Leadership and team coaching

Abstract

The dizzying challenges from digital technology and artificial intelligence, driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, impact on how we define team coaching, learning, facilitation and leadership development. To achieve leadership and organisational goals in this era of rapid transformation, we need to develop new and more innovative coaching models to suit our human systems. In today’s race to digitalise, we need to grasp the importance of leadership agility - a core leadership and team competence. This highlights the ability and willingness to learn from experience, then applying that learning to perform under novel or first-time conditions. Leadership is seen as an activity that is “distributed” across multiple leaders, rather than inherent in the role of one leader. Distributed leadership and its value to team coaches emphasise the ability to look through a systemic lens at leadership activity, and the potential for more democratic leadership. No employee or leader can have the answers to all the issues that arise daily in large businesses today. For this reason, organisations have integrated team-based structures into their organisational routine. Joiner and Josephs identified five developmental levels in mastering leadership agility: Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist. These levels represent sets of emotional and mental capacities. The chapter also examines team coaching versus other team and group interventions: Joseph O’Connor and Michael Cavanagh’s five considerations for behavioural-based coaching, David Clutterbuck’s competences and five pillars of coaching and Peter Hawkins’ Systemic Team Coaching model.