Choose two service companies with which you are familiar, such as Facebook, Amazon, and UPS. Apply Hills Strategy Development Framework to them. F

Train Managers How to Effectively Coach Their Teams.

In the workplace, not only should there be team players but also team coaches.

Masterful coaching has proven its value in various organizations for several years. Research has revealed that managers with strong coaching skills have higher-performing teams, increased morale, and many other desirable characteristics. Teams produce much of today's work in organizations, yet there is a dearth of proven methods to guide talent development professionals how to train managers to effectively coach their teams.

Skillful coaching is a highly valued leadership competency. Managers who are good at coaching have better relationships with their individual team members, and their teams are consistently effective. According to numerous studies, team members who have managers who practice skillful coaching are satisfied; participate more; and have more commitment to the team, to individual members, and to achieving mutual goals. However, one challenge for talent development professionals is manifesting, fostering, and sustaining coaching skills in managers.

Why the focus on team coaching

Because teams are more than the sum of their individual parts, coaching teams is different from coaching individuals. Team coaching is not just coaching several individuals on a team at the same time. It speaks to the music an orchestra creates and to its individual musicians.

Manager team coaching is gaining momentum for three reasons. First, time and, thus, cost savings result if managers can coach their teams as full groups as effectively as coaching each person individually.

Next is the substantial evidence of the power of individual coaching. Talent development professionals know the return on investment and outcomes from teams whose managers are skilled coaches. More than ever, the benefits of coaching can have an impact on every level of an organization with managers who are skilled team coaches.

Finally, teams produce more than three-quarters of the work in companies, and teams are diverse. A manager with team coaching skills can resolve and prevent conflicts, increase motivation and even work passion, and interact optimally with each team member and the team as a whole while attending to individual differences.

To get an idea of the impact managers who are skillful coaches can have on their teams, replace the word "coach/es" with the word "manager/s" and replace the word "client/s" with the word "team/s" as you read the International Coaching Federation's definition for professional coaching:

"Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help clients improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives. Coaches are trained to listen, to observe, and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach's job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has."

Learning to be a team coach is like learning to swim. Getting in the water and swimming is part of the learning process; it would be difficult to learn to swim without actually doing it. The learning curve for swimming starts with instruction on safe and dry land where participants learn the foundations. Next, participants learn a model that shows them the steps involved in swimming. The last step involves going into the water and practicing to eventually achieve and maintain fluency.

Step 1: Build the foundation using a common language

Not surprisingly, skillful coaching requires skillful communication. Training managers to become competent team coaches starts with them learning a common language for use within their teams and throughout the organization to help people communicate more effectively at work. While being applicable, easy to understand, and fun, the common language should resonate with each team member, the team leader, and the company.

The Creating Team Coaches model is based on decades of synthesized research and a novel approach of keeping it simple. The methodology is grounded on the premise that the reason many initiatives to create a common language don't stick is because the nomenclature is awkward and sometimes even cryptic or overcomplicated.

Regardless which common language you choose—whether it's a version of DISC or DiSC, MBTI, or any other communication coding—it will help managers help their teams.

Helping team members understand each other's communication preferences and how people work best together using a common language is one of the important steps of team formation that managers should not overlook. Research shows that teams that consistently meet performance goals spend half their time in the forming and norming stages of team development getting to know each other, developing team norms, and adopting technology. Managers will benefit from taking time to attend to these important team dynamics as coaching opportunities with their teams.

A team coach should consider teams over various developmental stages based on the team's contexts, such as a project development perspective or a cyclical perspective. Managers must pay attention to what individual team members need to optimally work together. To become skilled team coaches, managers must take the time to listen, observe without biases, and learn what their teams need to be successful. In addition, team members need to feel safe to speak freely and openly with each other and with their manager.

Creating psychological safety can help manifest team cohesion, and creating a common language can empower the communication necessary for the sincere discussions and active listening required for feelings of safety and cohesion to form. The team can begin to create a learning culture in which it openly discusses mistakes without placing blame as a way for the team to improve over time.

Step 2: Learn to coach teams

The second step maps the tenets of individual coaching—such as powerful questioning, perspective shifting, and creating structures—to team dynamics. To be successful team coaches, managers need to be able to transparently observe and respond to their teams as a collective group and as individual members. They must learn the art and skill of coaching individuals in front of the rest of the team in ways that benefit that individual and the entire group.

There are no industry-sanctioned certifications for team coaching; however, some well-adopted best practices can serve as a model for teaching managers to coach their teams.

Simulations. Simulations are an important part of learning to be a team coach by providing a safe place. This intentional practice helps managers learn how to communicate with another person in that individual's preferred style while maintaining their own authenticity, thereby improving interpersonal and team communication. Talent development professionals will benefit from providing an ongoing opportunity for managers to learn from and with each other by practicing team coaching together.

Creating awareness. Team coaches help team members see situations and goals through the same lens. When members accurately perceive a situation the same way, they can collaborate more effectively to achieve their goals. Team coaches need to be skilled at facilitating the conversations required for team members to get on the same page. Note that such discussions often involve conflict.

Managers who are skilled team coaches help team members to embrace conflict as an opportunity to learn more about each other. Conflict resolution occurs through awareness, and awareness is achieved through clear communication, powerful questioning, and perspective shifting.

Designing actions and accountability.

Team coaches help teams co-create and operationalize the specific actions necessary to achieve their goals by talking about it as a group. Each member is accountable for the overall outcome, regardless of individual performance.

Team coaches also help team members talk as a group about individuals' expectations and how they can support each other to keep the pace to performance. Likewise, team coaches ensure that each team member's voice has been heard and that members give and receive constructive feedback from each other along the way.

During individual coaching, coaches don't offer advice; they instead ask questions to help the client gain his own awareness. Team coaching is different when the coach is the team's manager. Managers not only consult with team members by offering advice; they also mandate certain behaviors.

To be an effective team coach, managers must use more questions than statements to elicit critical thinking and discussion among team members. Helping teams design actions and create accountability for achieving goals is a typical activity for managers. However, doing so using a Socratic approach helps managers become effective team coaches.

Step 3: Coach teams

This final step brings managers into the water to practice swimming—coaching teams in a safe space. It's important to create a space in which managers feel comfortable making mistakes and learning from them. Explain and demonstrate how the space in which managers will practice is safe, and provide a variety of observers as managers practice team coaching to offer unique perspectives and insights.

Managers can get their feet wet first by practicing team coaching with teams that are not their own. Such teams should represent groups in various teaming stages and contexts.

Learning to coach teams among a cohort of managers can be the most efficient way for managers to learn. Peer coaching can be helpful for managers to practice with each other and discuss team coaching progress, but a group of managers learning from and with each other about team coaching can be much more powerful.

Talent development professionals and managers will benefit from creating or adopting a set of measurements to monitor the impact of their team coaching over time and to forecast future team performance.

The pandemic's impact on teams

A new team development stage has emerged for many teams as a result of the rush to virtual in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Because many employees unexpectedly started working virtually, they must now also become innovative teams and figure out how to keep up productivity and well-being.

In addition to maintaining productivity, team members want to feel as connected as they do when physically together in a shared space and not isolated apart in their individual homes. Managers who are competent team coaches can help their teams through this adaptation process and even improve their teams' effectiveness.

These rapid changes create new stressors and anxieties, such as feelings of being cooped up and having cabin fever. That stress and anxiety can hinder the performance of newly forming teams and existing teams now meeting in virtual venues. In such situations, every leader and manager should do three things:

Plan extra time and extra patience to get things done. There will be stalls due to technology issues caused by user and vendor errors. It's important that people don't feel rushed in these team meetings and that they feel comfortable using the new technology and know how to communicate in the new venues.

Talk about it. Working in physical isolation is a different way of conducting teamwork for many, and it is imperative that employees learn about best practices for virtual teamwork. In a hurry to get things done, managers should not skip the crucial initial steps of team development. They must take the time to create new norms and keep the conversation going. Psychological safety is paramount.

Invest in coaching. If your team managers are not skilled coaches, train them or consider hiring experienced professional coaches to help individuals and teams learn to thrive.

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THE TRUE TEST OF VIRTUAL TEAMS

Productivity is up, but how are communication, talent management, and employee engagement going?

It's hard to imagine a time where work has changed so much in so little time. And yet here we are. Remote work has transformed how employees communicate, collaborate, and coordinate. Supervisors have been rethinking how to manage and lead. And employers are challenged to maintain work communities as staff remain apart. Those challenges are most acute in how employees team.

In some sense, the team is synonymous with personal interaction. Early last year, when you thought of work teams, you likely pictured people gathered around a table or in front of a whiteboard collaborating, brainstorming, and innovating solutions together and celebrating hard-won victories over a shared meal. That time is no more.

Or is it? Must employees physically be together to be a team? Do the basic rules that guide team interaction change simply because individuals are physically apart?

I would argue that the shock of such a physical manifestation of change—being apart—prompts many people to imagine that they must rewrite the book on how employees work together and how they team. And yet, I do not believe that is so. The rules that guide human interaction and collaboration remain largely the same; the attributes of good teams are unchanged. How individuals most effectively lead and work on teams still follows the same basic guidelines that conform to how people work, act, and feel.

The only factor that has changed about work teams is physical proximity. But that absence of proximity doesn't mean that the basic human psychology of how people work together has changed. People still need the same things from their leaders and teammates that they always have: vision, goals, purpose, trust, and community. Don't overthink it. The challenge, however, is how to maintain the practices we have always known to be true—but now without being in the same room.

Talent development plays an important role by reminding leaders that good teams—whether virtual, in person, or a mix of both—succeed by completing important work, aligning around a common vision, vigorously challenging team members, and leveraging all team members' skills and abilities. And in the course of accomplishing their goals, leaders still must develop the important and far-reaching benefits of belonging, community, and purpose.

The TD department can bring best practices to teams and leaders that enable them to instantiate best leadership practices in the remote space. Broadly speaking, leaders' and TD professionals' main concerns regarding leading a remote workforce can be grouped into three categories:

• Communication, coordination, and collaboration

• Performance management

• Team engagement

Each of those requires leaders to rethink and reassess how they may go about managing those fundamental gears of team leadership. And the TD function already has the expertise in those areas to help leaders navigate this new world.

Communication, coordination, and collaboration

One common complaint I have heard is that remote work inhibits communication and coordination. However, a small Harvard Business Review study found that among people who know and work with each other, communication increased by 40 percent since the start of the pandemic lockdown. The study reveals that companies may be adapting well to the surge in work from home and remote work. That also corresponds with my clients' observations as well as anecdotal evidence from colleagues in the field.

Technology such as Zoom and other remote meeting solutions have enabled workers to continue to collaborate and communicate effectively. Certainly, remote employees have needed to adjust the cadence and means by which they work together, but some data suggests that organizations may be doing well overall.

TD professionals can and should continue to leverage such technology on a regular cadence to help leaders ensure their teams are aligned on priorities, communicate roadblocks, and collaboratively solve problems. Depending on the scale and scope of the work, team leads can schedule morning huddles, end-of-day check-ins, project status meetings, or weekly video team check-ins. In addition, leaders should increase one-on-one conversations with their team members.

Each meeting should have standard questions that help participants stay focused and on the same page. For example:

• What roadblocks are you encountering?

• Have we made any decisions that we need to communicate to anyone not on the call?

• What actions have we decided on, and who owns each one?

• What is each action's due date?

These regular meetings, married to purposeful alignment questions, are effective in keeping the team communicating and cooperating. Team members will understand what needs to be accomplished, by whom, and by when. TD can actualize such checkins and provide leaders with guidance on the kinds of touchpoints and questions that can help teams focus.

If the alignment ideas sound familiar, it's because they are merely attributes of good team communication. There is nothing necessarily special that managers must do to ensure remote teams are communicating and cooperating. Aligning on priorities, communicating progress, and ensuring that actions have an owner and a due date are basic team and leadership activities.

The fact that teams are now physically distant forces them to purposefully engage in the very kinds of communication and cooperation that they should have been purposeful about doing in the first place. Because of that dynamic, I am often seeing teams become more effective over time rather than less so.

Performance management

In my work with leaders, I have heard a good deal of concern around performance management for remote workers. A common question that sums up their concern is: How do I know they are working?

That has always been the great fear of remote work. Leaders often think that if they are not watching their employees, then they may not do any work. It is difficult to come up with a comprehensive list of reasons that kind of thinking is wrong headed; the list would be too long. But again, what does good performance management look like? It remains the same as it ever was: being clear on expectations and deliverables, removing roadblocks to forward progress, and checking in on that progress.

TD professionals are well positioned to remind leaders of these tried and true practices. Where once leaders could assure themselves that their teams were diligently working by dint of their physical presence at a desk, they all too often neglected basic performance management practices. TD can, and should, design and build frameworks that they can use to ensure that leaders are communicating with and aligning their teams. In practice, that looks like frequent check-ins with employees and teams to:

• Ensure agreement on priorities.

• Set expectations.

• Clarify deliverables and due dates.

• Agree on what good looks like.

• Understand and remove any roadblocks.

• Jointly design the best path forward.

• Mutually monitor progress.

It doesn't matter whether a manager is in the same room or 1,000 miles away, the basic mechanics of leading and managing team performance are the same. Certainly, it requires more effort on the leader's part to carve out the necessary time to engage in those activities. But one unanticipated benefit of the current situation is that supervisors are now forced to engage in the activities that they may have been neglecting previously. To free up their time, team leads must learn to delegate more and give their people more autonomy.

The result is a virtuous cycle where granting greater levels of autonomy and decision making to employees is leading to higher levels of employee and team engagement. That is a good thing. Developing training that addresses trust and delegation benefits both managers and their direct reports. The benefit for employees is that they will have more autonomy and control over their work environment. The benefit for leaders is that they will now be able to focus on being leaders rather than micromanagers and harvest the benefit of enhanced employee engagement that this brings.

The TD team should also consider creating templates and cheat sheets that leaders can use to work with employees to ensure that quality of work over quantity of work is the focus. The templates will provide both parties documentation to track whether the employee is meeting the work standards and deadlines.

Team engagement

Personal interactions and relationships are a critical facet of team community, engagement, and loyalty. Remote work can erode those dynamics and has the potential to diminish the duty people feel to their teammates.

People unaccustomed to remote work can struggle with team engagement and the sense of belonging and community that teams can generate. The development of personal relationships that physical proximity fosters can take a big hit when team members who once saw each other in the office every day are now working from their respective kitchen tables.

The sense that good teams have in not wanting to let their teammates down is built not necessarily on the work itself but rather on the relationships that have developed in the doing of the work. The potential loss of that dynamic is perhaps one of the more troubling aspects of remote teamwork.

Considering that, TD professionals can help leaders create environments that foster personal relationship building such that people generate loyalties to one another and not just to the work. Mentoring and success partnering are great examples of creating situations that lay foundations for developing meaningful personal relationships. They are also places where the TD team can provide significant value. There are numerous ways to do so. For example:

• Pair up experienced people with less- experienced individuals.

• Pair up individuals who have some knowledge or skills with those who do not.

• Create success partner teams that help fellow teammates develop a new skill.

• Use small pilot teams to develop a new product or brainstorm new services and innovate solutions.

The point is to get people together, even if remotely, in more intimate settings so that they can potentially build the kinds of personal relationships that generate interpersonal loyalties. A good leadership practice is to tend to relationship building to generate those loyalties. TD professionals can help by educating leaders on the utility of relationships and by designing mentoring and success partnering programs that drive relationship building.

Address basic needs

TD professionals have an enormous opportunity to engage with leaders to not only recognize and clarify the potential pitfalls of remote work but also to highlight how team members' and teams' basic needs have remain unchanged. Training should emphasize leadership best practices such as frequent and clear communication, aligning on expectations, having clear shared goals, and developing relationships.

TD's role here is primarily to influence leaders to purposefully engage in such activities and to provide resources that enable leaders to do so. Leaders and TD should use the new normal we are now engaged in to leverage the leadership practices we all know to be best practices.

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