The future for leadership is collective: The Role of Team Coaching

Guest article by Professor Peter Hawkins: Professor of Leadership, Henley Business School

The myth of the perfect CEO or perfect leader is prevalent in many organisations, sports teams and indeed even in the politics of nations. We expect more and more from our leaders. We invest such hope in their miraculous powers to turn things round, but then are quick to criticise when they do not live up to our unrealistic expectations.

As an example, when starting work with the senior executive team of a leading financial company, I was struck by how the views of the team were focused on what was wrong with their current chief executive. The company had had a number of chairmen and chief executives with short tenures and there had been intense competition before the latest (internal) appointment. After a few months of working alongside them, I was still being lobbied about the CEO's weaknesses. At the next meeting I said to the team: 'I am fed up with you all telling me what is wrong with your chief executive.' The chief executive looked at me with shock and anger and the team members all looked down at their papers. I continued, 'I think you are all delegating leadership upwards, and playing the game of "waiting for the perfect chief executive". Well I have some bad news for you. In all my years working with a great variety of organisations, I have never met a perfect chief executive. So the question for you as senior team members is: "How are you as a team going to take responsibility for his weaknesses?"'

Coaching boards or senior teams running a business is very different from most other teams. In parallel to running the business they are also to focus on transforming the business and its wider system. It's about collective transformational leadership. This is the process of collectively engaging the commitment and participation of all major stakeholder groups to radical change in the context of shared endeavour, values and vision. The stakeholder groups at a minimum include employees, customers or service users, suppliers or partners, investors or voters, regulators, the communities in which the enterprise takes place and the natural environment.

This is not an activity that can be done by an individual or by a group of individuals acting in parallel. Nor is it about allocating individual responsibility where the financial director looks after the investors; the HR director the employees; the sales director the customers etc. This can lead to systemic and stakeholder conflict being enacted in the leadership team or in the boardroom.

A senior team can have too much conflict to be effective, but it can also have too little. The level of conflict in a team should be no greater or no less than the conflict in the system they are leading and operating within. Team coaching needs to help teams (and boards) expand their collective capacity to manage systemic conflict.

Teams have so much more potential than individuals to rise to the growing, current and future challenges that face all organisations, countries and our human species, but need support to become more than the sum of their parts.

TEAM COACHING

Coaching has been the fastest growing component of leadership development in the last 10 years. Yet there's only a small percentage of team coaching which is often confused with team building, facilitation, away-days or process consulting.

Research conducted by Wageman and colleagues with 120 leadership teams found that "teams do not improve markedly even if all their members receive individual coaching to develop their personal capabilities. Team development is not an additive function of individuals becoming more effective team players, but rather an entirely different capability."

The growing interest in team coaching has come from a realisation of the limits of what can be achieved through individual coaching and leadership development, which can help create strong individual leaders but leave unaligned, poorly functioning leadership teams untouched.

The journey from being an effective team to being a high-performing transformational leadership team is challenging and demanding. A carefully selected and well-supported team has far more chance of being successful than a heroic leader but we must beware of replacing the myth of the super-hero leader with the myth of the super-team.

Five disciplines of high performing teams

To deliver collective transformational leadership there are five core disciplines.

For a team to be successful it needs clear commissioning. This includes a clear purpose and defined success criteria by which the performance of the team will be assessed. Then the team must clarify its own mission including purpose, goals and objectives, core values, ways of working, roles and expectations and importantly a compelling vision for success. Living this is a different challenge. The team needs to constantly co-create together so the mission has a beneficial influence on performance. The team must then connect outside to engage staff and stakeholders and transform relationships that drive improvements in the organisation's performance.

At the centre of the model is core learning that sits in the middle and above the other four. This is the place where the team stands back, reflects on their own performance to consolidate the learning for the next cycle of engagement.

The high-performing leadership team needs to be effective in all five of these disciplines. Although there is clearly an implied progression for moving through these disciplines, they are a continuous cycle and there is a constant dialogue between them. So, as is often the case, if the commissioning is not clear the team needs to have a dialogue between creating their own mission and getting buy-in and agreement from stakeholders.

A high-performing leadership team takes time out to take stock, reflect on the patterns within and between disciplines and learn more about both their own team functioning internally and externally.

Great teams are those who know exactly what is required and have a passion for their collective purpose. Where there is keen interest in each other's successes, setbacks and learning and where there's a real sense of partnership between the team and with the board and stakeholders.

This does not occur by happenstance. It occurs when the five disciplines are in place, connected and in balance. Team Coaching needs to be able to work with all five of these disciplines, each of which require a different team coaching approach and a team coach who can connect the personal, interpersonal, group, organization and wider system and business dynamics and help the team not only become high performing but create greater value for the system they serve.

Professor Peter Hawkins's book 'Leadership Team Coaching - Developing collective transformational leadership' is published by Kogan Page in April 2011.