A Team Coach is not a Superhero. There are many layers to the job.
As a team coach, I often sit in on meetings as a casual observer. In my experience, it is a crucial tactic to evaluate the team, and it helps in various ways.
Whenever possible, I try to refrain from saying anything at all, as this allows me to get a sense of the team dynamics and allows me to intuitively (as well as demonstrably) understand the gaps in communication, the individual attitudes that inform certain people, as well as the overall energy of the team, which no doubt plays a huge role in how the team functions.
But I don't always stay quiet. If the opportunity so arises that I feel like I need to draw the team's attention to an important moment in the course of the meeting, I make it a point to intervene in the events - so that everybody can take cognizance of what's transpiring at that moment.
Understanding the intervention
Usually this can be a moment where a person exhibits a tendency to think in black and white terms, or starts to be dismissive of another's idea without any solid ground. Or, it can be a moment when the entire team accepts the opinion of the leadership without first trying to understand the reasoning behind the opinion itself. In any case, both these moments reveal not just the tendency of a particular individual, but rather it hints at the interaction of the personal with the structural - and that's exactly the juncture that team coaching addresses.
Here, however, I must admit that things get rather tough for me, and that's for two reasons primarily.
The first is that, having had some experience in team coaching, I can identify patterns. So when I see a certain thing happening, there's usually a chance that I have an idea of where it's headed - even if I don't know the exact destination.
Naturally, this means that I need to be very gentle in how I approach the subject of the intervention. I can't come across too strong, for if I do that, I will not be trusted by the team. At the same point of time, I still need to have conviction in my beliefs, because without that I won't be trusted either.
The second difficulty is in some ways the exact opposite of the first difficulty. It goes like this: even after years of being a team coach, there are still new ways in which I continue to be surprised by people and their behaviours within teams! What this basically means is that no two teams are the same, even if the tendencies within the individuals in both may be similar.
As in the case with the first difficulty, this means that I need to be very careful with what I do beyond the intervention stage - as I need to weigh my moves carefully to make sure that I can create small changes that the team will welcome, rather than large changes that the team will reject outright.
But all of this discussion leads me to the point that I wanted to make regarding team coaching.
Balancing and Building in Reality
The fact of the matter is, that as a team coach, you have to be self-confident enough to trust your intuition, but at the same point of time, you need to reign in your ego - because it could be tempting to come into a situation as someone who knows everything and can solve everything in one go. But it’s of the utmost importance to convey a sense of humility that allows you to truly reach the team that you are trying to coach.
Ultimately, a team coach is not a superhero - and this is the reality that every team coach needs to admit to themselves.
Team coaching takes time, and it requires an attempt to build a connection with the team you're coaching, rather than saying, "I know what's happening and I can fix it!".
You need to spend time with the team first, so that you can identify what's going wrong and why. Only then can you fix it. This process, rightfully so, requires a lot of time and patience. But it’s worth it.
