The Archipelagic Approach To Coaching Supervision For Effective Team Leadership Coaching

Written by Jedidiah Alex Koh, MCC

An Archipelago is a collective diversity of community, culture, customs and spirit.

“How do I manage my remote team more effectively?”

“I am having difficulties in coaching my team.”

“How do I deal with this conflict that is affecting other team members?”

These are issues typically raised by team leadership coaches when they are invited to provide team coaching to a team that is looking for greater performance or team effectiveness. The degree to which an organization can thrive in the future economy is directly impacted by the degree of team excellence in driving performance and results. Leaders often just look at the desired result and performance, but this is short-sighted, as results are a by-product of performance, and performance is a by-product of team excellence.

What is team excellence in the future of work?

It is the encapsulation of team communication, clarity of thought, synergy, integrity, professionalism, values alignment, emotional and social well-being, team aspiration and vision. When the team comes together not as individuals but as one singular entity, they embody the spirit of excellence in what they do, how they do it and how they leave a legacy. Team excellence is addictive and promotes and influences other teams; furthermore, it promotes retention and employee longevity.

So why are we not doing more to invest in teams?

Most organizations do not realize the investment and resources they put into assets, structures, technology and systems in their efforts to see productivity and performance thrive. The critical asset that is often neglected and has become a systemic liability as a result of lack of care is the organization's people or teams. The people are the core asset of the business. But when organizations fail to invest proper energy, time, money, space and resources to nurture teams, the teams begin to impact the overall productivity as they become less motivated, experience more conflicts, sense a mismatch in expectations from hierarchies of leadership and face social and political uncertainties.

How should we think about teams?

With a more distributed workforce and leaders having to lead different project teams for different organizational demands, there needs to be a new way of leading teams. Though the core of team building and performance still exists, the way we engage, interact, promote healthy connections and generate progress has to adapt to the way teams operate across time zones, cultures, generations and communication styles. We need a new way of thinking about building teams, engaging them and engendering healthy psychological, emotional and social well-being among them. One of the best ways to nurture teams is through team leadership coaching.

How does team leadership coaching enable teams?

The function of leadership in teams isn’t assigned to a positional leader. Leadership in teams often is a distributed and shared responsibility. Team leadership is the dynamic relationship that teams need to embody when experts from different fields are brought in to work on a particular project. These individuals often are their original team’s specialists or experts; as such, distributed leadership has to exist for effective team performance.

In each team, an assigned internal team leadership coach can help hold space for the team to thrive by ensuring equity of thoughts, ideas, innovation, communication and challenges. As the team leadership coach has to consider a wide array of themes and topics, they also need a coach supervisor to help them in building awareness, dealing with challenging cases and developing self-efficacy.

I have developed a systemic approach to help team coaches who work with distributed teams support their development well. This approach I've coined the "Archipelagic Approach to Coaching Supervision."

The archipelagic approach was inspired by my travels and interactions with the locals of the Southeast Asian archipelago region. The diversity of life and culture there reflect what global teams are like, with their unique diversity and cultures that bloom together harmoniously. This approach is defined as a collective group of inter-harmonizing domains of professional and personal life, allowing each piece to have its own unique identity and systems while finding synergy where possible for interoperability. It’s not about trying to merge or harmonize or consolidate everything but is a respectful understanding and awareness of the value each part brings to the greater whole. It allows for the team leadership coach to find coherence, congruence and correspondence between what they do, why they do it, how they do it and who they are being beyond the doing.

There are seven key conversations that happen in these coaching supervision sessions:

Before-session conversations:

• The team leadership coach’s internal dialogue and presuppositions of the team’s current state

• The team leader’s reflections, thought process, self-talk and expectations

• Team members’ reflections, conflicts and desired state

During-the-session conversation:

• A conversation dialogue space for emergent ideas, thoughts and awareness-building. During this phase, each entity’s assumptions and presuppositions are tested against the conversation's flow and movement. If the conversation is not going toward desired states, there will be evidence of behavioral or emotive responses. If the conversation is moving toward desired states, there will be a meeting of minds, and even if a seeming conflict were to appear, it would be easily resolved with the expectations of the convergence of ideas to move toward a common outcome.

Post-session conversations:

• Team members’ resolution, emotional and social well-being and internal state

• The team leader’s resolution, evaluation of expectations and self-talk

• The team leadership coach’s resolve, internal dialogue and emerging new awareness and assumptions

This approach enables all entities to evaluate their progress, acknowledge and appreciate differences in communication styles and personality, converge ideas with an intention to move toward a shared vision and outcome, respect individual voices while moving in harmony as one and generate a co-created conversation space where each entity takes ownership, responsibility and accountability for the actioning.

The key advantage to coaching supervision is the broadening of awareness while honoring the conversational space. This will allow for a sustainable culture of learning and coaching to thrive. Individually, each has their strengths; collectively, the strength is exponential in potential.