When ”the Team” is the Entire Organisation

Written By Ana M. Marin

Case study provided by the Team Coaching Community of Practice

Team Coaches: Madalina Zaharia, EIA SP, ITCA P, PCC, CSP, MA and Nicoleta Neghina, EIA SP, ITCA P, PCC, MA

Context and the broader system 

This team coaching assignment was a pivotal component of the EMCC's Romania - Team Coaching Community of Practice Initiative, aimed at:

  • Supporting the advancement of team coaching in Romania by creating pertinent case studies for practitioners and both social and business communities.

  • Assisting the non-profit sector in Romania through pro-bono provision, offering exposure to a comprehensive team coaching process.

The focal organization in this team coaching endeavor was a significant Romanian NGO, currently expanding and navigating a leadership transition. The coaching process spanned over a year, engaging two co-team coaches with three teams from the organization across three different levels: the Extensive Leadership Team, Project Management Teams, and the Subject Matter Experts (SME) Team. Approximately 100 hours were dedicated to team coaching throughout this period. Although originally slated for a shorter duration, we were heartened to observe sustained engagement from both the teams and the organization at large, even amidst crises and significant challenges.

In our reflective practice, we aimed to distill the unique aspects of this engagement, encapsulating them in the chosen title "When 'the Team' is the Entire Organization: Leveraging Ongoing Re-contracting in Collaborative Team Coaching Design". Specifically, we addressed:

  • The intricacies of collaborating with relatively small, purpose-driven organizations (approximately 40 people) where individuals strongly identify with the team or organization beyond their daily working team.

  • The significance of working with a "real team" or "intact team" within contemporary team dynamics, particularly in sectors such as nonprofits, where stability, financial resources, and time are often scarce, underscoring the importance of meticulous contracting and co-designing processes.

  • The importance of ongoing re-contracting and the implications of collaboratively shaping the agenda over a one-year engagement involving multiple teams.

Throughout the iterative contracting process, we observed the fluidity and permeability of the teams and the work environment, where individuals often assumed multiple roles and responsibilities. Given the fluidity of team members involved in the project, we were also guided by Amy Edmondson's concept of teaming, fostering an environment where it is safe to speak up, collaborate, experiment, and reflect (acknowledging that reflection can be challenging in a fast-paced, action-oriented environment), while promoting learning and embracing mistakes as integral to the team's growth process.

While believing in co-creation of the team coaching process with the organisation, its leaders and its teams, we supported our approach on various school of thought. The theoretical frameworks that underpinned our approach included Peter Hawkins’ Systemic Team Coaching, David Clutterbuck’s Complex Adaptive Systemic Team Coaching, Alain Cardon’s Delegated Processes, as well as 6 conditions of team coaching, 3D Mapping and appreciative inquiry approaches for organisation level interactions.

This approach was complemented by the SIDER structure (Scoping / Inquiry (/Co) Design of the agenda / Execution / Review & Learning) to ensure comprehensive and effective coaching.

As team coaching practitioners, supervision was an integral part of our process, ensuring ongoing refinement and effectiveness.

Initial Contracting Considerations

The initial engagement involved discussions with the HR responsible, who also served as the organization's psychologist and later transitioned to the role of Wellbeing responsible, and the Operations Director, who was expected to gradually assume expanded responsibilities, including part of the current Executive Director's role. From the first interaction, it became apparent that each person held multiple roles within the organization. The initial invitation from the organization was to work with the project managers and subject matter experts (SME) as a team, as the Executive Team had already begun working with a coach/consultant on the clarification of vision, strategy, values, and executional pillars.

From our initial interactions, it became apparent that when referring to the "team”, they meant the entire organization (comprising 35+ people). Moreover, we sensed that there were more systemic aspects that could benefit the organization if addressed, beyond the initial requirement of the sponsors. However, at that point, it would have been only an assumption on our part as team coaches. Therefore, we proposed conducting an Inquiry and Diagnosis phase before committing to a specific team coaching process to determine the optimum way to proceed. At this stage, we only contracted to develop a diagnostic report based on this phase.

Only after completing the diagnosis stage we will further agree on the form of the team coaching process. It is important to state that, as promoters of EMCC Team Coaching endeavors, we engaged in continuous contracting about what team coaching is and how it differs from training or consultancy, realms that the organization was more familiar with.

Inquiry & Diagnosis

What we used within this stage:

  • Observation of teams at work, including the entire organization during a strategy event, focusing on understanding dynamics, power dynamics, affinities, and influences, and familiarizing ourselves, as coaches, with the NGO's strategy, priorities, values, and workspace.

  • Crafted emails sent to conduct interviews and collect PERILL 360 feedback.

  • Dynamic Inquiry - semi-structured, dynamic interviews with one or both coaches, including the entire organization and the NGO President, conducted to ensure alignment and comprehensive understanding while building trust within the coaches and organization.

  • Application of PERILL to the entire organization.

The Scoping & Inquiry phase resulted in a 17-page observation report detailing patterns, themes, strengths, concerns, and opportunities for improvement. The report was well received by the Executive Team and became the foundation of the entire team coaching process. It was first presented to the Executive Director & Leadership Team and then at the Kick-Off to the entire organization in a more concise format.

The report helped the team coaches gain the team's trust, an important prerequisite for a team coaching process. Throughout the entire team coaching process, the report remained relevant, with the Leadership team drawing action items from it to improve the overall efficiency and impact of the NGO.

Reiteration of Contracting and The Team Coaching Agenda Co-Creation

Based on the diagnosis and the discussion after the report, since it was still not clear which individuals comprised "the team" for the team coaching process, we devised an intermediate proposal. This entailed conducting a kick-off with the entire organisation to present the results and establish potential directions for the team coaching process. After the kickoff, five important themes emerged for the organization to become more impactful and efficient, with the potential to be addressed during a team coaching process.

Upon reflecting on these stages, our experience and intuition led us to believe that focusing solely on the Project Managers and SMEs would not effectively address the organization's most important themes. Therefore, we decided to adopt a systemic approach, initiating the process concurrently across three organizational levels: the extensive leadership team, project managers team, and SMEs team. Given our understanding of the concept of "the team," we believed that a multi-layered synchronous process would be most beneficial for the organization.

Consequently, we recontracted with the sponsor and the leadership team, and the team coaching process proceeded simultaneously with three teams in parallel. The objective was to co-create an impactful intervention across the organization.

During these initial stages, we utilized the IDDD collaborative cycle, as proposed by Peter Hawkins:

  • Inquiry: Identifying the most significant voices to involve in the team coaching process.

  • Dialogue: Making sense of the collected data to determine what is needed.

  • Discovery: Synthesizing the insights from the Inquiry and Dialogue stages to identify necessary actions.

  • Design: Co-designing the approach to working together to address the identified needs, aligning with our collaborative inquiry.

This experience demonstrated once again that co-creating the coaching agenda is an iterative process involving both the team and the coaches. While the themes are determined by the team, team coaches take ownership of the coaching process. In developing the agenda, we emphasized the importance of continuous partnership, empowering team members to articulate their needs both individually and collectively, fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility. Throughout the team coaching process, the agenda evolved continuously, with ongoing re-contracting sessions to ensure alignment with the team's evolving needs and goals. This iterative process was closely linked to the initial contracting phase.

Execution & Review Phases. Overview of the Team Coaching process

Figure 1: Overview of the Team Coaching process

During the team coaching process, we employed multiple developmental streams:

  • Off-site, in-office, and online interventions and workshops;

  • In-office coaching alongside regular business meetings;

  • Coaching to improve relationships within the team, focusing on clarifying roles, responsibilities, and their impact on each other's roles.

  • Continuous status meetings with the project sponsor;

  • Process status review meeting with the new Executive Director, in the second part of the process.

With each session, we maintained the coaching agenda established during the kick-off, evaluating its current relevance, and how addressing the chosen theme for the sessions could potentially impact what they considered important. During the closing session, in addition to reviewing the learning, we focused on the areas still deemed most important to improve: roles and responsibilities, clarity, and accountability across all three teams involved in the team coaching process.

For the Kick-Off and agenda co-development, given the NGO's focus on social impact, collaboration, and creativity, we used 3D Mapping to better understand their current and preferred organisational system. 3D Mapping is a tool used to bring multiple dimensions and perspectives together to understand the elements of the system collectively. During this mapping process, the entire organization, split into three multidisciplinary teams, created two 3D models—one representing the current reality and the other depicting the future they aimed to create. From this, they extracted, prioritized, and voted on the themes they wanted to address within the team coaching process.

Furthermore, as highlighted in our discussions, there was a need to clarify the role of the Extensive Leadership Team and how they can exemplify teamwork. To address this, we began by inviting the team to create their own Team Charter. We organized a dedicated workshop with the Extensive Leadership Team to formulate their charter, with the intention for each team to follow suit. This initiative, well-received by the participants, aligned with the team coaching agenda and aimed to be cascaded to all other teams by their respective leaders. 

Moreover, during this workshop, it became evident that the SME’s Coordinator should be included as a permanent participant, a role identified during the diagnosis process.

Subsequently, Workshops 1 and 2 with all three teams focused on meetings observation, covering its content, processes, and behaviors. For meeting observations and feedback, we drew from the works of Clutterbuck, Hawkins, and Cardon. This approach was based on the premise that meetings reflect the team's day-to-day workings, and improving meeting effectiveness would have broader benefits. We found Cardon's observation on systemic delegated processes particularly relevant to our teams' needs, as it emphasizes focused discussions and decision-making, which aligned with our agenda themes. This approach had a noticeable and lasting impact on meeting efficiency and also served as a platform for developing leadership competencies.

Throughout workshops 3 and 4, we continually checked the alignment of the agendas with the broader team coaching themes established during the kick-off meeting. One consistent action that emerged from the workshops was the need for a clarification conversation between the Project Managers Leaders, the current Executive Director (formerly the Operations Manager and PM Leaders), and the SME’s Coordinator. We proposed a team coaching session between workshops 3 and 4 to address this, which was welcomed by all involved parties.

The closure event, co-designed with the Sponsor and Leadership Team, aimed to further build on the most prominent theme from the kick-off until the end - clarity on roles, responsibilities, and role autonomy. 

Additionally, in each session with the teams, we placed a high importance on accountability discussions to ensure follow-up actions were taken, aligning with the team coaching desired outcomes.

To conclude the entire team coaching process, despite changes in team structures and personnel, including a new Executive Director and the emergence of new roles in the Leadership Team, we decided to reassess using the PERILL tool to make sense of the data collectively (still in progress). This served as an invitation for the team to continue the process independently, building on the foundation laid in 2023. 

Reflections & Implications for Practice 

  • How many coaches?

We found that having two team coaches was a strength in our approach. The organization's complex dynamics and the intricate web of roles and relationships within the team were too complex for one person to observe effectively. Additionally, having coaches from different team coaching backgrounds, along with their supervisors, proved advantageous. This diversity allowed us to adopt a non-dogmatic approach, tailoring the team coaching process to the team's needs rather than trying to fit it into specific schools of thought.

  • Continuous Contracting: When, How, and What We Contract with the Team

We believe that the continuous reiteration of the contracting process positively impacted the overall process. The NGO was very receptive to our suggestions regarding the design of the team coaching process. It was a great advantage for this initiative that the sponsors were highly committed to the process and ensured its smooth operation for almost a year.

It's worth considering whether this would have been different if it were not pro bono and if each additional aspect had to be paid for - the ideas proposed by us didn't require a financial investment but rather time and energy. It's worth mentioning that this pattern of enthusiastic agreement without considering resource constraints was also common in the organization – a theme we continually invited the team to reflect upon.

We engaged in recontracting at every stage of the process, from scoping and inquiry to the kickoff, agenda, and beyond, adjusting based on the current reality of the organization and the teams involved. We also believe that encouraging recontracting within each session was crucial. Considering the extended duration and the shifts occurring between the kickoff and each subsequent session, we find that evaluating the significance of the agenda items and their alignment with the team's current needs proved to be highly beneficial.

Despite this, in hindsight and through our supervision process, we realized that while the diagnosis report and five themes to work on were clear, we could have further clarified how exactly these themes would translate into clearer measures of success for each team. We have realised that we did this more implicitly than explicitly.

  • Who is the team?

How do we effectively engage with a "team" that identifies with the entire organization, consisting of around 35 people, despite their involvement in project-based teams and functional teams? Despite the presence of distinct teams (Extensive Leadership Team, Project Managers Team, Specialist Team, Communication Team, Project Teams), the challenge lies in the multitude of roles each member simultaneously juggles, often resulting in a tendency to report to the entire organization. This plurality creates confusion in roles and responsibilities, necessitating the structuring of independent teams as the organization grows, although uncertainty persists.

We view this as a critical theme in today's environment, where teams experience increased instability, and constant change and uncertainty are commonplace.

In navigating this challenge, we've focused on:

  • Clarifying roles and responsibilities within the organization.

  • Balancing between the concepts of "team" and "teaming," prioritizing aspects such as speaking up, collaboration, experimentation, and reflection over the traditional notion of assembling the right people at the right time within a stable framework.

  • Striking a balance between engaging with the entire organization (during kick-off and closure sessions) and conducting functional team coaching sessions.

  • The Goldilocks Effect in the Diagnosis Process

Our lingering question revolves around the distinction in scope and complexity between the diagnostic process as a result of the team coaching stages of scoping, inquiry, and discovery, and an organizational diagnosis typically conducted within a consulting process – what is the optimal approach?  While the immediate answer could lie in the fact that team coaching focuses on observing and reflecting without providing recommendations, we believe that if executed effectively, the initial stage of team coaching can greatly benefit the team. Perhaps due to uncertainty about the evolution of this team coaching process, we treated the diagnosis as more of a standalone stage rather than a stepping stone into the team coaching process. We pose this question while also considering the significant time investment we, as team coaches, allocated to this stage, a stage which is not generally adequately compensated, at least in the Romanian market.

After consulting with our team coaching supervisor and peer team coaches, we decided to conduct a diagnosis based on individual dynamic semi-structured interviews and to utilize the PERILL questionnaire. Using dynamic, semi-structured interviews permitted us to probe deeply into aspects critical for the members of the organization.

We interviewed almost 40 people, some jointly and some individually. We opted for joint interviews with management and those in "sensitive" roles within the organization, both to access information collectively and to enhance our growth as a coaching team.

Another lingering question we take from this process is how do we align or complement any team coaching assessment instrument with what emerges in the interviews? We conducted interviews with the instrument in mind to facilitate correlation, but we still ended up with a lot of information to correlate, which eventually translated into a very comprehensive 17-page diagnosis report. The structure of the report reflected the structure of the interviews, with the PERILL assessment results complementing the overall picture.

  • How do we address the unsaid and difficult truths?

When faced with sensitive information, how do we balance the need for transparency with maintaining confidentiality and respecting each other's perspectives? 

This is another point of reflection we continue to explore: we opted for transparency and directness during the inquiry and discovery phases. However, upon reflection, we felt fortunate, mainly because the Leadership Team members were open-minded individuals with a genuine desire to create an impactful organization and were knowledgeable about coaching processes. Having one of the Directors, who had extensive corporate experience, openly express appreciation for the honesty of the report and how it was received by the Executive Director and the Leadership Team, was particularly valuable.

However, as in any coaching process, we recognize there is a fine line between being open to feedback and becoming defensive. Therefore, considering that trust is not yet fully established in the initial phases of a team coaching process, how do we navigate discussions around sensitive topics?

  • Conclusions: what really worked in the end

Over the course of more than a year-long process, assessing the impact can be challenging amidst various changes like turnover and unexpected crises. Nevertheless, several lasting themes and effects have emerged:

- Establishing intentional reflection and collaborative learning spaces proved crucial in an organization biased towards action over understanding requirements. Providing opportunities for team members to reflect and learn together, along with dedicated workshops on lessons learned, proved highly beneficial.

- The tendency to view corporate structures and formal procedures negatively sometimes led to confusion and frustration. Clearing up roles and structures was vital in addressing these issues.

Based on feedback and discussions with each team:

For the Extensive Leadership Team:

  • Increased self-awareness among members and emphasis on meeting preparedness and defined roles.

  • Recognition of the need for clarity regarding their purpose within the organization.

 For Project Managers:

  • Improved understanding of the value of project meetings and roles within them.

  • Enhanced awareness of decision-making processes and the importance of preparation.

For Subject Matter Experts (SME):

  • Transitioning to a cohesive team under their coordinator, with increased awareness of problem-solving tendencies.

  • Heightened sense of team belonging and implementation of collaborative procedures.

Common impacts across all teams:

  • Foundation Building: Defining roles, responsibilities, and team processes through a team charter and meeting norms significantly enhanced team dynamics and workflow efficiency.

  • Notable impacts of the team charter included:

  • Clarification of roles and decision-making processes.

  • Improved conflict resolution and communication skills.

  • Mitigation of overzealous proactivity, leading to more efficient work.

Another important learning from this process was the significance of leadership modeling and role clarity, especially in smaller organizations with close leadership-employee interaction.

References

Ana M. Marin

Coach, Trainer, Speaker, Bullet Journal Addict

https://www.anammarin.net