Team coaching

Teams are funny beasts. Full of individuals, but also they have a life of their own.

It’s hard enough for individuals to get it together to sort out their own development, and evolve their skills. But for a whole team to recognise they need to get better at something and sort out the getting-better? Hard.

I work with teams who know that it’s time to sort out that thing they’ve been meaning to sort out.

If that’s presentations, well, that’s easy. 

We can run either some half-day/one-day workshops or, if you’re really serious and can split into groups of eight and don’t mind getting your chequebook out, we can run our world renowned presentation skills masterclass. We can add in optional one-to-one coaching too, which makes the learning even more applicable.

But what if it’s not presentations?

Maybe you know you need to think through your positioning, your leadership, the way you communicate with your customers/stakeholders. The way you communicate with each other maybe.

When I’m working with teams, I bring a mixture of outside input (frameworks, theories, lenses) and space-holding for you to think things through yourselves.

For example, I had a team recently come to me for presentation skills. It quickly turned out (as it often does) that they wanted more.

They wanted to think through how they approached sales as they were all originally project managers, not sales people, and had never had any formal sales training. We spent a couple of sessions gathering their thoughts about who their favourite clients were, where those clients came from and what the common denominator was.

Turned out the common denominator was the founder of the company - so they decided to give the MD responsibilities to someone else and he could just do what he did best - cultivate his network.

Then the team came back and said, well, cool, but how can we approach new clients so that we’re extending our reach. I came with a broad framework from one of the people I respect most in this field (I’m a total nerd about communication, systems, leadership, conflict… so I almost always have a reference!) and we used that to redesign the way they contact people via email.

The common thread is that I didn’t really do anything revolutionary - it wasn’t “training”. I just helped them look at the bright spots of what already worked and helped them detective-out how they could sustainably do more of that.

I tend to work with teams in three-month or six-month blocks. We start by setting up some broad success measures, then we go where it makes sense to go. 

In fact, one of my clients says, “We know it doesn’t really matter where we start when we’re with you. We always end up where we need to be.”

So, if you and your team sense it’s time to evolve your leadership together, drop me a message here.