By Linky van der Merwe

When you find yourself leading a virtual team, you will often need to take on the role as team coach to facilitate optimum performance. In order to do so properly, a good place to start, is with your understanding of what a team really is.

Much about teams and team performance can be learnt from the authors Katzenbach and Smith. No wonder that their definition of Teams became an industry standard over the years:

“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

Katzenbach and Smith

In an article: “Organisational Culture” published in the Harvard Business Review, Katzenbach and Smith stated that teamwork represents a set of values that encourage listening and responding constructively to views expressed by others, giving others the benefit of the doubt, providing support, and recognizing the interests and achievements of others. They explain further that teams require both individual and mutual accountability. Teams rely on group discussion, debate, and decision, sharing information and best practice performance standards. Teams produce work-products through the joint contributions of their members. This is what makes possible performance levels greater than the sum of all the individual members, also stated as a team is more than the sum of its parts.

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. The essence of a team is common commitment towards a purpose in which team members can believe. The attainability of specific goals helps teams maintain their focus on getting results. The combination of purpose and specific goals is essential to performance. In essence, goals help a team keep track of progress, while a broader purpose supplies meaning and emotional energy.

In working with teams Katzenbach and Smith have found when a team shares a common purpose, goals, and approach, mutual accountability grows as a natural counterpart. When people work together toward a common objective, trust and commitment follow. Consequently, teams enjoying a strong common purpose and approach inevitably hold themselves responsible, both as individuals and as a team, for the team’s performance. This sense of mutual accountability also produces the rich rewards of mutual achievement in which all members share.

Project Lead as a Team Coach

Having the responsibility to facilitate positive change in teams you lead, whether in person or virtually, you have much neuro-science research to back you up according to the Neuro Leadership Institute. How can this help you to coach teams for optimum performance?

Well, virtual team members have differing skill sets and depending on their background also different levels of experience to consider.  It is important for teams to have the right mix of skills including technical or functional expertise, problem-solving, decision-making skills and interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills include risk taking, helpful criticism, objectivity, active listening, giving the benefit of the doubt, and recognizing the interests and achievements of others.

As a team coach it is good to be cognizant of behavioral differences in the virtual team. There are a variety of individuals with an even bigger variety of personalities. Having a basic understanding of personality types, will help you tailor your communication plans. Remember also that virtual team members may be at different levels of engagement and motivation.

Brain Based Team Coaching

The Neuro Leadership Institute teaches us that there are some brain based principles for team coaching. They are:

1. Establish a toward state
2. Let them do the thinking
3. Focus on solutions
4. Give positive feedback
5. Make them stretch
6. Clarify the important points
7. Choose your level of focus

Christopher Samsa from the Neuro Leadership Institute continues to explain important factors to consider as part of brain based team coaching. They are:

• Collective intelligence
• Collective emotion
• Collective performance

Collective Intelligence 

Collective intelligence is the prediction of the group’s ability to perform well. There is a correlation to how group members are social sensitive of one another, if there’s an equal distribution of conversation turn-taking and even the proportion of females in the group that can increase the collective intelligence.

As a team leader and coach you can help the team to be more meta-cognitive, to be mindful about planning out their work, tracking their progress, and assessing their own knowledge.

Collective Emotion

Collective emotion refers to the ability to empathise and to cooperate with one another. Some factors that come into play are:

• Social regulation – a person’s ability to be explicit about their emotions. For example, if you join a meeting just after receiving some bad news, instead of trying to keep it to yourself, mention it and put it out in the open.
• Mirror neurons – when we perceive some-one in pain, sadness, it fires the same emotions in your brain.
• Social context, if are you friend or foe. A perceived similarity will help, perceived closeness will improve commitment.  If one member shows progress, the whole team will feel they are making progress especially if they have a common purpose and shared goals. Work towards having positive connections and similarity in groups.
• Help the team stay cool under pressure by managing expectations and helping other reappraise.

Collective Performance

Collective performance is about understanding the team behaviour at systemic and habitual level. Look at the culture of the team and figure out if they are generally positive. If they are connected to each other and are they contributing to team performance.

A common tool that many of you are familiar with, is the Tuckman model for teams. The Forming Storming Norming Performing theory is an elegant and helpful explanation of team development and behavior.

Principles for results coaching

The principles to use in order to coach for results are:

1. Self-directed learning – let people discover, find answers themselves, learning something new, making new connections.
2. Solutions focus – look forward into how to solve problems, instead of only discussing problems and issues.
3. Positive feedback to the team and individual members often.
4. Stretch – provide stretch goals that are not always easy to attain.
5. Structure – be consistent with the agenda and format of discussion, it will help to make people feel safe.

Model for Coaching

In their research, the Neuro Leadership Institute shares another very useful Model, called the Co-create Model. Based on this model you need to remember the following when coaching teams for optimum performance.

1. Spend enough time in the Forming stage to establish a common purpose for the team based on the shared vision.
2. Agree on the performance objectives based on the common purpose; they could be business objectives or project milestones and deliverables.
3. Identify the gap between where the team is now, versus performance objectives and the common purpose. This is where you need to take into account the budget available, the project timeline, the team’s experience, skills and emotional status.
4. Explore all possible ways of bridging the gap. This is where the team can be stretched.
5. The Team decides on the best way forward and allocates who does what. Allow the team to discuss how they will manage progress and accountability and when they will meet next to review the actions.

Visit the Neuro Leadership Institute for more information about Brain Based Team Coaching.

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Source: 

1. The Harvard Business Review: Organisational Culture, 1993. By Jon R. Katzenbach, founder and co-leader of the Katzenbach Center at Booz & Company, which focuses on cultural and leadership joint research within client situations, author of “The Wisdom of Teams” and “Leading Outside the Lines”.  And Douglas K. Smith, Chairman of the Board of ‘The Rapid Results Institute’ and author of “On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me”.
2. Neuro Leadership Institute: Managing your team virtually, April 2020