Team Coaching
That Works
BY
DR. JACQUELINE PETERS, PCC A N D DR. CATHERINE CARR, PCC
Organizational development research indicates that only one in five teams is highperforming. As such, it’s not surprising that as coaches, we often get called in to
support teams to be more effective.
Knowing how to coach teams to high performance
is challenging because the field of team coaching is
relatively new and unstandardized, and the quality
and impact of team-coaching approaches can
vary greatly. What feels great for the team and the
coach in a session won’t necessarily translate into
ongoing results, so coaches might be wasting their
time and impairing their credibility. Additionally,
several researchers have found that poorly timed or
uninformed team coaching can do more harm than
good. It is no wonder that many coaching thought
leaders and professional organizations are calling
for evidence-based approaches to team coaching
practice that are grounded in research and have a
track record of results.
The High Performance Team Coaching (HPTC)
system that we developed draws on a decade
of team-coaching practice and years of research
in organizational development, as well as more
recent work by team-coaching researchers and
practitioners. HPTC is a comprehensive, systemic
approach designed to support a team to maximize
its collective talents and resources to accomplish
and exceed the goals required by the organization.
It has a results-oriented focus achieved by aligning
the key actions a coach or leader takes to the
beginning, midpoint and ending stages of a team’s
natural business cycle.
What makes the HPTC system unique is that it is
a comprehensive, modularized approach that
allows coaches to identify, understand and explain
the rationale behind their coaching approach. It’s
based on research that coaches can refer to when
they talk to leaders about why they are doing the
things they are doing, and it provides a sense of
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Coaching World |
August 2013
17