“Team Coaching & Mindfulness”
Cinversation on Stage
with
Irini nikolaidou & Olga Papatriantafyllou
7th ICF Coachathon – Greece
On December 5, the 7th Coaching Marathon entitled “Thriving in a Challenging Business World”, organized by ICF Greece, took place at the OTE Academy, in Maroussi.
The event included a series of speeches, discussions & live coaching sessions, focusing on modern coaching practices and their role in empowering companies and organizations to respond to challenges, empower their executives and teams, and respond to changes in a constantly changing environment.
Moving Minds supported the Coachathon institution again this year, with the participation of Irini Nicolaidou, accredited PCC, ACTC Professional Coach by the ICF, in a live discussion on stage with Olga Papatriandafillou – Coach, Psychotherapist, and Founder of the Mindfulness Institute. Together they shared reflections on the issues that concern teams in corporate environments and how Team Coaching and Collective Consciousness are connected. In the context of these dialogues, ways were sought to support businesses and their team members to grow.
Regarding Team Coaching, the questions answered mainly related to the following:
What is Team Coaching?
Team Coaching is a strategy for increasing the effectiveness and cohesion of teams in systemic environments. It is delivered by a specialist coach to a group of professionals working together on a project or co-shaping an outcome or outcome.
It usually includes a series of group or individual coaching sessions, and lasts several months, depending on the goals set.
Team Coaching helps teams define goals, make appropriate choices, create a vision, promote team spirit, and achieve their goals. This process can greatly enhance the collective intelligence of individuals who are part of a group.
Research in Organizational Development shows that only one in five teams is high performing. It is, therefore, no surprise that, as Professional Coaches, we are called upon to support teams and their leaders to become more effective.
What is it that we can achieve together that none of us could achieve separately?
If the team is ready for coaching, the focus can turn to evaluating the team’s performance, and what the team needs to do for maximum success and effectiveness.
There are different systemic approaches and types of assessments, so we choose to make the right choice for each group, which will target what is most important to our client and encourage productive dialogue.
Due to its complexity and increased demands, Team Coaching differs significantly from 1:1 and requires expertise, special knowledge, and significant experience.
How does Team Coaching work in the workplace?
With Team Coaching, issues of team structure, design, and collective performance are examined in order to design the necessary interventions and install them at the various stages of the process. Hackman and Wageman, researchers of workplace effectiveness, describe six critical conditions for team structure and design:
- Is it a real group with clear members and boundaries?
- Does the group have a purpose that directs its work?
- Does it have the right people with the knowledge, skills, and experience to perform the required work?
- Does it have a stable team structure with fewer than ten members who have a clear set of rules and agreements to guide how they get their work done?
- Does it have a supportive organizational framework that provides the information, time, and resources to do its job?
- Does it have professional support to help the team develop individually and as a unit, either from an internal or external Coach or Facilitator?
A company needs Team Coaching when it needs to:
- establish common language and codes of communication and common decoding
- to disseminate the Organization’s Values, Vision, and Mission throughout the hierarchy
- to establish best practices in day-to-day operations
- to create structural coherence, continuity, and consistency
- to build relationships of trust and self-accountability
If any of these above conditions are not aligned systemically, it can lead to interpersonal conflicts. As we all know, interpersonal conflict in the workplace disconnects members from each other, causing commitment and trust to falter. But mainly, it distances the executives from the common purpose, resulting in the team not having cohesion, rhythm, and good performance.
What is the difference between Team Coaching and Group Coaching?
While Group Coaching helps individuals individually, Team Coaching provides teams with the tools and mechanisms to communicate and collaborate to achieve success together. It is a systems approach methodology that supports team members to work together more effectively to achieve common goals in the workplace.
