Coaching for Team Performance

Teams are the force that drives most organizations. Whether it's a functional team, a team of managers, or a project team, people get most done when they work together effectively. So when members of a team don't work well together, performance and productivity can suffer. That's not good for anyone.

Have you seen hostility, conflicting goals, and unclear expectations within your teams? These are symptoms of an unhealthy team. To avoid these harmful effects, you need be proactive about improving team performance. And even when a team is meeting its objectives, there's often room for improvement. So how can you help your team improve? With good team building (you can take your team to the next level. It's a valuable activity, and it's an essential management and leadership tool.

Team building helps people understand how to work better with others. It's an effective method for showing teams how to reduce conflict and improve their working relationships. The team can then focus on its real work, and achieve its objectives.

Understand Team Dynamics

A great place to start team coaching is by understanding the dynamics of the team. This is the process of figuring out how team members relate to one another. We all have different styles of working and communicating, and when we encounter a person with a style that's different from our own, we can often get frustrated with that person, and fail to recognize his or her unique strengths.

Some people can be "pushier" than others. A pushy person may think everything is going great – however, her teammates might have a different perspective. If one person walks away from conflict, and another speaks his mind and doesn't back down from an argument, this can lead to poor decision-making and unproductive work.

Personality and behavior assessments are great tools for improving a team's understanding of its own dynamics, and they give team members a better understanding of why they react to their colleagues in certain ways. This new understanding helps them think about how they can relate to one another more effectively, at the same time that it breeds tolerance by helping people understand that different approaches may be valid in different situations.

With a greater level of understanding, team members begin to see one another differently. This allows them to adjust their own behavior for better results, and they're able to interpret others' behavior with more insight and empathy.