Expanding your group and team coaching toolkit - Assessments (7)

As coaches, assessments provide data for clients to create their own story. Assessments can be a valuable starting point for the coaching conversation. As coaches we want to use assessments as a springboard for awareness, action and insight.

There are many different assessments coaches may think about including into a group or team coaching process including:

Strengths – Individual strengths work using StengthsFinder or VIA Strengths.  or collective strengths like the Team Diagnostic

Styles – MBTI, Disc

Values – Barrett

Roles -Belbin

Leadership – Leadership Circle Inventory, Leadership 363

A great starting place is to ask your client what assessments they have used in the past, and what could be of value to them. What is it that they are trying to measure?

Another consideration with assessments is – What is the focus? Is it collective (across the entire team) OR is it to explore the individual level and then scale up to the team level? 

Team assessments such a Team Coaching International’s Team Diagnostic Survey is unique in that it maps a teams strengths as a system, rather than providing a collation of the snapshots of individual team members.

Six questions:

1. What is important to explore more fully?
2. What do you want to measure?
3. Is it important to explore it on an individual or collective level?
4. What is the story the team is making up about the item?
5. Looking at where you are now, where do you want to go?
6. What will success look like?

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)
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

Expanding Your Group and Team Coaching Toolkit - Relationships (5)

This week’s blog post explores the topic of relationships. What are the key relationships which are going to help your group and team coaching clients move forward?

Key to coaching support with teams is supporting them around their relationships as well as results. In a team context, results can usually only be sustained for as long as relationships are strong. Think about it, if a team enjoys it’s own company, they are likely to go “above and beyond”, investing in more time to make things work. In contrast, if people do not enjoy working together, it’s unlikely that they will spend much time with each other. While results are possible for short amounts of time, the necessary amount of time needed for high performance may not be feasible

At the heart of many team issues is conflict.  Conflict is a multi-faceted topic for teams to explore, as residing within it are a variety of issues such as styles, trust, and the ability to work across differences. Think about the tools you have around this. Conflict, and styles, will be another focus here at the blog.

Success today in any business content usually entails a wide variety of different types of relationships – both internal to the organization or context someone is working within, as well as externally. 

Exercise:

As a foundation, it can be valuable to see what relationships you have and what the quality of relationships are. One exercise you might consider engaging with is that of relationship mapping. In this, you would have clients identify core relationships and then map them or locate them in relationship to the issue or the person. This visual map provides insights around what relationships exist, which are missing, and which ones need attention.

Six questions to explore around relationships:

1.       What are the core themes to notice around relationships?

2.       What are the relationships most important to you right now?

3.       As you consider each one of the relationships – what’s important? What’s possible?

4.       Who can help magnify your work or impact?

5.       What can you do to reach out on a more regular basis?

6.       What else?

 What do you want to explore around relationships with the groups and/or teams you are working with right now? 

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)
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 (starts Friday May 3rd -2 spots still remain - 8.75 CCEs), Advanced Group and Team Coaching Practicum (starts Friday May 3rd - 2 spots open: 10 CCEs) or the Virtual Facilitation Essentials(starts Monday May 6th  - 4 spots open - 8.5 CCEs)

Expanding Your Group and Team Coaching Toolkit - Results (4)

We’re moving into week 4 of the 52 weeks of building your team and group coaching toolkit. Following closely behind the topics of coaching for action and awareness, come this week, and next week’s focus of RESULTS and RELATIONSHIPS.

When coaching teams particularly, supporting them to identify the results they are aiming for is key. This goes hand in hand with Relationships.

This week, let’s take a look at RESULTS.

On the group level, it’s likely that within a coaching group each group member will be striving for a set of individual results. There may be a common set of results people are aiming for across the group – such as “Building my business” or “Becoming a better leader”. If there is too much divergence in the goals and results coaching groups are looking for, it is possible that there is not enough synergy and cohesion.

At the team level, results may be collective as well as individual. A significant amount of the coaching process may revolve around supporting the team to:

• Clarify what results are – across the team, as it relates to other parts of the organization and/or with the overall organization;
• Create alignment around how things are measured and reported on;
• Understand everyone’s contribution;
• Understand how one task/result impacts another

Coaching Tools you might include are:

1.       SWOT

2.       Strategic Issues Mapping

3.       Exploring the Values of the team and how these are translated to action, and therefore results

4.       Action Plans

5.       What success will look like….

6.       What else?

7.       Five Whys Coaching tool

I’ll expand on each one of these in this week’s Facebook Live – join me over at Effective Group Coaching this week for the call.

Best

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 (8.75 CCEs), Advanced Group and Team Coaching Practicum (10 CCEs) or the Virtual Facilitation Essentials