Team Coaching

• The behaviour and culture of senior teams have a huge impact on their business. This is especially true of the Board. A cohesive and high-performing team makes a critical contribution to delivering results and a motivated workforce. A mediocre or dysfunctional team - and there are many - both reflects and creates organisational and interpersonal problems that limit success.
• Much of the impact that business leaders bring to their role is delivered through and by their top teams. We believe that building a healthy team is one of the key tasks of leadership - and often one of the most difficult.
• This is especially the case with 'virtual teams' where the dispersal of members across a country, continent - or indeed the world - poses special challenges to both leader and members. Teams that are cross-cultural, whether virtual or not, project teams that are brought together for a specific purpose and 'self-managed' teams of all kinds also face extra difficulties in delivering consistently high performance.
• In the past few years, Sandler Consulting has increasingly been approached to work with Boards and senior teams. As a result we have built up a great deal of experience in this area and now specialise in coaching teams as well as individuals - either as stand-alone projects or in conjunction with one-to-one coaching of the team leader (and in some cases other key team members).
• We believe that teams can only deliver outstanding performance when they align their attitudes and behaviour with the organisational tasks that they exist to carry out. Discovering how to remain consistently and successfully 'on task' will unlock a team's full potential and also enable team membership to become an enjoyable and motivating experience.
• This is easier said than done as all teamwork generates complex interpersonal and group dynamics which have to be understood and harnessed effectively if a team is to become 'more than the sum of its parts'. These underlying patterns have a subtle but direct impact on the team's ability to achieve results. A poor team dynamic can hamper or derail the efforts of even the cleverest of teams.
• We help top teams gain insight into these dynamics, creating 'safe' ways for members to examine their functioning and talk honestly about strengths and weaknesses. We then work with the team to generate and implement practical, sustainable improvements in the way it delivers its business goals.
• Among other methods, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a particularly powerful tool for illuminating the individual differences in working style which exist within a team. We have used it to dramatically helpful effect on many occasions. We have also found that a team 360 degree feedback process is a valuable method of surfacing (often unspoken) difficulties.
• We have worked with teams from a range of organisations, usually at Board or senior level. Typically, these have one or more of the following features:
  • Boards who are facing particular challenges in leading their business.
  • New teams who need to accelerate their journey to performance.
  • Longstanding teams which have become uncreative, sterile or too 'cosy'.
  • Teams where members are working in 'silos' rather than together.
  • Project teams together for a limited time with a critical organisational task to deliver.
  • Teams whose functioning is marred by interpersonal conflicts or tensions.
  • Teams with a new leader who wishes to take the team in a new direction.