Transformational Coaching to Lead Culturally Diverse Teams

Sunny Stout-Rostron

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429879548
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychologie
• Sous-sujet: Psychologie industrielle et organisationnelle

In this book, Dr Sunny Stout-Rostron examines real-world experience and the contemporary literature on group and team coaching. She analyses how team coaching can guide coaches to help leaders and teams flourish in complex, culturally diverse organisations. As well as presenting a variety of team coaching models she also presents her own model, High-Performance Relationship Coaching, the result of many years of working with global corporate teams.

Dr Stout-Rostron illuminates how team coaches can help teams to learn from and interpret their own experiences, and to understand the complexity of the environment in which they work. Her team coaching model is explored over eight chapters, beginning with the role of the business team coach and leadership coaching processes. She evaluates how to work in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and how to shift culture through transformative leadership coaching, explains the depth of relationship systems coaching, and explores how to apply a variety of methods including Ubuntu coaching. The book encourages team coaches to develop deep self-awareness, team awareness, cultural diversity awareness and wider systemic and relationship awareness. Filled with practical stories and examples, it describes how to work successfully with these models in the real world.

Transformational Coaching to Lead Culturally Diverse Teams is a key guide for coaches in practice and in training, HR and L&D professionals and executives in a coaching role. This is essential reading for all team coaches.

1 Introduction

Team coaching

Sunny Stout-Rostron

The business issues facing us today need innovative thinking and fresh solutions, and so cannot be solved by one inspired leader, but by interconnected teams that are having to adapt to changing societies and cultures. This requires pioneering new organisational processes and strategies – and vitally, harnessing the technological-digital Fourth Industrial Revolution. To do so, organisations are increasingly looking to team-based working units to improve agility, organisational flexibility and competitiveness.

What does a business team coach do?

Team coaching focuses on an effective, sustainable and measurable way of developing managerial leaders and their teams. A business team coach encourages clients to think for themselves and to develop an awareness of their own conscious and unconscious behaviours, which may influence performance in the workplace. Traditionally, the development of organisations and corporations supported business and performance development models, but ignored the importance of values to individuals, teams and the business – which underpin organisational culture and behaviours. This crucial lack laid the foundation for the development of individual and team coaching – not just for leaders and senior executives but for individuals at all levels within the workforce.

For this reason, organisations have integrated team-based structures into their daily organisational routine. Although “team” and “group” are often mentioned simultaneously, they differ in terms of their interdependence. Individuals within a group tend to work independently with minimal mutual accountability, whereas a team member has individual and collective accountability while working independently and interdependently (Abrahamson, 2016: 8). Team-based work units allow for a move from the model of the dominating single leader to a collective leadership model where team members can step into multiple roles and functions (Abrahamson, 2016: 12). Inside this new environment, the role of the team coach is to help individuals to find their own voice, and yet help the team to create its own collective and supportive processes to achieve organisational outcomes.

The team coach helps the team to learn from and interpret their own experiences, and to understand the complexity of the environment in which they work. Team coaching works because it is about the results experienced through the relationship between the coach, each individual and the resulting team dynamic. It is from this base that the team continues to build their relationships with key stakeholders within the business – it is critical that the team identifies all the relationships that are core to the business. Gaps are identified in terms of building relationships, managing people, problem solving, decision-making, executing strategy, communication skills and facilitating meetings. The team will work together in alignment with organisational values and goals.

This book examines the contemporary literature on group and team coaching to see how it can guide coaches to help leaders and teams manage and flourish in complex, culturally diverse organisations and societies. It introduces a variety of team coaching models, culminating in the author’s team coaching model which is the result of numerous case studies over many years working with global corporate teams. This model, developed through organisational team coaching practice, includes deeper development of self-awareness, team awareness, diversity awareness, cultural awareness and wider systemic and relationship awareness. The book provides coaching stories and examples to highlight how to work with the models and tools being presented.

My work has been strongly influenced by the need in South Africa for coaches and leaders to learn to manage diversity, develop cultural competence, understand leadership as a function of cultural difference and develop an ability to lead and coach across cultures. As a British-American, I continue to coach in the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia and across sub-Saharan Africa. I believe that successful management of today’s increasingly diverse workforce is one of the most important global challenges faced by all leaders. The move from homogeneous to heterogeneous societies is an irreversible trend, and many of today’s organisational challenges stem from the inability of leaders to fully comprehend the dynamics of diversity and culture.

Contributing authors

This book represents my personal, signature approach to team coaching along with that of my four contributors: Deborah Williams, Dr Dumisani Magadlela, Creina Schneier and Anne Rød. My coaching work over the last decade has been strongly influenced by the Thinking Environment^®, Relationship Systems Intelligence™ and Systemic Team Coaching (STC). Also, as I live and work in South Africa, much of my last two decades in organisational work and research has been focused on culture and diversity. Research suggests that cultural diversity in the workplace has significant potential to enhance business success (Stout-Rostron, 2017). It is therefore important that business coaches working in a global marketplace understand diversity and develop an understanding of the multicultural issues facing coaches and their coachees on a daily basis.

What is clear to us in our approach to team and individual coaching is that we partner with the client, become trusted advisors and help them to become trusted advisors to their stakeholders. We tend to work experientially, collaborate extensively within the client’s system and collaborate externally with other executive and team coaches to be sure that we are designing the right programme and bringing in the best coaches for the intervention.

It is not our approach to be the expert, be directive or pretend that we have the answers for our clients. Our aim is to help the team members to develop their own thinking, feelings, appropriate behaviours and outcomes when considering their new challenges. The team coach is a catalyst in helping the team to generate new thinking.

Aim of the book

Our aim is to introduce you – whether leader, coach or Human Resources (HR)/Organisational Development consultant – to current thinking on coaching teams and the variety of models available to you so that you can develop and begin to practise working with your own team coaching model. We bring to you a practical and experiential book with theories and tools which you can apply immediately to your own team coaching.

To gain the most wisdom from the experience of other team coaches, my four contributing authors share with you their expertise in working with teams across a wide variety of global sectors. Creina Schneier and Anne Rød explain the nuts and bolts of Relationship Systems Intelligence and Relationship Systems Coaching. Deborah Williams shares her experience as an internal Organisational Development consultant within the field of financial insurance and medical administration, who also works in partnership with a variety of external team coaches. Dumisani Magadlela introduces us to the African concept of Ubuntu and its practical application and relevance to global teams.

Client stories: teams A, B and C

This section introduces three client teams in different organisations and the journey they set out on for their team coaching. We bring in various stories throughout the book as the teams progress on their journeys. For the purposes of confidentiality, organisational names and details have been omitted.

Team A – Human Resources ExCo for financial services company

• Initial meetings with stakeholders.
• Draft proposal.
• Design of the individual and team coaching interventions.
• Individual coaching interviews.
• Emergent themes document.
• Meetings with sponsors.
• Management and leadership individual and team profiles.
• Two-day initial team inauguration forum.
• Ten monthly half-day team coaching sessions.
• Interim regular reviews and final closing review.

Team A was an HR ExCo comprising 18 team members within a financial services company. The brief was to work with team coaching as a way of developing the HR ExCo’s performance, effectiveness and ability to manage change. The process involved several initial meetings with the Strategic HR Director. Based on our discussions, we designed a team coaching intervention that would be practical and experiential – helping team members to work from their own experience to learn how to better manage themselves and lead others. Our focus was building relationships, being authentic communicators, engaging positively with each other, and managing how to structure and facilitate meetings at every level in the business.

This was a very diverse team in terms of race, gender, experience and expertise. The overarching brief was to develop leadership capacity, trust, accountability and the ability to manage conflict, broadening out the team’s influence and visibility within the larger organisation.

Team coaching process

To commence the process, I put in a proposal with clearly identified stages which would be reviewed as we completed each stage. My initial meetings were with the sponsors and leaders in the team coaching process. Together we designed a draft proposal for the entire intervention. I then met with each team member in individual 75-minute sessions to get to know them and understand their roles and responsibilities. This allowed me time to build trust and rapport while gaining an understanding of the organisational culture – and what was working and not working within the team.

The next step was to sit in on one of the ExCo meetings to observe how they communicated and engaged with each other. This gave me an idea of how meetings were facilitated, the levels of conflict, how that was managed, who spoke up in meetings and who remained silent or disengaged. Armed with all this information, we agreed to hold a two-day team inauguration forum away from the office, which was to lay the building blocks for our team coaching sessions. Prior to this, each participant completed a leadership profile we planned to use during the two-day forum to help develop individual self-awareness and team relationship awareness.

In the two-day forum, we began to work with the specific behaviours required for team success and to identify the core issues helping or hindering the team’s performance. We worked with specific issues that needed to be addressed, at the same time as building relationships, forging new ways of working and bonding as a team that could begin to work with more trust and safety. We identified how the team wished to work in future. My role was to facilitate this through the subsequent monthly team coaching sessions. The purpose of the two-day forum was to build the skills and behaviours to enable better communication and engagement with each other. This also formed the basis of our team coaching sessions together.

A month after the team inauguration forum, we commenced regular monthly team coaching sessions for a period of ten months. With my two sponsors, we incorporated a review every third month to identify new behaviours, new learning and enhanced performance within the team. Each monthly team coaching session was designed in the light of issues emerging within the team and core events taking place within the business, and in alignment with the team and organisational strategy. Throughout the entire process, I had regular meetings with my sponsors including the Head of Strategic HR to keep us on track with organisational as well as team goals. Towards the end of the process, we had a final review of what learnings had emerged from the overall process.

Team B – Business Unit ExCo for medical scheme administrator

• Initial meetings with stakeholders.
• Draft proposal.
• Design of the individual and team coaching interventions.
• Individual coaching interviews.
• Emergent themes document.
• Meetings with sponsors.
• Management and leadership profiles.
• Two-day initial team inauguration forum.
• Ten monthly half-day team coaching sessions.
• Interim regular reviews and final closing review.

Client challenges

Team B was my case study to continue to develop and test my team coaching model. I worked with colleagues who were also completing their International STC Senior Practitioner Diploma with Peter Hawkins and John Leary-Joyce. It was a requirement to take on a team coaching assignment with a real team in an external organisation for a period of 12 months. The team coaching assignment was to run in parallel with the STC modular programme, giving the team coaches a chance to apply their learning from each module throughout the life of the programme. I and my co-team coach worked with the Hawki...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: Team coaching
• 2 Leadership and team coaching
• 3 Transformative leadership coaching: Shifting culture in organisations
• 4 Theories, models and tools informing the High-Performance Relationship Coaching Model
• 6 The case for Ubuntu Coaching: Working with an African coaching meta-model that strengthens human connection in a fast-changing VUCA world
• 7 Relationship Systems Coaching
• 8 The High-Performance Relationship Coaching Model
• 9 Final ref lections
• Appendix A: ExCo coaching interview protocols
• Appendix B: Staff coaching interview protocols
• Appendix C: Values survey questionnaire
• Index