Organisational team & communication coaching
Creative Coaching with Compassion & Empathy for Yourself and Others
Almost every single commercial outcome, good and bad, is the result of a group or team effort. Being so critical to commercial success, team work relies on developing strong bonds between team members. It also needs to become mostly self-sustainable and resilient when shocks to the system occurs in a volatile world.
How have you and your staff changed during the pandemic?
Are you looking to rebuild and/or restructure your team post-pandemic?
Would you like to maximise business recovery and restart with a new perspective?
Invite creative change and disrupt traditional thinking for a renewed sense of purpose with refreshed perspectives.
I coach leaders and teams to improve communication, mutual understanding and acceptance of each others communication and behaviour preferences. Why? To develop stronger alignment with organisational goals and improve strategic performance to enable better business innovation and resilience. Also to create a great place to work.
Re-align strengths and personality awareness with individual, personalised Lumina portraits and a day on the Lumina mat with the team.
You will be surprised at the change a day of investment can bring to your team’s efficiency, relationships, and performance.
The nature of working in a team during the pandemic lockdowns and onwards into the post-pandemic world staff are now working a hybrid of on-site, in the office and remotely be it at home or back on the road.
How are you and the team handling the changes as a result? Is communication as good as it could be? Is it supporting your business goals, values and culture as well as you hope?
Building resilience for your team in dealing with volatility, fear uncertainty and doubt, ambiguity, and complexity with reciprocal trust and respect is vital to the successful completion of business goals.
START YOUR NEW STORY
Book a free discovery call
10 COMPELLING REASONS TO CONSIDER TEAM COACHING
Encourage empathetic, compassionate teamwork with radical acceptance of individual preferences
Team dynamics can be complex with a broad range of personalities and cultures. Do you feel you have or work in a dysfunctional team? Team effectiveness can be hugely affected by breakdowns in communication and misunderstandings in the differences of individual personalities. Alongside individual roles’ necessary skills, coaching can help develop a set of complementary skills to support business goals.
Encouraging open communication and awareness of self and others behaviours often results in the following 10 reasons to consider an investment in team coaching:
Productivity boost
Shared workloads and shared problems, tasks which are allocated to play to individual strengths rather than pushing those not comfortable with a given task tend to be completed faster with less unnecessary stress. These can help boost productivity for the entire business.
Encourages creative thinking and innovation
Developing a space which encourages creative thinking and doing with genuine enthusiasm from colleagues allows everyone to bounce ideas off each other. Sometimes simply speaking an idea out loud can help the speaker’s brain to more consciously, quickly come to their own answer. Group sessions in a breakout room or even across desks. Remember to allow everyone to come up with ideas – remember the quiet ones sometimes take longer to think about a problem but can have a deeply insightful key to success.
Improved morale
Collective success increases the sense of both team and personal satisfaction and reward. Each member accomplishes more than they could alone – also shares sense of recognition and sense of belonging, results in improved self esteem and encourages repetition of that behaviour. Ensure everyone involved gets that recognition by name. Every single one.
Support network
During times of extreme change, volatility both in the workplace and at home, knowing you have a team who are supportive can make all the difference. It doesn’t mean every staff member or team lead has to be an instant counsellor, or that it’s worth having an on-site counsellor all the time (but access to one may help!) Simply being able to say “I’m struggling” or “I have this thing going on at home” and not be viewed as weak but simply acknowledged with a “What do you need?” from leaders and colleagues can reduce stress enormously. Reduction of stress allows for division of the necessary tasks to whoever else has capacity and gives breathing room to help that person refocus on their own tasks.
It’s one thing to say on social media or in interviews that your business is like a family (let’s face it, some families can be toxic) and another to genuinely treat each other as fallible humans.
Improved communication skills
Learning about each others areas of strengths can – who’s good at what? Who can deal with sensitive customers? Who can haggle well with suppliers? And leads and customers? Who is naturally more competitive? Who is more supportive and patient? Who clashes and why? Who can help mediate? Can they clash in a sound proofed room? Sometimes this can actually help release tension. Radical, right? Head to head constructive arguments with two competitive people can still create respect and support. It depends on how it’s managed and understood by the individuals themselves.
How every individual is seen by others – individual perceptions of a given person can vary wildly – this is where the Lumina mat comes into its own with the cards
One of the main aspects of using the mat is to uncover how everyone in the team sees each other and themselves. The way in which others see ourselves may be surprising. You may think you know yourself well, your strengths and areas where others are better suited. Yet your colleagues may actually disagree and you may be under-representing yourself. This helps everyone see each other through different lenses
Note there are two sides to every perception – the positive and the less well viewed (although even in these, sometimes in some circumstances they can be useful)
Stronger relationships
Much of the preceding reasons serve to develop stronger relationships – more open communication, supportive networks, collaborative work, improved morale, shared tasks, a space to ask questions openly and creative problem solving, a sense of trust in showing vulnerability. The team will motivate and encourage each other to work to their strengths while helping to learn new skills as well.
Increased skills, knowledge and experiences
Much of the above naturally leads to team members new and old learning more and encourages support for practical application of developing skills
Develops future leaders
Open communication, a supportive network, shared learning and willingness to show vulnerabilities yet lead with vision, determination with an ability mix analytical, critical thinking with creative vision. All these can nurture those with hidden leadership skills in a range of business events come to the fore and lead in their own style.
Enables flexibility and resilience
A supportive and collaborative team naturally allows room for flexibility and overall team and business resilience in the face of fear, uncertainty, doubts and volatility. When life happens to an individual, their task are more likely to be taken on board and shared across the entire team (where skills allow). Disruption and shocks to the daily flow of business are more easily absorbed. Imagine having a team where even severe shocks to the system are barely noticed by your customers?
Reduce staff churn
A happier team who feel supported, nurtured, respected and free to develop are more likely to stay with the team. This reduces time, money and effort spent on hiring and training new staff, improves your organisation’s reputation.
THE PROCESS
A step by step guide to working with me
BOOK A CALL
Every good story starts with a call to action. Naturally I need to understand your story and why you want a change
TAILORED PLAN
We will create a tailored plan to achieve the results you desire
GET COACHED
Over the course of our agreed time together, you will learn how to unlock your own potential
ONGOING SUPPORT
Even once you feel you’ve learned enough, you can receive ongoing support for new challenges
What are the steps in the team coaching process?
Effective team coaching needs to work with individuals and the team as whole over a period of time.
Every individual within the team has their own preferences in communication and behaviours.
In order to have a clear picture of each person, initially they will receive their own personalised Lumina Spark portrait.
My coaching has a strong emphasis on positive but realistic development of supportive, compassionate communication and progress towards defined goals.
Everyone within the team will be offered individual coaching support on a one to one basis. Everyone involved will have action plans to encourage and measure progress of self-awareness and their desired outcomes – their beliefs, aligned with organisational goals about themselves and others within the team, how they feel they interact with colleagues and what they feel they can do to improve their own team performance.
I encourage ideas from everyone on how to improve business performance overall and how their actions, how the roles they play affect that performance.
As with the other coaching services I offer, I use the ever-popular GROW coaching model:
- Goals – for the business and the individual
- Reality – the current reality for the same
- Opportunities – to change in alignment with the goals
- Wins – conscious acknowledgement of any successes help a sense of progress towards the defined goals
We will map out a team portrait which will help those in leadership positions have clarity on the overall layout of the team personality.
You and the team will have a fully inclusive team workshop day of discussion and learning of perceptions in order to encourage a healthy, supportive environment to be curated by the team themselves as well as with the team leads.
After this, I will have coaching conversations with the team individuals on an agreed frequency – ideally weekly or bi-weekly. In addition the coaching program offers time for ad-hoc requests of support for emerging challenges. Examples may be meetings with sensitive customers, pitching ideas for innovative ideas to senior leaders etc. Anything out of comfort zones which give huge opportunities to develop one’s complementary soft skills.
Monthly team workshops with individual and team action plans to measure progress. Working as a team we uncover what issues exist and what can be done to mediate, educate and realign the team with your organisation’s strategic and cultural goals to develop a great place to work and build the success you desire.
START YOUR NEW STORY
Book a free discovery call
I care about your success
Starting and enduring life coaching can provide many positive, encouraging and life changing results – otherwise why do it?
It does take an amount of time, mental effort and emotional energy in enacting change. During the process of starting a new story for your self, you may strive, stumble, fail at times. It can be disheartening, but we will strategize and build a bespoke action plan together. I will guide you to guide yourself to attain the results you want to achieve in your personal and professional life.
Are you ready to commit to those changes?
TEAM PERSONALITY MAP
LUMINA CARDS
How does the Lumina mat work?
The Lumina Spark, Leader or Sales portraits’ mat is designed to encourage open perception discovery and can be a hugely useful tool to encourage mutual understanding and open communication.
That in itself can help build resilience and, naturally, a more supportive environment.
In the Lumina portraits:
- “positive” qualities are known as “Effective Qualities”
- on the flip side are “Over-extended Qualities”
Using the main Lumina Spark as an example, there are 24 qualities per side. Every Lumina Spark portrait will show your top Effective and top Over-extended qualities overall.
During a team discovery day, we use the mat and a deck of cards designed for the exercises.
Each side of the mat is a duplication of the Spark mandala.
The team is introduced to all this and then asked to pick say 3-5 cards from the deck at random. Note that the cards contain a mix of Effective Qualities (EQ) and Over-extended Qualities (OQ) (or simply E and O respectively).
If they feel the statement on the cards fits their personality, they keep the card. If, however they feel the statement is better suited to a colleague they can offer the card to that person.
Clearly this can be a sensitive one to do and may need to be managed carefully – this is why it is important that everyone feel and believe the work we do together is a genuine safe space.
After a few minutes each person will have a mix of how they see themselves and how others see them.
We gather them round the mat, standing at their overall top of 24 effective quality. They describe the cards they picked for themselves, and then describe the cards given to them and by who. Important everyone understand this is not a blame game, simply a safe and open space in which to learn. The giver of a given card can then explain why they thought it suited the receiver so well – ideally with encouragement and positivity! I, as the facilitator, will help encourage this to happen.
This prompts for plenty of discussion about perceptions. Reactions may include “That’s not me at all!”, or “Yeah, I see why you think I’m like that”, or “I never knew you saw me like this” – this can be a hugely positive experience and may help build some staffs’ confidence at one level or clear the air in long held conflict.
After a time of perspective discovery, we move onto the flip side – the “Over-extended” side. Again, the process is repeated. Again as facilitator is my role to help manage the reactions here. Ideally everyone will come to understand that having their OE qualities seen and explained out loud can actually generate support and compassion from others in the team to encourage open vulnerability and radical acceptance of support from colleagues.
It may not be easy to start but will prompt and encourage introspection in order to learn, grow, be self aware and develop consciously. Also how to communicate with others.
From this exercise we can move on to discuss where issues or conflict may have arisen, or where issues have occurred with events outside the business, maybe with certain customers. We can unpack who was involved, how they reacted and how they may react better and who they can ask for help with in future occurrences of a similar event.
The ability to visualise communication and behaviour preferences shines a light on points of conflict and breakdown in teamwork
Where people are situated on opposite sides of the mat, it becomes much easier for your team to understand where they “literally” stand on personality differences or needs, and consequently how to shift perspectives to create more positive outcomes.
Note that similar exercises are available with their own specially designed mats and card decks for Leadership and Sales teams