What do we need to do together as a team to meet the needs of the greater system, now and in the future, that we could not do apart?
Peter Hawkins, 2017
What a good question for any team! Lencioni (2002) states that it is not finance, not strategy, not technology, but teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and yet so rare. This therefore is the difference between a smart and a healthy organisation.
What is Systemic Team Coaching (STC)?
Moya’s ALE programmes for individuals, and teams uses the core Systemic Team Coaching (STC) principles and approach that focuses on coaching an entire team simultaneously; equipping them to reach levels of effectiveness beyond what they’ve envisaged possible, allowing them to have a 360o influence within their current systems. Team effectiveness is dependent on levels of foundational trust in the team, which in turn is dependent on the clarity of the team’s purpose, in line with expectations of their stakeholders. This is what allows teams to develop teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and yet so rare.
The STC approach in particular, is a process by which a coach team of minimum two co-coaches, works with entire client teams in order to help them improve their collective performance, how they work separately and together and how they develop their collective effective leadership. This enables them to engage more effectively with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider organisation, as illustrated in the following diagram.
Benefits of using STC approach in teams
Developing ALE using the STC approach can address the following questions for the team, always starting with commissioning, which refers to your stakeholder expectations:
- Stakeholder expectations — How well do you know who all your stakeholders are, always and what their expectations of you as a team are, now and also in the future?
- Team purpose — Based on your stakeholders’ expectations, how clear are you on your team’s primary purpose, strategy, delivery, systems and roles?
- Team dynamics — How effective are your team relationships; how well do you work together?
- How strong is the foundation of interpersonal trust in the team?
- How comfortable are your team members to engage in healthy disagreements?
- How much commitment do you experience within your team to stay true to your purpose and to meet and exceed your targets?
- How willing are team members to hold self and peers accountable for the behaviours that will allow you as a team to achieve your targets?
- How much does your team focus collaboratively on reaching the targets you need to achieve?
- Stakeholder relationships — How well do you connect and engage with all your key stakeholders; those you depend on and those that depend on you?
- Core learning — How ongoing are the individual and team learnings for sustainability?
STC focuses not only on the team members, but also on the connections between them. During this process, the team discovers something much deeper than just achieving their goals or contributing to the company’s success — they discover how they are uniquely positioned to address specific challenges in the present moment that no other team can. What makes STC different is its ‘future-back’ and ‘outside-in’ approach. Unlike most interventions that focus on assessing where things are now and how to move forward, STC looks first to the future and then works back from there; focusing on the ‘outside’ bigger system and connections, and then moving inwards.
The impact of integrating STC in our coaching processes far exceeds the scope of influence of traditional individual and team coaching. Whereas traditional one-on-one coaching impacts the individual and interpersonal aspects and team coaching reaches the team aspects, integrating STC takes it a step further by impacting connections outside the team and in the wider systems where a reciprocal dependency exists.
Steps towards implementing STC in your organisation
Enhancing your organisational health, starts with inspirational leadership and team effectiveness, and there is no silver bullet that will achieve this. The ALE STC journey can be structured in any combination of half-day sessions with the team, conducted on a monthly basis or as agreed.
Some thoughts for your consideration:
- How important are individual and team systemic ALE to your organisation?
- Out of 10, where do you believe, are you as an organisation in achieving this?
- If what you are wanting and needing in your organisation, is more inspirational and positive leadership effectiveness, what would need to be your next steps?
- Each individual and team’s gaps are unique, and therefore each development journey should be unique.
- Always commence with a 360o systemic diagnosis of the team strengths that can be harnessed, else weaknesses that need to be addressed to take the team to the next level of effectiveness.
- Once the inquiry into the team and its context has been completed, collaborative sense-making needs to take place together with the team, before any team development agenda can be agreed upon.
Moya employs the expertise of the most skilled and experienced panel of ALE / STC coaches who can support even your most challenges teams and individuals, with both backbone and heart. In order to tap into the collective intelligence of our STC learning and practice community, we regularly attend and contribute to structured supervision sessions where we explore best practices and how to deal with ethical and practice dilemmas that might arise during any STC intervention with our clients. We do this because we realise that our own learning journeys never end, and supervision allows us always to show up best in service to our clients.
Our clients have experienced significant value and return on investment as a result of embarking on our tailored journeys for their specific team requirements, and we encourage you to do the same. Our expertise lies in partnering with our clients to co-create solutions, and we welcome working with the relevant stakeholders to fine-tune and tailor the programme to meet your unique requirements.
We look forward to partnering with you!