The Agile Business Innovation‘s Podcast

Team Coaching: Every solution creates the next problem

Every team starts as an idea in the head of the founder. With success comes complexity. Complexity allows specialization and volume, but also creates loss of focus, resources and direction. In this episode we take you through the challenges of four main stages of development.

Team Coaching: What is team coaching?

One of the things I do in Intact Academy is to train team coaches. Team coaches are a little bit of a different animal than executive coaches. In individual coaching you coach in a one on one relationship, where one person is the helper and the other person receives help. In team coaching, we want to create sustainable results and ongoing development in the whole team, not just for the individuals in the team. This requires different competencies. Not only intra-psychic and relational competencies, but also systemic and inter-team competencies.

Team Coaching: The quadruple focus of team coaching

Within Agile Business Innovation, I help businesses innovate more quickly than their products, so that they can get to market on time. Usually, I find organizations that have great ideas but lousy adaptation of their organization to modern times. I help them renew their leadership, renew their cooperation, find a new relationship with clients, so that they can accelerate their time to market.

One of the integral parts of my business is team coaching. We've talked about what team coaching is, and that you need a triple or quadruple focus for that. Now, I want to talk about: What do you look at when you’re team coaching?

Team Coaching: What are the diagnostic levels of team coaching?

We talked about the definition of team coaching and the triple or quadruple focus you need. We talked about levels of what you actually look at - structure, dynamics, psychodynamics. Now, I just want to go through those levels one by one to give you some idea of what you are looking for. We're only talking diagnostics now. We'll talk about interventions later.

When we talk about the structure of teams, what are we looking at? If you want to have a healthy team, there's two main rules. One is that all the levels are in sync with each. The other thing is that what is happening within the levels is congruent. We’ll start with the structural level.

Team Coaching: How do you work at the dynamic level?

We talked about the structural level of team coaching, and now we're talking about the level of dynamics, otherwise called the interpersonal level,. This level is all about how people relate within the team. If the team is doing well, they're willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt, and they're willing to support each other. If one person has a problem, the other person says, “what can I do to help you?”. What's an ideal team for me is when it comes to the wire that everyone eds to be done, regardless of their status, or their position, or their role in the team.

The dynamics are healthy, if there's cohesion, if people want the team to survive. You see them helping each other, complementing each other, doing what needs to be done, disregarding their egos, and working together seamlessly. Where one drops the ball, the other one picks it up.

Team Coaching: How do you work at the psychodynamic level?

Today we're going to look at psychodynamics, or the level of unconscious functioning of the group. Within transactional analysis, we talk about four main concepts at this level: imago, transference and countertransference, personality as in the influence of life script on the team, and authority structure.

I want to talk about imago this time because it is one of those concepts that are often misunderstood, and used in a way that perhaps isn't very helpful for team coaching. According to Eric Berne, an imago is a mental picture of what the group is or should be like. Anytime you enter a group, you've already got a picture in your mind, based on your previous experiences of a group, based on your archaic ideas of what a group should be. Maybe this imago is based on the things you've missed in your primary group, which was your family of origin. You come into each group carrying that backpack, and constantly comparing, and then looking at the group you are actually in through that lens.

Team Coaching: What is the group imago?

We're talking about team coaching. We talked about group imago. It is the mental image of what a group is, or should be like, that you carry with you from other experiences and things you missed, probably in your family of origin.

There's a theory about how group imago develops. Eric Berne ran psychotherapy groups, he was a psychiatrist. His idea of group imago was always a little tilted through his experience as someone who ran psychiatric groups. Nonetheless, it's relevant for team coaching.

A group imago is something we carry inside at an unconscious level. As a team coach it is pretty hard to see what's going on unconsciously, unless you look at the effects of behavior. Or if you bring in exercises which are non verbal. If you ask people to draw, if you use family constellations, if you do exercises around, “How was your family?” and “How do you want this ‘family’ to be?”.

Team Coaching: How do you diagnose the problem?

We're talking about team coaching, and more particularly about the levels of team coaching. We've talked about the structural level, the relational level and the psychodynamic level. Now I want to talk about; How do you diagnose? What kind of diagnostic diagrams do we use in team coaching using transactional analysis?

Eric Berne talked about six different diagnostic diagrams. He talked about a location diagram. You literally draw a team, where you show the physical situation of the team. In a group, you draw a seating diagram, where do people sit? In an organization, you would draw, what level of the building the departments are situated on.

Team Coaching: What are the links between the diagnostic levels?

We're talking about team coaching. What is a team? What is team coaching? What are the levels of diagnosis? It's important to understand where teams are stuck, so that your interventions become a “bull’s eye” instead of a shot of hail. It's better to be direct about what you're aiming for with the team, instead of applying very broad interventions, and trying to hit a moving target.

Previously, I talked about the diagnostic diagrams that Eric Berne uses in his book “The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups”. I want to go a bit deeper into that. It's not just the levels you have to look at. It's also the link between the levels that's important, to understand where teams are stuck.

Team Coaching: Who Has The Power

We're talking about team coaching, and more specifically about diagnostics in team coaching. We've talked about the different levels in teams, the diagnostic diagrams, about how you diagnose roles and the connection between roles at the structure, the relational and the psychodynamic level.

One of the other interesting things I find is, who has the power in a team and what is that power based on? If we look at the structural level, power is based on three different things. One is what we call the “Constitution of the Team”, the other is the law, and the third thing is the culture. At the relational level we look at who has the social influence. Culture is more at the psychodynamic level, because it's based on often pre- or unconscious values.