Team coaching is distinct from team building, team training, team facilitation, and team consulting. The latter are all valuable interventions in their own right, by the way. Team coaching is distinct in that it helps teams develop and maintain new behaviors and ways of working in real time, doing real work that leads to needed work outputs, during real meetings and work sessions, and with real results — producing long term, sustainable improvements in team cohesion, effectiveness and performance.

Let me emphasize this again: Team coaches make interventions in real time, during real, everyday team meetings and work sessions where real work is done. They do this to challenge teams on how they interact and how this, in turn may affect trust, motivation as well as results. Please note that team coaches do this only with regard to focus areas that the team itself has chosen to focus on after the team coach has collected data during a diagnostic phase and presents the possible range of issues back to the team. As a result, teams have ownership of what to work on, which increases their willingness to change habitual behaviors, ways of working etc. This, in turn leads to better team effectiveness and performance but also cohesion, trust and candor.

Team coaches do sometimes complement this work with bits of team training on key content chosen by the team; they may also facilitate team discussions or retreats, if and when the team asks for this. Individual assessments may also be added if the client so desires.