Building Your Group and Team Coaching Toolkit - Strategic Issues (20)

Many teams and group members will want to build in a focus around strategic issues into their

coaching process. Strategic issues are important as they usually take us to the 30,000 foot view, or macro view of our work, context and landscape.

While strategic years ago meant 10 – 20 years, in today’s super-charged world of work, strategic now may mean 3-5 years down the road.

There are a variety of excellent strategic planning tools we may incorporate into our work as coaches, as we help individual group members and teams identify what is important to them. 

Three tools you may want to explore are the:

SWOT – one of the more traditional strategic planning tools which explore strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

PESTE – an environmental scan which explores the political, economic, social, technological and environmental layers

Strategic Issues Mapping

I often will incorporate one or more of these into a team coaching conversation, or as pre-work for a group coaching conversation. The insights gleaned around our context (the SWOT and PESTE), or what we see in our landscape (Strategic Issues Mapping) can be a great spark for a conversation.

For a description of what Strategic Issues Mapping is all about, take a look at my 2014 Teams365 blog post here: https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams-365-85-strategic-planning-tool-2-strategic-issues-mapping

 

You can read more about the SWOT here: https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams-365-84-strategic-planning-tool-swot

As previously mentioned, I will often have teams or group members create their own SWOT prior to a coaching conversation. You could also get group members to work in breakouts (Virtual or in-person) to explore one or more of the SWOT categories, presenting it back and then sparking a deeper conversation with the team.

Six questions you might explore as you coach around strategic issues:

1.       What are the strengths and weaknesses?

2.       Looking to our external environment, what threats and opportunities exist?

3.       As we move to the 30,000 view, what’s important to notice?

4.       Keeping in mind our strategic priorities, what do we need to say YES to? What do we need to say NO to?

5.       3-5 years from now, how will we know we have been successful? (Ask this on an individual level if group coaching, or team level if team coaching)

6.       If _____ ($/resources/ etc) were not a priority, what would we do?

Enjoy your conversations,

Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, CPCC, PCC – Potentials Realized 
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner (2018) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
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