Developing Your Own Team Coaching Journey: What Happens Next?

In this closing episode of The Team Coaching Journey – Where Teams Come Alive, Georgina and Allard step back from their hypothetical team coaching journey with ACME to look at the bigger picture. They recap the journey from initial engagement and discovery through team relaunch, coaching, individual sessions, live-action coaching and final review — and reflect on what emerged along the way.

A key theme is the balance between task and relationship: while teams need to get things done, collaborative work depends on their ability to have genuine contact with one another. Georgina and Allard also explore other interventions that could have supported ACME, and why the next step in any team coaching journey may not always be obvious at the start.

You'll discover:

• How the ACME team coaching journey unfolded from initial engagement to final review.
• Why balancing task focus with relational contact is essential for effective collaboration.
• How team coaching themes can emerge from what happens in the room, rather than being decided in advance.
• When stakeholder interviews, observation, workshops and profiling might add value.
• How larger experiments can turn team coaching insights into real-world learning.
• Why practitioners should develop, test and refine a coherent approach of their own.

As Georgina and Allard bring the ACME journey to a close, they leave practitioners with an invitation: make the team coaching journey your own. Develop an approach that is congruent with your philosophy, put it into practice, notice what works, reflect on your learning edges, and keep refining your craft.

Mentioned in this episode – the team coaching journey illustration

Brought to you by Team Coaching Studio - The world’s leading academy for team coaching. To find out more about us visit https://teamcoachingstudio.com/

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to Teams Transformed, the podcast for people who want to see real team transformation.

SPEAKER_02 0:07

For courageous coaches, curious leaders, and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of Teams.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

We your hosts, Georgina and Alard. Here to journey with you through transformational insights on how to coach teams with presence, depth, and emergence.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Let's explore not just the tools but the art of transforming teams. If people have been with us over these last eight episodes, it might be useful to just kind of circle back to the you know where did where did we start and what's been happening over the last eight episodes.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Yeah, so we started with the initial email from a sponsor who actually, now I say that, we probably need to loop back and have a conversation with. But um the initial sponsor who was the HR' business partner.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Was it Sarah?

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Sarah, yes, who put us in touch with the team.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

And Sarah gave us a little bit of a sense of the work that was needed, but not that much. Um we asked to get in the room and meet the team and have a team engagement session. So we joined um one of their normal team meetings for an hour and a half to really explore what they wanted from team coaching, what they wanted from us for us to share our approach.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

And they wanted to go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

We then did uh we did a bit of discovery work. The team, the team really asked for that. Uh they wanted to do a bit of an assessment up front. Not not all teams do, but ACME, the leadership team at ACME did. So we ran a team selfie, I remember, and debriefed some of the results with them. We did some one-on-one interviews with different team members. And uh yes, and so, you know, came up with some initial hypotheses about what this team might need and what its strengths and and and potential learning edge was.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

And then we uh debriefed that with the team.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Explored and during that debrief noticed have we had a lot more opportunity to put our own attention on to what the team felt like and how they were interacting with each other. And it lifted it off the page from the diagnostic tool, which is yeah, more words on a page into the into the relational human experience.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

We then had a had a team, a team launch or a team, I think we called it a team relaunch, but really to set set the team up for the work that was um that was needed, got some more clarity on and some agreements and buy-in in terms of what the learning agenda for the team was or is. And uh and that really set the stage then for um for at least the initial few coaching sessions that we had with them, where there were very, very clear themes, things that we needed to work on in that particular coaching session.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah, went through those. I was gonna say, oftentimes the kind of themes that you can expect that often come out at that stage is a polarity around that comes from the Cape Cod Institute, you know, strategic and intimate. Uh, to what degree the team focuses um more on task and content and action, and to what degree they focus on their relationships and their capacity to have good contact with each other. Um, so that's often something we're paying attention to at that stage because without good enough contact, it's very hard for tasks to go well. Collaborative tasks, individual tasks are okay, but collaborative tasks are likely to struggle. Um so we're aware there's some uh lens about stage of team development that are there in the background as we're encountering the team. And and as you say, they became the the themes or figures topics for team coaching sessions.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

Yeah, and uh around that same time we started up some individual coaching with the team leader and the different team members in order to support their contribution to the team, then um did some live action coaching that we um that we talked about in our in the last episode of this podcast. And ended this phase with a final review session, which we described in our in our debrief. Yeah. And uh, and hopefully what what the diagram doesn't show is that that last that last arrow should really loop back to the to somewhere at an to an earlier stage of the diagram and and uh you know where we we we set off on a new on a new cycle.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

How are we doing? What progress are we making? Yeah that's really important.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

And no, and just maybe a couple of last remarks, but you know, we didn't cover everything in our pod. We could have, we could have there's other interventions that happened with acme along the way or could have happened. Yes, we might example.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

We we could have done um interviews with other stakeholders like uh direct reports or uh customers. Um we could have gone and observed the team in town halls or out um working with their stakeholders in their environment.

SPEAKER_02 5:37

We could have um we could at one point we could have we could have included a workshop. You know, we could have stepped out of our role of team coaches and maybe run a workshop on on particular skills that the team want team members wanted to develop, could have done more diagnostic work.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

Yes, such as individual profiling. Um I know many colleagues in in team coaching like to use tools like uh the Enneagram or Myers Briggs uh uh to bring personality into it or uh leadership circle. There's so many different kinds of diagnostics um that can help to raise awareness if that's part of your your profile. Um we could have also um created bigger experiments. Uh one team I worked with, um, their brand, you know, what what came out of one of the figures that emerged through the coaching was that their brand wasn't good in the organization. They were not seen as an aligned and effective executive team. Um so the experiment was to do a team event with their senior leadership. So about a hundred people were there. Where instead of preparing heavily on the content that they were going to present, which is normally what they'd do, is they were preparing for how they would show up as a team and how they connect and engage with the whole senior leadership team. So the types of interventions you might do beyond the team coaching journey may not be clear at the start. They may come come out of the discovery work or of figures that emerge throughout throughout the team coaching experience.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

Right. And and so I think the the parting invitation to whoever's has been listening to this faithfully is by all means make this team coaching journey, make it your own. If you were if you were studying with us, and maybe some of you are, if you were studying with us, we'd the only thing we'd ask you is that it's uh that your version of a team coaching journey is congruent with your philosophy, with yours with your strong beliefs about learning and development and about teams and and what's needed in the world. So make sure it's congruent and uh and make sure that the different elements of your team coaching journey hang together in a coherent fashion. And uh and if you were studying with us, yeah, or if you are studying with us, then that's really part of the work that we encourage you to do. Develop your own, develop your own approach.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

That's right, well put. And uh and then put your own approach to practice and reflect on that, see what works, see what where your own learning edges are, same as we'd expect our and hope for our clients to do. And gradually over time, you will grow and master the art of team coaching. And please leave any comments, questions, thoughts, feelings uh on in any chat or thread available on your platform or your podcast platform, uh, or connect with us on LinkedIn. We look forward to staying in contact with you.

SPEAKER_02 8:54

Yeah, go to our website, make sure that you uh that you're a member of our community, and we'll see you soon in the world of Team Coaching Studio.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

If you liked this episode, you will love our free ebook, Beyond the Blueprint: a guide to emergent team coaching. It's the ultimate resource for leaders and coaches driving true team transformation. Grab your copy via the link in the show notes, hit follow, and we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

Thanks for joining today's Journey of Teams Transformed.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

If this sparked a new insight or a deeper question, we invite you to sit with it. Not to solve it, but to let it unfold.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

For resources, community, and reflection prompts, visit teamcoachingstudio.com.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Until the next time, stay present, stay curious, and keep leaning into the art of emergence.