Expanding Your Group and Team Coaching Toolkit - Action (2)

Last week in kick off of this blog series, we started exploring different elements of the coaching

conversation, especially as it relates to tools and questions for teams and groups. If you haven’t read last week’s post, take a look at it here.

Another core foundation of the coaching process is action. Action creates action, and it can feel easy to coach around action.

 There is an elusive belief that to coach someone to do something quicker, faster or better, may be the best thing, but is it? A key question to explore is “is this the right action?”.

In coaching a group it’s likely that each person will have their own action plans. On a team, helping team members get clear on the collective actions which are prioritized, and what success looks like, can be a significant focus.

Questions you may want to explore as a team are:

What are the priority actions right now?

What will success look like?

How do I contribute to this collective goal?

Where might I impact others on the team  - overlap or be in conflict with?

In coaching for action, we’ll also want to keep in mind the varying layers of awareness. What else is possible? Awareness will be our focus next week.

In coaching for action, we can draw on a number of different coaching and related tools including:

1. Coaching around planning tools such as SWOT Frameworks (this strategic planning tool can provide the backbone to a rich exploration by a team around their STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITES and THREATS.
2. If you prefer an appreciative inquiry stance, coaching around the SOAR instead of the SWOT
3. Identifying what we want to START, STOP and CONTINUE Doing
4. The Stoplight framework of GREEN (Good, go), YELLOW (Cautiion, proceed slowly) and RED (STOP,  CAUTION/CRISIS)
5. One page plans
6. Urgent/important matrix made famous by Steven Covey – What are the actions which are having impact? Which are coming from a crisis mindset – yours or others?

What tools do you use in coaching for action?  Feel free to share one of your favorites in the comments below.

Six Coaching Questions to Explore around Action:

What actions are going to move you towards your goal?

What are the steps which are going to move the team forward collectively? As individuals?

If you knew you would not fail, what would you do?

To move you towards your vision, what do you need to do?

What’s the one thing you want to focus on?

What do you need to stop doing?

Next week we turn our attention to Coaching For Awareness. Stay tuned!

Enjoy the conversation,

Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, MES, PCC, CPCC

Group Coaching Essentials | Potentials Realized

Join us for an upcoming ICF CCE Approved program - the Advanced Group and Team Coaching Practicum (10 CCEs), the Group Coaching Essentials program (8.75 CCEs), or the Virtual Facilitation Skills Essentials (10 CCEs) 

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Expand Your Group and Team Coaching Toolkit - Goals (1)

Expanding Your Team and Group Coaching Toolkit – Coaching Many Toolkit

In celebration of our 15^th anniversary which I kick off this month, I’m starting a new blog series here at the Group Coaching Ins and Outs blog. One of the most important things I’ve learned from being in business for this long is the importance of consistency, and consistency over time. Rather than doing something once, do It three times. With this in mind, I’m committed to sharing a weekly blog post around a different tool in building your team and group coaching toolkit.

The  tagline for my most recent series of workbook planners (the Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack) is “Consistent Action + Daily Steps = Momentum). 

At the heart of any coaching process is goals. What’s different between team and group coaching is

often the lens of goals. In group coaching, where people are coming together from across an industry, geographic context or across , it’s likely that people each bring their own focus. With this in mind, the challenge for the group coach is to help the group find connection and alignment across the group.

In a team context, we are supporting the team around their collective goals, most of the time. The challenge is in helping individual team members connect their goals with the collective team goals, and find alignment across the team.

What’s unique is when we are coaching a virtual or remote team. In these instances, the virual and remote team members may have a radically different primary focus, AND they will still need to find the connection to the meta-goals of the team and/or group. In these instances, coches who work with virtual and remote teams will want to regularly revisit with them how they are operating as a “grouping”. Are they more of a group or a  team? What are the other matrix relationships they are part of - -how does that impact this team membership?

Some of the tools we may work with in coaching around goals include:

1. Exploring goals by using a variety of frameworks – from SMART, to WOOP, to PURE and CLEAR. There are many different goal frameworks espoused. What are the frameworks your clients are using? What have they found useful.
2. Exploring the link between collective goals and individual goals, as well as team vs. organizational goals;
3. Coaching individuals on short term, medium-term and long term goals
4. Working around vision – goal setting without an anchor in the bigger picture of a person’s, team or organization’s vision can start to lose energy and momentum over time. As I write in the Coaching Business Builder “Our vision pull us through the choppy and sometimes turbulent waters of business and life". |

Six Coaching Questions around goals:

1. What's important about this goal? (it may be framed in the big picture? Short term? Long term?)
2. What will success look like?
3. What outcomes do you want?
4. What might get in the way? (or what could be a roadblock?)
5. What resources do you need to be successful? (OR What will help you be successful?)
6. When you are successful with this, what's possible?

What is important for you to note around goals in your work as a group and team coach right now?

Enjoy the conversation!

With best wishes,

Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized 
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2018) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder 
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development)

Join us for an upcoming ICF CCE approved program - Group Coaching Essentials, Advanced Group and Team Coaching PRacticum or the Virtual Facilitation Essentials