coaching in the corporate world cup
Authored by:
Jeffrey Von Drehnen,
Australia
Amy Hoare,
UK
Rachna Verma,
Australia
The presence of a coach is natural and expected in sport: someone who is part of the team and yet removed, who helps everyone work together to win. It’s impossible to imagine a sporting team playing without a coach.
Yet coaches are rare in the workplace, even though payroll is often the biggest single business expense, particularly for service industries. Despite the enormity of this cost, and contrary to frequent claims that ‘people are our greatest asset’, organisations tend to expect managers to make the most of their teams using only their past workplace experience. While a range of policies and procedures may be in place in the organisation (governing everything from sleeve length to desk density) there is rarely any guidance on how a team should work together to deliver results.
This is where coaches can step in to help a team or organisation improve how they work, sometimes as part of a broader organisational transformation. Coaches can facilitate conversations and agreements around values, principles and ways of working. A coach is there with the team members, observing and helping them practice and improve how they work together toward their desired end state. A coach helps bridge the gap between the organisational intent for how teams should work and the reality on the ground.
Scoring the benefits
Improving how people work within a team, and how teams interact with each other, can deliver real and fast results for your business such as:
- Clarity: working on the right thing at the right time to meet your strategic objectives
- Delivery efficiency: achieving outcomes quickly, overcoming obstacles and mitigating risks
- Alignment: running teams in an agreed and methodical way improves how teams work together as the decision-making and prioritisation is transparent
- Satisfaction: everyone likes working for the winning team. Achieving results makes work more satisfying.
Reading a playbook is no substitute for coaching
Bringing in a team coach for a few months can deliver these benefits, particularly if the coach is authorised to help the enterprise as a whole – aligning people within a team, across teams and across the enterprise. A coach can help you understand the changes required, provide the skills to work in new ways, as well as the motivation to win.
Kicking around ideas for end state
Without a coach it can be tough to get out of the delivery mindset and think instead about how you interact and make decisions. You’re more in the space of: What needs to be done today? and less in the space of: What should be the ideal model for how a team works together within our organisation? Or How should teams interact across the organisation?
Consideration needs to be given to how teams connect their work to strategy; prioritise delivery; iterate outputs based on feedback; work together to overcome obstacles, risks and dependencies; all within the resources available. Once an end state is understood, the coach can help you formulate a plan to get there.
‘A weekly meeting with your director is often not enough support for teams to deliver meaningful results in a competitive industry,’ says Jeffrey von Drehnen, a Project Lead at Adaptovate in Sydney.
‘All too often leaders work in patterns they’ve always worked in. Or worse, they just rely on pre-existing operating models within the business. There is no intention underlying how we work together and limited recognition of the inefficiencies that randomised work patterns create.
‘Are you working together in an agreed and optimal way or are you just doing what you’ve always done? A coach can help you develop a vision for how you should work together and ways to execute that vision.’
Practise, practise practise!
Once you have agreement for how a team should work together, you will need help to provide and practise the skills required. Receiving a deck on how to work together is just not the same as having a third party observe you and your team in action, to provide actionable advice you can apply straight away to enhance team performance. We wouldn’t expect someone to learn soccer from reading a manual so why would a corporate team be any different?
‘Teams may have the intention to improve, but without someone there who isn’t their boss, it can be hard to reach that next level of maturity,’ says Amy Hoare, a Project Lead based in our London office.
‘It’s satisfying to see a team take our recommendations on board, shift how they work together, and then deliver even better results.
‘In a recent engagement, teams achieved scores of 80–90% confidence in applying their new ways of working, after just 8 weeks of coaching support. These teams stopped investing in work that wasn’t aligned to organisational priorities, allowing them time to work on the right things.’
Pass on negativity and defend motivation
Applying new ways of working can be tough. Teams already have their regular work and only so much bandwidth for new corporate initiatives. Having a champion to motivate the team during fragile transformation phases can ensure the pain pays off. Coaching provides a space for team members to explore their thoughts and feelings about the changes, and to make the changes work for them.
‘Just as having a coach and fans on the sideline can motivate a team to win, so too can a coach motivate a corporate team to work together in a better way,’ says Rachna Verma, a Project Lead currently based in the Toronto office.
‘Coaches inspire teams to give it their all and accelerate that culture shift. The coach is someone who helped them design the end state, and helps the team do what it takes to achieve it. Not everyone in the team learns and adapts at the same speed, nor in the same way. A coach is there to help each team member, and the team as a whole, to stay motivated, especially after the inevitable setbacks. You just don’t get that level of inspiration from handing out FAQs on how to work together.’
Keep your eyes on the prize
While it can be tempting to examine a team’s performance by output, that somewhat misses the point. Achieving outcomes by delivering the right output, at the right time, while drawing on the capabilities available to us in the most efficient way possible, is the never-ending challenge of leadership. Why leave this to chance? In times of global uncertainty, when service industries are experiencing intense inflationary pressures, it’s just good sense to make better use of the roster available to us.
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