Step 2. C – Current work culture of the team
Purpose of this step is to help the members understand the current culture of the team. Current culture of the team means the way team currently works. How the information is exchanged and processed in the team. How are the differences handled in the team? How are the differences shared? Are the differences welcome or ridiculed? How are the decisions made? Is there culture of team members voicing new ideas or do they shy away from doing so for fear of being ridiculed? Who speaks and how much? Do all concerned get opportunity to voice their opinions? Or few members dominate the discussions and others keep quite. What is the level of collaboration in the team? What are the overtly stated as well as underlying norms of behavior in the team?
The team coach observes the team in actual working session and then facilitates conversation within the team regarding the way they work today. Coach also helps the team understand the consequences of the current way of working.
This may take more than one working session of the team. The team coach may use variety of different interventions to help team become fully aware of their current ways of working and its implications. To accomplish this, coach may facilitate freewheeling conversation, use some questionnaire through which everyone give their opinions, or share own observations. Coach can adopt any or all of these means to achieve the purpose of helping team develop shared understanding of their current culture.
Step 3.C – Culture desired
In this step, coach helps the team articulate the ‘desired culture ‘necessary to meet their aims and objectives. Coach helps the team develop norms of behavior necessary for meeting agreed aims and objectives. Coach may facilitate freewheeling conversation within the team to arrive this. Alternatively, each team member may be asked to put their thoughts on a sheet of paper. Coach then captures all of these on flip chart paper. Either way, all the ideas of the team members are up on the flip chart paper. Now comes the need for filtering these ideas. One good way to do this is ‘impact analysis ‘of each idea. That is, the level of impact the particular idea has on achievement of team objectives. The ones with H (High Impact) is retained and the ones with L (low impact) are dropped. The ones with M (medium impact) are discussed and decided if some of them are to be retained.
At the end of this step, the team will have clear understanding and acceptance of the desired culture, i.e. ‘the way they need to function in the team, hereafter.’
Step 4.E – Explore enablers for transiting into ‘desired culture‘
By the time team reaches this step, they would have clear understanding and acceptance of
In this step 4, coach helps the team to explore ways and means to transit from current to desired way of working so that the team achieves its aims and objectives. Like in case of coaching an individual client, here also the team coach does not advice any solution but helps the team by asking powerful questions to find answers for itself. As the coach is facing the entire team not just one individual, team coach can help team do ‘brain storming ‘to come up with ideas on how to transition toward desired culture. Once the ideas are on the flip chart, they can be filtered by doing impact analysis much the same way as suggested in step 3 above.
This step 4 in the team coaching process concludes with concrete ideas on how to transition to desired culture for the team.
Step 5 D Develop action plan for institutionalizing the ‘new way of working in the team‘
In this step 5, coach helps the team in institutionalizing the ‘new way of working in the team‘. Like in case of coaching individual client, this involves helping the team build commitment and accountability. The team coach can use wide variety of intervention to accomplish this. Some of these may be:
- Visualization by asking the team to visualize the outcome of their working in new way hereafter.
- By asking the team to build in some measures which is going to tell them if they are working in new way. If not, it should send them alert.
- By helping team intermittently take a pause and reflect ‘what is going as per new culture ‘ and ‘what is not going as per new culture‘.
- By remaining in the team as observer and giving ‘in-the-moment’ feedback to help team stay on course.
Summary
In team coach model ACCED, team coach helps team with understanding and acceptance of
- Aims and objectives of the team.
- Current culture in the way team functions and its dysfunctionalities.
- Culture desired – the new way in which team needs to function.
- Exploring enablers to transit to desired culture.
- Developing action plan for building commitment and accountability.
In each step, the team coach helps the team by his or her basic skill of observing, listening and asking powerful questions.
References
Hackman, J.R. & Wageman, R. (2005). Theory of Team Coaching. Academy of Management Review, vol. 30, No2, 269-287.
Rock David (2007). Quiet Leadership, New York: Harper Collins