May 10th, 2017

HOW TO EFFECTIVELY IMPROVE TEAM PERFORMANCE
 
One way to achieve better business results and to give your company a competitive edge is by improving your performance through team coaching.
 
In today’s ever-changing business environment, organisations are slowly becoming more aware of the importance of team coaching as a key performance driving tool. Traditionally, most work done around team performance is focused on how well team members relate to each other and all too often it’s believed that team performance can be improved, or even transformed, through a once-off team building activity. Unfortunately, as with most things in life, it’s just not that easy.
 
To create a highly effective team that delivers sustainable results, the team needs to continuously look at themselves, reflecting on what they do well and where they can improve. A great way to achieve this ongoing assessment is through team coaching.
 
What Is Team Coaching?
Although there are countless definitions, for us, team coaching comes down to partnering with a team to sustainably improve performance and maximise the collective talents and resources, to accomplish and exceed the goals required by the organisation.
 
Effective team coaching leads to improved team performance, through dialogue, reflection, action and learning. Through this process, the team will learn to master these behaviours and techniques, with the aim of becoming a self-coaching team. 



The TAC Model for Systemic Team Coaching 
 
A team coach helps the team reflect on their learnings, while providing activities and facilitating conversations to ensure they achieve their desired goals and objectives. Our team coaching process is made up of seven important phases:
 
Engage
The first step is to engage the team, team leader and other relevant stakeholders in the team coaching process. Here it’s important to clarify what team coaching is, how it works and what the desired outcomes are. By the end of this phase you should have a highly engaged, motivated and committed team, as well as support and buy in from the relevant stakeholders to start the process.
 
Identify

The purpose of this step is to get a clear picture of where the team currently is in terms of their performance, not only from their own perspective but also from the perspective of their stakeholders. Practically this stage often involves several team and individual assessments that create a good understanding of the team’s behaviours, structures, engagements and ability to create value for their stakeholders.
 
Explore

Here the team looks at the data from the identifying phase and starts exploring where they want to go. The data is analysed to highlight potential gaps and opportunities, allowing the team to create specific and achievable goals.
 
Map the way

With specific goals in place the team now starts to map out how they will achieve them. By identifying the behaviours, processes and relationships they need to build, the team creates their own map to reach their desired goals and objectives.
 
Do

Now it’s time to put the plan into action. In this phase, the team will practically build the processes, relationships and behaviours that they have mapped out as their way to success.
 
Grow

An important part of the journey, and an ongoing process, is allowing and encouraging the team members to move towards becoming a self-coaching team. A big part of this involves reflection on the team coaching process and learnings, with a focus on how to build lasting performance and continuous growth within the team and the organisation.


The idea with our model is that the cycle then starts again, with or without a coach, depending on the team’s ability to coach themselves.
 
This ongoing process and continual reflection leads to high performance teams, who are well-equipped to add value to an organisation by delivering great results on an ongoing basis.