Team Coaching: What It Is and How to Do It Well

Team coaching addresses what one-on-one coaching sessions can't: how a group of people work together.

Most workplace coaching programs invest in the development of critical talent, like managers, senior ICs, and executives. The goal of these coaching sessions is often to help leaders build capabilities or solve problems, especially during times of transition.

But the impact of one-on-one coaching can be limited. Work often breaks down at the team level: how they collaborate with other functions, make decisions, align their priorities, or even take feedback.

Why team coaching requires different skills

Group coaching requires specific training in group dynamics, like psychological safety, popularized by Amy Edmondson:

Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

This is often a prerequisite for group coaching. Without it, two patterns often emerge: decisions get made by whoever talks the loudest or the most, and people struggle to take accountability for their actions. Both stall progress towards coaching goals.

That's why coaches often begin group coaching by setting ground rules. This is called contracting, and may include rules such as:

• No one speaks twice until everyone speaks once.
• Feedback is focused on performance, not personality (e.g., "John missed a deadline that impacted the team," not "John is always late").
• Conflict focused on tasks is productive; conflict focused on relationships is not.

A skilled coach may also ask for the team's input on this list. For instance, asking, "What could we do to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute in each session?" or "How do we want to address bad behavior?"

How to run a team coaching session

While the content of a coaching session will vary from team to team, each session will typically have a three-part structure: an opening, discussion, and closing.

Open

There's an intention-setting practice I'm particularly fond of, which is that anytime you move into a new space, you take a beat to pause. At work, we're often rushing from meeting to meeting, so it's important for participants to mentally reset before digging into the work. You can encourage everyone to do the exercise I just mentioned, or ask a question like:

• "What's something you did recently that brought you joy or satisfaction?"
• "What is one thing you are looking forward to this week?"

This should be a brief warm-up exercise, no more than 5 minutes.

Discuss

Once you've warmed the group up, you can identify the agenda for the session and begin the discussion. The goal of the coach is to facilitate the conversation, pulling in everyone's perspective and being accountable for the rules set by the team (as are all participants).

That can look like asking someone who's been quiet, "What do you think?", or turning it back to the group less pointedly, with invitations like:

• "What ideas or perspectives are missing from this conversation? How do we get them?"
• "Does anyone disagree with this approach?"

Depending on the session's goals, this discussion may also be complemented by a structured practice opportunity. For instance, a group working to better communicate their priorities to key stakeholders may practice doing so for an upcoming stakeholder meeting via a structured roleplay.

Close

Each coaching session should end with clear next steps and accountability: what each person is going to do back at work. This means asking questions like:

• "Who owns this decision?"
• "What would it look like if everyone was accountable for this decision?"

Team coaching sessions are rarely one-offs. Usually they are a series, with enough time between sessions for the team to apply what they've discussed.

How to scale team coaching

Team coaching can be transformative for teams, and consequently, the business. But scaling team coaching is an exercise in resource management.

You need to be able to scale the number of coaches. That means either adding to your coaching budget, repurposing an existing contract, or training your leaders and managers to be coaches.

The former is an expensive proposition; it's also time-intensive. You have to vet coaches' backgrounds to make sure they're properly trained (usually indicated by a credential, like the International Coaching Federation's) and have experience facilitating in groups. Then you also have to make sure their availability aligns with the team's availability (this takes up more time than it should).

The alternative, training coaches internally, is much more sustainable. Coaches don't need a formal certification to be successful, but they do need the right knowledge and skills to effectively facilitate sessions.

And once you have more than one coach running sessions, you need a way to keep their approach consistent, building a coaching program that scales across every manager rather than letting each coach improvise their own version of team coaching.

If you're interested in learning how Synthesia can help you design and deliver a robust coaching training program, with hands-on practice, reach out.