakthroughs I know you’ve got to witness that I have as well is through really bringing the coaching modality to groups, to teams different than a one on one, but really be able to coach a group or an intact team towards some more purposeful action through some challenges they might have, maybe even uncovering what they don’t know so they can be much more dynamic and have breakthroughs.
Ralph Simone
It gets me thinking about an old role that we might think of as a meeting facilitator. But I often think of group coaching is our opportunity to hold the space and to facilitate discussion which helps create alignment or identify areas of misalignment among an intact team. And I remember what I really when I fell in love with this word facilitate. I think it literally means to make easy. And you’re kind of opening and closing the gate, but you’re making it easy for people to be heard, to be acknowledged, to be validated. So it has a feel of one-on-one coaching, but it is a one-to-many relationship because it’s a senior leadership team or it’s a project team or it’s a tiger team, something of that nature.
Bill Berthel
The idea of facilitation, right, to make that easier is there’s a both/and of some structure and some really kind of amorphous looseness just holding the space for the group, right? Just holding that space as part of the facilitator’s role or in our case the coach’s role cause we’re really talking about coaching here.
Ralph Simone
I worked with a leadership team of a sales organization for almost two years in this group coaching. And what was in it for them is they rarely spent an hour together frequently to talk about some of the more strategic issues. But it was pretty loose. I do a check in, what’s on your mind. And sometimes the facilitation was trying to sort out the things that were most essential for them to be discussing as a team.
Bill Berthel
Yeah, I love that. And sometimes it needs a little more structure. I was just finished about a yearlong engagement with a senior leadership team that really started more structured than that. That’s what they needed at the time. And there were some topics that were more like teach pieces, some skill building to begin with, you know, some fundamental skill building like building more psychological safety and trust amongst themselves, better communication. But it really morphed into just holding the space for their topics and conversations to come to surface. Be able to talk those out and get to if not a solution, a way to move forward and experiment with something differently for their team.
Ralph Simone
What I love about the group coaching concept is it really showcases the consultant in the classroom but without all of the formality. So in other words, you’re holding the space what comes up. But you have enough knowledge that you can kind of facilitate the discussion. You can actually teach something of a leadership practice or a team practice that enables this group to be more effective going forward. And so I love it that. I think it showcases our ability to be a coach, a consultant, a facilitator, all in one. And it moves a group forward.
Bill Berthel
We just shared a couple examples of some experiences we’ve had. But what kind of teams do you think, or groups benefit most from a group coaching experience?
Ralph Simone
Oh, that’s a great question. So I think senior leadership team because I think the process of aligning around strategy and structure is dynamic. It’s ongoing.
Bill Berthel
Yes.
Ralph Simone
I think a high visible project team. So if you’re standing up a new product, a new product line, a new service, I think facilitating that in a group coaching format would also be good and perhaps a team that’s struggling to perform and really utilizing the group coaching to kind of get at what are some of the causes for the performance issues.
Bill Berthel
Yeah, absolutely. I had an opportunity a few years ago to work with two different sales teams within the same organization that were almost not intentionally competing for resources within the organization and not even knowing that was happening and it was harming both teams.
Ralph Simone
Right.
Bill Berthel
but there was a leader who recognized that these two separate sales teams would benefit. Coming together in a, you know, facilitated discussion on a regular basis. The breakthrough was amazing. They figured out ways to not only share resources but really synergize. Right. Because they had some common goals without knowing it.
Ralph Simone
Well, I think what you do with group coaching versus individual coaching is you establish a healthier relationship between the tension of competition and cooperation.
Bill Berthel
Absolutely.
Ralph Simone
There’s a place for individual competition, but then there’s also a place for cooperation, collaboration. And I think it helps establish that tension.
Bill Berthel
Sometimes teams come to us knowing they would like some type of experience, but they don’t know exactly where to start. And we’ve utilized a few different team assessments in that space as well, really being able to give some kind of baseline objective data. So we can also measure the functionality of teams. We can measure the self-perspective of how effective teams are in different aspects of team performance. And so sometimes it’s just knowing we want to improve, we want it a little differently, a little better, but not knowing where to start. There are ways to measure that.
Ralph Simone
The other thing that comes up for me is group coaching is a good way to re-energize a standing meeting, intact team or group. So anything over time can get stale and even the idea of well, what is this group even coming together for? So as you kind of revitalize that. And one of the things that I’ve seen a huge benefit though is just creating alignment or identifying where people are misaligned because they’re not in conversation often long enough as a group to really understand where people fall on certain issues. And I think it creates alignment or identifies misalignment. And when we have alignment, we have a lot less pain, a lot less noise in a lot less wasted energy in organizations. So I think that’s one of the real big benefits in the group coaching process.
Bill Berthel
Yeah, and I would jump to the opposite end of the timeline. Newly formed teams really get a strong start in those early stages of establishing some operating ground rules, establishing a team vision, a purpose, really getting a strong start for newly developed teams as well. It doesn’t have to be stale. It could be brand spanking new, and you want to get it off to a really strong start.
Ralph Simone
Well, I think as silly as it sounds, a lot of times when groups or teams go off the rails, it’s because they don’t have agreed upon ground rules to govern how they will behave. They aren’t intentional about making it a safe space. They steer clear of conflict as opposed to encouraging ways to constructively work through it. And I think having a coach, a facilitator doing the group coaching can help people move through those things with less residual and really get to where they need to get.
Bill Berthel
And sometimes it’s really moving from being a work group to a team. I think we might call some of our groups teams and we’re really not operating at that cohesive level of real teamwork. Right. A work group is a group of People who are working together and doing some similar work, they may or may not be very well aligned. Teams have defined common goals and continuously work on their alignment towards those goals. We work, no offense, we work with a lot of work groups that are aspiring to be teams.
Ralph Simone
We call group coaching that. Team coaching.
Bill Berthel
That’s right.
Ralph Simone
Which I don’t know if we did intentionally or it happened at the unconscious level, but I think it’s really interesting. And this is where team sometimes gets overused in organizations, because unlike a sports team, where the goal is crystal clear, and people are aligned around it. And so it brings us back to really, one of the things that’s in it for you to do group coaching is to really create alignment around a goal or a common set of goals so that you can go from a group to a team. And I think that’s one of the tremendous values. again, we have a lot of energy expended in organizations because people are working at cross purposes.
Bill Berthel
Absolutely. Ralph thank you.
Ralph Simone
Thanks, Bill.
Bill Berthel
And thanks for listening, folks. We hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’re looking forward to more. You can listen to a new podcast two times every month here at Get Emergent or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you pick something up you’re going to use or apply to your leadership and your work, let us know how that goes. And please reach out to us. support@getemergent.com or directly to myself or Ralph thank you.
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