8 Steps to a More Effective Team

As an executive coach, you may be asked to coach teams or to support leaders in coaching their teams to help organizations achieve greater effectiveness and success within group settings. To give you a preview of how team coaching works, today we’re outlining our 8-step coaching process for building successful teams. Much like one-on-one coaching, this TEAM coaching process includes coworkers involvement and consistent follow-up, and most importantly, is guaranteed to be effective. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Begin with a small survey.

Ask all team members to record their answers to the following two questions:

1. On a 1 to 10 scale, how well are we doing in terms of working together as a team?
2. On a 1 to 10 scale, how well do we need to be doing in terms of working together as a team?

Step 2: Calculate the results and share them with the team to start a discussion.

The goal is to get a commitment to the need for team building as a way to bridge the gap between the level of current effectiveness versus required effectiveness. Once everybody is aligned, proceed to the next step.

Step 3: Now, ask the following question:

“If every team member could change two key behaviors that would help us close the gap between where we are and where we want to be, which two behaviors should change?” Prompt each team member to record his or her selected behaviors on a flipchart or whiteboard.

Step 4: Help team members to prioritize the recorded behaviors and determine the most important behavior to change for everyone.

This step is often the most enlightening as the group begins to uncover together the direction that will lead them towards greater effectiveness as a team. At the end of this step, the group should have chosen and committed to one behavioral area to change.

Step 5: Have each team member hold a brief one-on-one conversation with all other team members.

During the dialogues, each member will ask his or her colleagues to suggest two areas for personal behavioral change (other than the ones already agreed on in the previous step) that will help the team close the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Step 6: Allow some time for each team member to review his or her list of suggested behavioral changes.

Let them choose the one that seems to be the most important. All team members should now announce to the team the one key behavior that they will change.

Step 7: Now, it’s time to introduce the follow-up process.

Encourage all team members to ask their colleagues on a monthly basis for “suggestions for the future”. This will help them be more effective in demonstrating 1) the one key behavior common to all team members, 2) the one key personal behavior, and 3) an overall effective behavior as a team member.

Step 8: Conduct a mini-survey in approximately six months.

Each team member will receive confidential feedback from all colleagues on his or her perceived change in effectiveness. Let the results determine next steps for the team.

We encourage you to give this process a try. Invite friends and colleagues to a breakfast workshop and see what common goal you can reach as a group. As effective teamwork is becoming increasingly important, the time that you invest in learning this process has the potential to produce a big return for your clients’ teams and their organizations.

If you’d like to learn and role-play this process in a more educational setting, learn more about GCG’s coach certification program here. We certify coaches to enable them to practice TEAM coaching and equip them with the resources and materials needed (online dashboard, survey reminders, binders, handouts, spreadsheets, etc.) to simplify the process even more.

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