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What is team coaching?
Team coaching is a process where a business coach walks business teams through a training program while also being available to problem-solve specific issues and challenges that could hinder team success and/or business scaling and growth.
Introduction
Team coaching has been hailed lately as ‘the future of work’ for successful businesses.
And as a scaling business coach who’s literally ‘in the trenches’ on a daily basis, I completely identify with this.
The truth of the matter is that business teams are the foundation of profitable, scalable businesses—and it goes without saying that if you can assist your teams by providing them with team coaching training, then you’re highly likely to create better future outcomes for your business.
There’s an old saying—a team is only as good as its weakest player.
Well, when it comes to business teams, there’s some truth to this.
And in my experience, I’ve seen business owners, founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs effectively increase the competency and skill level of their teams using a proper team coaching program.
With that being said, it isn’t always clear what to look for in these coaching programs.
So in this blog post, you’re going to learn exactly what to look for in a business team coaching program.
I’ve seen my own team coaching program yield incredibly positive results in helping businesses to scale to 7 figures, 8 figures, and beyond—and you’re about to learn exactly which values I focus on in my program to help get business teams the kinds of amazing results they’re looking for.
10 Topics To Look For In A Business Team Coaching Program
First of all, I think it’s really important to describe the difference between a coaching program and a training program.
- A business team training program generally consists of a set of materials (a curriculum or program) that you provide for your team as a learning and training resource.
- A business team coaching program, on the other hand, takes this a step further.
A business team coach will still provide training materials, but they’ll also provide personalized team coaching and training beyond even what those materials could provide on their own.
Another great thing about business team coaching is that a coach can help you to identify specific problem areas, and help to provide solutions for those problems that the training materials alone may not actually cover.
What you’re about to read is a list of the 10 most important topics that every team coaching program should be covering and providing.
If you’re looking for a coaching program that’ll actually help take your business team to the next level of performance, you’re going to want to make sure that your chosen coaching program at least covers these 10 topics.
1. Company Vision
It’s crucial for your team to understand the vision for the company (along with the values it stands for), and to adopt this vision whenever they’re completing projects, accomplishing work, or making decisions that will affect the direction or bottom line.
Covering this topic can be surprisingly useful and beneficial.
You may be surprised at how many members of your team are either unaware of the company vision, or partially mistaken in what they believe the correct interpretation of the vision actually is.
Making these adjustments, and ensuring that everyone has a thorough and accurate understanding of the company vision, are crucial ingredients in the process of helping your business team to reach its fullest potential.
2. Company Culture
Nowadays, there’s a big conversation going on about the importance of a quality company culture.
In fact, statistics report that 46% of job seekers rate company culture as an important factor.
And while leadership holds a great deal of the responsibility for creating a quality company culture, it’s also true that each team (and thus, every team member) plays a role in this as well.
3. Communication
When discussing communication, it’s crucial to talk about issues like addressing conflict, real listening, expressing feelings, and being open and honest when communicating.
It goes without saying that companies are going to thrive and succeed at higher levels when they’ve mastered their ability to communicate.
This is true not only between leadership and on-the-floor teams, but also between different departments—and even between individual team members.
This is especially important for executive team coaching, because communication is a skill that must be mastered at all levels.
4. The Importance Of Processes
Everyone knows that policies, procedures, systems, and processes play an integral role in helping everyone to understand what work they should be accomplishing and how they should be accomplishing it to perform specific tasks and achieve specific objectives.
With that being said, it’s also important to make sure that your team understands the importance of these specific processes so that they understand how vital it is that they’re followed appropriately.
This could help to prevent corner cutting, and will just generally increase the quality and value of work accomplished.
This is also an essential element of leadership team coaching, as it’s even more important that leadership understands how to train appropriately for these processes.
5. Cooperation And Collaboration
Great businesses are built on the foundation of a great idea, a bit of startup capital, a lot of hard work, and cooperation and collaboration between team members.
This is really the ‘magic sauce’ that makes businesses successful.
Well, with that being said, this can all too easily get left behind once a company starts to reach a certain size.
We all know that ‘corporatization’ can be a death sentence for good, old-fashioned, well-intentioned internal team cooperation.
This is why high-performance team coaching can be crucial to companies that want to scale to 7 and 8-figure income levels.
At a certain point, you really need to reintroduce this magic ingredient back into the ‘sauce,’ and make sure that it’s still ‘alive and breathing’ within your organization.
6. A Leadership Quality Assessment
Every high-quality coaching team building program should include some kind of a leadership quality assessment—to help you determine where you are in terms of how your leadership is performing within the organization.
Listen, you can’t escape the fact that every team is going to need some leadership—and the quality of your leadership will act as a filter for how well your teams are able to conduct the vital, day-to-day affairs of your business.
In my program, I use a 360 leadership assessment to help dial in those crucial leadership metrics.
And I can definitely tell you this…
If you’re thinking about using a team coaching program to help you increase business efficiency, this should always be a priority factor in the process.
This is also useful and important in the context of small business leadership.
7. Mutual Respect And Patience
Another thing that people often forget about business entities is that they’re really built from people.
Sure, there’ll be patents, processes, legalities, and even products and value propositions that’ll be required in order for your business to function.
But at the end of the day, the important pillars of your business are really the humans involved in it.
For this reason, mutual respect and patience are essential for helping your team to learn how to succeed at their highest level.
Humans don’t like to be disrespected.
And as you probably already know, employees tend to leave organizations when they don’t feel respected by leadership or their fellow teammates.
This can lead to an expensive, higher-than-average turnover rate.
8. Clarity And Commitment To Shared Goals
When you think of the word ‘team,’ your brain may conjure up images of a basketball team or football team preparing for a big game.
You may think of those crucial locker-room pep talks, where the coach gathers the players around and instills within them hope and determination for the game to come.
Well—the reason for why these team-oriented structures are so prevalent not only in the real world, but also in our imaginations is because they speak to the crucial leadership function of making sure that your entire team is clear on their objective, and that they’re committed to a shared common purpose.
This inspires a sense of camaraderie that’s extremely powerful, regardless of what game you’re trying to play (or what objective you’re trying to achieve).
Learning how to leverage this to improve your business team’s performance is a seriously underrated and often overlooked tactic that a quality business team coaching program should help you to cover.
9. Mutual Trust
Simply put, trust is a must.
- Does your team trust their leadership?
- Does leadership trust their teams to accomplish work successfully and move the needle forward?
- Do you, as the founder/business owner, trust your team to help you scale your business successfully?
Trust is a tricky issue.
And whenever I administrate a team coaching program, I always make sure to thoroughly address it.
Where there’s a lack of trust, you’ll always find a lack of efficiency.
The problem with trust that’s difficult to overcome is that if it’s placed in the wrong people, it can actually open your business up to vulnerabilities.
For example:
If you choose the wrong people, and then trust them with important tasks, they may let you down.
But with that being said, a lot of people don’t understand that a lack of trust tends to have an overall greater destructive effect on the future growth of any enterprise than one-off incidences of trust placed in the wrong people.
This can be a difficult problem to shake—but it’s crucial that it be addressed in any team coaching program.
10. Freedom And Autonomy
Do your team members have the necessary levels of freedom and autonomy required to do their jobs and conduct the crucial affairs of the business—in the manner that works best for them?
Or are they being micromanaged (or feel micromanaged) to the point where they’re literally cut off at the knees and ineffective?
See, there can actually be two separate issues going on with this particular topic at the same time.
A lack of freedom and autonomy is, itself, an issue—but even a perceived lack of freedom and autonomy can sometimes be just as damaging.
Therefore, it’s crucial to delve deeply into this topic, and to explore it to the fullest extent possible—so that you understand exactly what’s going on.
And any quality team coaching program should cover this.
What Is Team Coaching In The Workplace?
Team coaching addresses a range of important and relevant challenges for businesses, organizations, or enterprises—with the goal of fixing problems and creating solutions for those challenges.
It helps to facilitate the further training and problem-solving of the performance of individual teams, addresses problems at the team level and at the individual level, identifies and creates solutions for problems occurring on a company-wide scale, and helps to facilitate greater levels of teamwork—which in turn, will help to facilitate better overall business success.
What Is The Role Of A Business Team Coach?
A business team coach should be focused on the objective of addressing the most likely common, problematic areas that business teams are facing within their organization.
A skilled business team coach will understand which issues are most likely causing problems, and how to help the team address those issues in a positive, proactive, and productive manner.
Often, a business team coach can help to elevate your business team even above and beyond what a normal training program could ever achieve—because a coach can deploy immediate problem-solving and investigative strategies to help zero in on the issues that are actually causing problems within the business—without being limited to only discussing the problems covered by the training material.
I would also like to add here that it’s really important to find a team coach who understands how successful businesses function. Even more specifically, it’s crucial to find a coach who actually understands how to build and scale successful companies.
This could not be more crucial.
You want someone who knows what they’re doing.
Business Team Coaching Can Help To Facilitate Growth, Harmony, And Structure Within Your Organization
At the end of the day, this is what matters the most.
Getting your business to the point where it’s scaling and growing towards a promising, profitable future.
And as a seasoned, successful scaling business coach, I’m passionate about this process.
Need some help figuring out what to do next?
Consider reaching out for a free consultation.
I’d love to help you explore the possibility of growing your business and helping you with the process of deploying a strategic team coaching program—to help you take your enterprise to the next level, and beyond.
