Rhonda M., a senior intelligence analyst, has a problem with the team she is leading, and she is not sure what to do about it.1 A few weeks ago, the chief of Rhonda’s unit asked her to pull together a team to assess the possible secondary consequences of an overseas intervention that was being planned. The intervention would significantly disrupt the channels through which massive quantities of illegal drugs were being moved from the country where they were produced to the countries where they would be sold. Although it was to be carried out covertly, the intervention was certain to be noticed and eventually it probably would become known who sponsored it. The administration official who requested the assessment was especially interested in knowing how the leaders of both the country’s political opposition and the drug cartels that operated there were likely to respond to the intervention. Even a successful operation, he thought, might create problems more serious than those it would solve. Because preparations were moving forward rapidly, he needed the assessment within a month.
Rhonda’s chief gave her a relatively free hand in composing her team and promised to use his considerable influence to free up whomever she most needed. The seven-person team she convened included representatives from drug enforcement, a diplomatic organization, a military organization, and a law enforcement agency, as well as three intelligence analysts with deep knowledge of political and economic realities in the focal country. Because team members came not only from different organizations but also from different locations, much of the team’s work would have to be carried out using electronic means of communication and coordination. Even so, Rhonda decided to ask all members to attend a face-to-face kick-off meeting. It was essential, she thought, that she get to know them personally, that they learn about one another’s special capabilities, and that they come to agreement about how they would collaborate in preparing the assessment.
The launch meeting went well even though two members, the military officer and one of the intelligence analysts, begged off at the last minute because of other pressing work. By the end of the meeting, the team had identified the additional data and resources it would need and who would be responsible for seeking them out. They also agreed on a schedule. The first week would be spent in individual work. The team would reconvene in person for a day at the start of the second week to collate what had been learned, and this meeting would be followed by additional individual or subgroup work. The team would frame the assessment in a two-day meeting at the start of the third week. Members would write their sections during the rest of that week, and then come together one last time at the beginning of the fourth week to assemble the team’s report. Rhonda would edit the draft report and circulate it to members for final review before giving it to her chief for transmission to the administration official. Rhonda made phone calls to the two absent members to give them their individual assignments and then checked in with everyone else by e-mail. Everything seemed to be on track.
The representative from law enforcement, who had seemed to Rhonda less engaged than others at the launch meeting, did not show up for the Week 2 meeting and, more worrisome, did not tell her beforehand that he would be absent. Rhonda thought the work the other members had done to prepare for the meeting was solid, although it quickly became clear that the military and diplomatic members had opposing views about the situation in the focal country and, indeed, about the prospects for success of the intervention. The team did not explore those differences, however, and members left the meeting with new assignments to complete in preparation for the major push to frame the report the following week.
Things turned sour almost from the moment the team convened for its two-day meeting at the start of Week 3. The member from law enforcement reappeared with neither explanation nor apology for his previous absence, and once again acted as if his role were that of silent observer. And what had been a quietly simmering conflict between the military and diplomatic members now boiled over. Everything one of them said was objected to by the other, sometimes with feeling. Other team members occasionally offered ideas for how their differences might be resolved, but those interventions invariably were rejected by both disputants—rare moments of agreement between them. When the team broke for lunch after a morning that had accomplished nothing other than to depress everyone, Rhonda went off by herself to see if she could come up with a way of salvaging a team that, she felt, was on the brink of falling apart completely.
Here are the possibilities Rhonda generated.
1. Release the team and write the report herself. This was her first idea and it was tempting. It was, after all, her responsibility to get something to her chief on time and she had no interest in putting her professional reputation in the hands of people who seemed unable to work together. Besides, the initial homework members had done gave her almost everything she needed to prepare a respectable assessment.
2. Terminate the planned two-day meeting early, send each member off with a specific writing assignment, and then draw on the best of what they provided when she subsequently drafted the assessment herself. She would decide what to do about the militarydiplomatic conflict only after she had read and thought about what each of the disputants wrote.
3. Pause the team meeting, use the afternoon to meet privately with each member, and then reconvene the team the following morning. That would give her the chance to find out what actually was going on with the law enforcement representative and, perhaps, to help him find a way to become more constructively involved. More important, she could practice a little shuttle diplomacy with the military and diplomatic members. There was at least some possibility that talking to each of them separately would help her come up with an option that would be acceptable to both of them. The team could then resume its work on a more solid footing.
4. Take time out from task work to focus on members’ interpersonal relations. Since collective progress on the task seemed to be blocked by personal and interpersonal issues, perhaps addressing them directly would free members up to give more attention to the actual work the team was supposed to be doing.
5. Re-launch the group. She could take a fresh look at the team’s purpose to make sure it was properly framed, and re-consider the composition of the team itself. A new start with a sharpened sense of purpose and, perhaps, a smaller, more focused team just might get things moving in a new and better direction.
There was something to be said for each of these options. But Rhonda saw that each of them also had a significant downside. She was stuck.
Now, imagine that you stopped by her table in the lunchroom while she was pondering what to do. Further imagine that, after describing her problem and the options she had generated, she asked for your advice. What would you suggest?
When I have asked this question of team leaders in similar circumstances, the most frequent responses are either to take over the task and personally prepare the final product, or to deal one-on-one with those members who need some individual coaching. Because you now have read most of this book, however, you just might suggest an alternative approach. Specifically, you might invite Rhonda to review the basic design of her team before doing anything else. Is it a real team or one in name only? Does it have a clear and compelling purpose? Does it have the right number and mix of members for the work to be performed? Are appropriate norms of conduct in place? Does the team have adequate support from the broader organization? You might remind Rhonda that group process difficulties such as member disengagement and interpersonal conflict often are rooted in a flawed team design. Would it be better to focus on how the team is set up than to directly take on the team’s process problems? Rhonda probably would conclude that the design of her team, although not perfect, was basically satisfactory. So some kind of coaching intervention might be helpful. But specifically what should Rhonda do, with whom, and when to get her team back on track?2
The remainder of this chapter explores what has been learned from research on precisely those questions. Specifically, we examine (1) the target of coaching (individual members vs. the team as a whole), (2) the proper focus of team coaching (member relationships vs. task processes), and (3) the right time for coaching (neither before the team is ready for it nor too late for it to do any good).
Coaches help people perform tasks. A parent helping a child learn to ride a bicycle is doing coaching. So is a fitness coach helping a client with a training regime. So is a consultant helping a senior executive improve his or her personal leadership style or skills. Most of the research that has been done on coaching has focused, as these examples do, on individuals. A whole profession of “executive coaching” has developed, for example, in which consultants help individual managers overcome their liabilities and develop their leadership capabilities. Less is known about how coaches can help intact teams make the fullest possible use of their resources to accomplish collective purposes.3
Leaders often assume that if one can get individual members thinking right and behaving well, good team dynamics surely will follow. That is another instance of the widely shared tendency to focus on individuals in explaining collective phenomena. (We might refer to this as the member attribution error, since it reflects the same type of bias as the previously discussed leader attribution error—the tendency to view leaders as personally responsible for outcomes that actually are collective products.) It is one thing to say that some specific individual has a commitment problem (as, apparently, Rhonda’s law enforcement member did). It is quite another thing, and often more valuable over the longer term, to help the team develop ways of working together that engage and sustain the commitment of all of its members—and, perhaps, foster member learning in the process.
To illustrate, consider the leader development strategy instituted by a major financial services firm. Because that organization was increasingly reliant on cross-disciplinary teams for carrying out its most critical work, individuals who would serve on those teams were asked to participate in a team-oriented leadership training course. They were given various tests of personality and interpersonal style, as well as extensive feedback from bosses, subordinates, and peers about their teamwork strengths and weaknesses. And they all participated in group work that gave them the chance to obtain real-time feedback from teammates. Most participants enjoyed the course and reported that they learned a great deal.
What the financial services firm did was good as far as it went. But individual-focused training and development, by itself, is unlikely to help teams avoid process difficulties or to achieve positive synergies. If you want to help a team do well, you need to pay attention to the team. Coaching teams, therefore, can and should have a dual focus: helping individual members learn ways they can strengthen their personal contributions and, at the same time, exploring ways the team as a whole can make the best possible use of its member resources. One-on-one coaching with Rhonda’s law enforcement member might well have improved his motivation and increased his competence in working with others. But she also could have worked with the entire team to help members recognize that someone they had been mostly ignoring might have more to offer the team than they had thought.4
Operationally, what is involved in competently coaching teams? Regardless of who provides the coaching—whether it is the team leader, an external consultant, or team members themselves—coaching does not involve dictating to the team the best way to proceed with the work. The proper function of coaching, instead, is to help the team increase its capability to competently manage its own processes. And, as will be seen next, that involves giving at least as much attention to the actual work the team is doing as to members’ interpersonal dynamics.
Interpersonal tensions and frictions are among the most obvious difficulties that come up in a work team. They are, therefore, the most inviting of coaching interventions. If we could just get members to work together smoothly and harmoniously, the thinking goes, task performance surely would improve. As reasonable as this inference may seem, it is neither logical nor correct. Although serious interpersonal conflicts sometimes do undermine team performance, it does not follow that the proper coaching intervention in such cases is to help members improve their interpersonal relations. There are three reasons why.
1. Interpersonal harmony has a downside. We all have experienced the good feelings that come when members of a team get along splendidly with one another, when everyone anticipates the next group meeting with pleasure. But there also are nontrivial downsides to team harmony. For one thing, teams whose members share good feelings and a spirit of camaraderie run the risk of groupthink (discussed in previous chapters). Dissenting views about what the group is doing may be ignored or squelched—or even self-censored by worried members who do not want to spoil things by raising uncomfortable questions.
Moreover, many groups do well despite interpersonal friction among members. In our research on professional symphony orchestras, Jutta Allmendinger, Erin Lehman, and I found a near-zero association between the quality of members’ interpersonal relationships and an independent assessment of how well orchestras played as ensembles (in fact, the relationship was slightly negative—grumpy orchestras played just a bit better).5 Here is how Matthew Dine, an oboist with the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, described the complex interplay between players’ relationships and the work they do together.6
It’s a whole package. It’s not just playing concerts and having to play great. It’s dealing with everybody. You can tell certain people hate each other. Certain people had a real long history together. This person went out with this person years ago, and look at that person. It’s an intense, intense social scene as well as musical … and, actually, that’s what makes it, I think. No one can come in every day and be good little boys and girls and love each other and say, “Oh, what a good idea, let’s try this.” It’s amazingly exciting.
There is a world of difference, of course, between a musical ensemble and an intelligence team. But the same principles apply: Even though conflict among members and the expression of minority views can generate unpleasantness, they also foster learning and increase the likelihood that the team will come up with something creative.7 Because skilled team coaches know that, they sometimes leave things alone and let the tension remain high for a while rather than rush in to resolve or smooth over interpersonal problems.
2. Interpersonal difficulties may be driven by more fundamental problems. It often turns out that the interpersonal clashes one observes in a team are rooted in flaws in the team’s purpose, design, or composition. In Rhonda’s team, for example, the conflict between the military and diplomatic representatives may have had more to do with the different perspectives of their home organizations than with their own actions and interactions. In other teams, process problems may derive from ambiguity about what the team is supposed to accomplish, from excessive team size, or from an individualistic reward system that puts members in competition with one another for recognition, pay, or promotion.
An unusual example of interpersonal difficulties that stemmed from individualistic rewards is provided by organizational psychologist Jack Wood’s study of a professional hockey team.8 The team, a toptier farm club of a National Hockey League (NHL) team, was plagued by interpersonal conflicts that mystified the team’s coaching staff. It turned out that what most mattered for each player was neither the love of the game nor the team’s win-loss record, but the prospect of being promoted to the parent NHL team—or, alternatively, being demoted to a lower-tier farm club or even sent home. That feature of the reward system was so salient for players that interpersonal tensions among them, both on and off the ice, were inevitable. Worse, there was little the coach could do to quell the conflicts because he had no influence on the parent team’s promotion policies and practices. Any intervention he might have made to resolve members’ interpersonal difficulties could, at best, have generated only temporary improvements. For the hockey team, but also for intelligence teams that operate in flawed contexts, problems are almost certain to resurface until whatever is driving them has been dealt with.
3. Interpersonal harmony may be more an effect than a cause. The common view that good interpersonal processes lead to good team performance is called further into question by research showing that the causal arrow actually may point in the opposite direction. How a group is performing can strongly shape the quality of members’ interactions—or at least members’ perceptions of their interactions. Recall from Chapter 3 the experiment in which teams were given false feedback about their performance and then asked to provide “objective” descriptions of how their team had functioned. Members who had been led to believe that their team had performed well gave more favorable reports about interpersonal relations among members than did members who thought their teams had performed poorly.9
For all these reasons, it is not surprising that the track record of process-focused coaching interventions, whether intended to remedy interpersonal problems or to foster positive team synergy, is shaky at best.10 Moreover, interventions that have been shown to generate gains in performance (such as the Nominal Group Technique and the Delphi method) almost always involve structuring member interactions to lessen the chances that process miscues will divert the team from focused task work—some of them to the extent of eliminating face-to-face interaction altogether (see Chapter 4).
If the proper focus of coaching interventions is not to foster interpersonal harmony, then what should it be? Research suggests that the greatest leverage is obtained when coaching focuses directly on the actual work the team is performing. Studies that have directly compared the performance effects of task-focused and interpersonal interventions invariably show the former to outperform the latter.11 More specifically, our own research suggests that the greatest leverage is obtained when coaching interventions address the three task performance processes that have been discussed throughout this book: (1) the level and coordination of member effort, (2) the appropriateness to the task and situation of the performance strategies the team is using, and (3) the degree to which the team is using the full complement of its members’ knowledge and skill. The coach’s aspiration should be to help a team avoid the process losses, and capture synergistic process gains, for each of these three key performance processes.12 But there remains the question of how and when that is best accomplished.
To make appropriate, well-timed interventions, a team leader must first of all observe the team carefully. What specific problems need correction? What opportunities for improvement lie just below the surface? And how soon should one act? Should Rhonda have taken on her team’s issues with member engagement and interpersonal conflict as soon as she noticed them? Or should she have waited until things played out for a while, giving team members time to deal with them on their own and, if they did not, giving herself more time to observe and reflect before acting?
It is a dilemma. Intervening quickly is more likely to correct a problem before it worsens. But early action also increases a team’s dependence on its leader and can undermine the team’s capacity for self-correction. Intervening later allows the leader to accumulate more diagnostic data and gives the team the opportunity to correct and learn from its own difficulties. But delay also increases the chances that a problem will escalate to the point of intractability, or that a transitory learning opportunity will be overlooked.
Do experienced and novice team coaches differ in how they deal with these trade-offs? To find out, organizational psychologist Colin Fisher recruited individuals who had either a great deal of experience coaching teams or almost no such experience and asked them to observe a video of an intelligence analysis team at work. As they watched, the coaches reported what team dynamics caught their attention and what coaching interventions they would make based on their observations. It turned out that experienced team leaders made a greater proportion of their observations and interventions at the group level of analysis (as opposed to attributing responsibility for what transpired to individual members). Moreover, experienced coaches waited longer than novices before taking corrective action, which gave them additional data to use in deciding how to intervene.13
Fisher’s analyses also showed that it takes some time for coaches’ interventions to take root and affect team performance. Although coaching improved team decision-making processes immediately, it was not until the team had moved on to its next task that performance benefits appeared. That is another reason for keeping teams together: Teams with reasonably stable membership are better able to incorporate and use what they learn through experience than are those whose membership is constantly changing (see Chapter 4).
Teams are ready for different types of coaching interventions at different times in their life cycles. Organizational psychologist Connie Gersick carefully tracked a number of project teams whose performance periods ranged from just a few days to several months, and found that every group developed a distinctive approach toward its task immediately upon starting work, and then stayed with that approach until precisely half-way between its first meeting and its project deadline.
FIGURE 9-1 The Temporal Appropriateness of Coaching Interventions Adapted from Hackman (2002, Chap. 6)
At that point, all teams underwent a major transition that included altering member roles and behavior patterns, re-engaging with outside authority figures or clients, and exploring new strategies for proceeding with the work. Then, following that midpoint transition, teams entered a period of focused task execution that persisted until very near the project deadline, at which time a new set of issues having to do with termination processes arose and captured members’ attention.
Gersick’s research provides a refreshing alternative to the hoary “forming-storming-norming-performing” model that previously dominated training about group development. Specifically, as is seen in Figure 9-1, it shows that different kinds of coaching interventions are called for at different times in the team life cycle.14
When a team is just starting its work, it is especially open to motivational interventions that focus on the effort members will apply to their work. Such interventions can help minimize free-riding (a process loss) and build high shared commitment to the team and its work (a process gain). Good team beginnings are critical because that is when a team establishes the track that will guide behavior throughout the first half of its work. And that is why helping a team have a good launch is an especially powerful coaching intervention.
From the perspective of team members, the most pressing piece of initial business is to get oriented to one another and to the task— getting clear about who is and is not a team member, starting to differentiate member roles, and coming to terms with task requirements. A leader’s behavior at the launch of a work team can establish the team as an intact performing unit, foster collective motivation to perform well, and help the team start functioning on its own. These objectives are best accomplished face to face, which is why it was a good idea for Rhonda to ask her members to attend a kick-off meeting even though much of the team’s work would be done individually and at a distance.
Sometimes leaders ask their team members to debate their work strategy at the launch meeting. That is too soon. When teams are just starting out, they are not yet ready to address questions about alternative ways of going about the work. As will be seen next, it is not until members have logged some experience with the task that they will be ready for a strategy-focused coaching intervention.
At the midpoint, when half a team’s allotted time has elapsed, members become open to consultative interventions that help them reflect on and revise their performance strategy. A midpoint intervention can help the group avoid over-reliance on habitual routines that may be inappropriate for the team’s task (a process loss) and instead invent work strategies that are particularly well suited to the task and situation (a process gain).
Well-conducted midpoint consultations invite team members to reflect on which approaches to the work are effective and which ones are misdirected or simply not working. Even the best teams have a tendency to get caught up in nonessential details and digressions. Patient leaders let that go on for a while and then, when the team is ready to reflect on how things have been going, pose questions such as, “How is that working?” “What’s not helping?” “What do we wish we had or hadn’t done so far?” “What should we do differently in the next half?” The discussion that ensues often turns out to greatly help the team move forward toward completion of its work.15
The importance of deferring strategy-focused coaching until the team is ready for it is seen in a previously mentioned experiment conducted by Anita Woolley that compared two different kinds of interventions, one that focused on improving members’ interpersonal relations and another intended to help members develop a task-appropriate performance strategy. Each team received only one intervention, administered either at the beginning or at the midpoint of its work period. As is seen in Figure 9-2, only the strategy intervention had a positive effect on performance—and it was helpful only when administered at the midpoint rather than at the beginning of a team’s life cycle.16
FIGURE 9-2 Woolley’s Findings about Coaching Type and Timing Adapted from Woolley (1998)
Woolley’s findings further reinforce the wisdom of waiting. In Rhonda’s case, she ultimately chose not to make a strategy-focused intervention with her analytic team. But had she done so, the right time would have been at the end of the second week of her team’s four-week performance period—which, interestingly, is just when she retreated to the lunchroom to try to figure out what she could do to save her team.
Midpoints are not good times for teaching team members new skills. If it becomes clear at the midpoint that the work is suffering because of missing capabilities, it may be better to engage the team in locating people outside the group who can lend a hand than to take time out for members to hone their own knowledge or skills. Reflective learning is better done later, when the group has completed its entire task or has reached a significant milestone in the work.
Once a major segment of the work has been finished, a team is ready for educational interventions that help members draw on their experiences to build the team’s complement of knowledge and skill. A systematic debrief not only contributes to the personal learning of team members but also can help the team as a whole learn how to better deploy members’ talents and experiences on any future tasks. Specifically, such interventions can minimize the mis-weighting of members’ contributions (that is, when an individual’s influence is not commensurate with what the person actually knows, a process loss), and foster peer-to-peer teaching and coaching that can increase the team’s overall capability (a process gain).
When a team has completed its work, members will have accumulated nearly all the information that is needed for them to learn from their team experience. Moreover, member anxieties about getting the work finished will have dissipated—which is important because people do not learn well when they are brimming with anxiety. And, finally, there usually is time for reflection once a task has been finished, which rarely is the case in the rush to wrap up a piece of work. Debriefings can be quite straightforward: “What went well for us?” “What went poorly?” “What resources went unused that might have helped us?” Just posing those simple questions can prompt discussions from which everyone learns—although the coach may need to do a bit of probing to ensure that members’ explanations are based on valid data about concrete events.
The major challenge in leading a team debriefing is to get it to happen at all. Left on their own, members are unlikely to spontaneously explore what can be learned from their experiences. If the team has succeeded, members may be more interested in celebrating than in reflecting; if it has not, they may be driven more to rationalize the failure than to explore what they might learn from it. Even the team leader may be far more interested in finishing up and getting on to the next task (as Rhonda was when she finally turned in the analytic report on behalf of her team) than in spending additional time with a team whose work is done. That is one reason why military organizations make after-action reviews a formal requirement. The leaders of intelligence teams would be well advised to follow the lead of their military colleagues and refrain from declaring work on a team task complete until after members have taken a little time to harvest the lessons that can be learned from their team experiences.
To review: A team that applies ample effort to its work, uses a performance strategy that is well aligned with its task and situation, and draws appropriately on members’ knowledge and skills is much more likely to perform well than a team that manages these processes poorly. Coaching interventions can be quite helpful to teams in managing these key performance processes—but, as we have seen, each one is best delivered at the specific, predictable time in the life cycle when members are ready to receive that particular kind of help. Coaching interventions that are made when the team is not ready for them—for example, raising a question about team norms at a time when members are fully occupied with an urgent subtask—are unlikely to be helpful and may even disrupt a team’s progress.
What about work that is performed continuously around the clock and throughout the year? How can a coach exploit the opportunities for intervention that come at beginnings, midpoints, and ends if there are no beginnings, midpoints, or ends? In fact, temporal markers almost always exist. If they do not occur naturally (for example, through seasonal or biological cycles), then teams or their leaders create them. A manufacturing plant David Abramis and I studied some years ago operated continuously with no natural breaks in the flow of work. But managers at the plant arbitrarily partitioned the year into six-week performance periods. Team dynamics were highly responsive to the beginnings, midpoints, and ends of those entirely artificial temporal periods.17 Quarters that demark financial reporting periods and semesters that organize educational activities in schools have the same character—they are arbitrary but nonetheless powerful in giving rhythm to collective activity. Even though they are merely surrogates for real beginnings, midpoints, and ends, they still create opportunities for coaching interventions.
There are still other times—quite unpredictable—when leader interventions also can be helpful. During the course of a day’s work, for example, members may fall into intense conflict, or become stuck, or embark on an extended discussion of some task-irrelevant matter. An intervention that helps a team deal with developments such as these can head off a downward spiral of increasing frustration and increase the chances that the team will get back onto a more productive path. Indeed, any time the balls go into the air and normal routines are thrown into disarray is an opening for some ad hoc team coaching.18
An extreme version of unpredictability, not uncommon in the intelligence community, occurs when all hands must come on deck to deal with an unanticipated crisis. When the hurricane hits, it is the hurricane rather than the team leader that determines what happens when. That said, it also is true that there usually are many more opportunities than one might imagine for well-timed leader interventions even in fast-unfolding crisis situations. Consider, for example, an operating room team convened in real time when a patient develops an unexpected problem that requires immediate surgery. The team in the operating room—the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the nurses— will not look much different from a team performing a procedure that was scheduled well in advance. The difference is that in an emergency situation there is no time to have the team briefing that many surgeons like to conduct before beginning a scheduled procedure.
Or is there? Which is worse for the patient: a short delay during which the patient’s condition may deteriorate while the surgical team gets its act together, or the risk that an un-launched team may experience failures of coordination that pose a graver threat? Most surgeons probably would worry more about the delay than about the possibility of team process problems. But it may be that there are relatively few occasions when deferring the start of a procedure for a few minutes will have mortal consequences, and relatively more occasions when a procedure that should have gone smoothly does not because of team-related communication miscues and coordination failures.
What if all staff on the surgical service had previously been trained in strategies for conducting a quick launch of a surgical team, and had practiced those strategies frequently enough that they became second nature? Would that make it possible for the team to have a reasonable launch even as members were arriving and preparing for their own roles in the upcoming procedure? And could the same kind of thing be done for mid-procedure check-ins about team strategy, and for quick and efficient post-procedure debriefings? Although I know of no research that bears directly on these questions, there surely are many more opportunities for well-timed team interventions even in crisis situations than generally are recognized. Just because a crisis occurs does not mean that timing becomes irrelevant. Indeed, it may be that the timing of team-oriented coaching interventions is even more consequential in crisis conditions than it is in normal times.
Even though Rhonda provided almost no coaching of the analytic team she led, the team turned out a product that was acceptable to the official who had requested it. So the absence of coaching assuredly does not mean that a team is doomed to failure. But could Rhonda’s team have been helped by some competently provided coaching? Almost certainly. Here, then, are five summary guidelines that might have helped Rhonda help her team.
1. Pay attention to timing. Beginnings, midpoints, and ends matter. Few acts of hands-on leadership are more consequential than launching a team well. And few opportunities for consultation are more inviting than those that appear at the midpoint of a team’s work, when gradually accumulating problems and tensions have slowed progress to a crawl—or stopped it entirely. And, finally, there is no better time for individual and collective learning than after the work (or a significant portion of the work) has been completed and members at last have the time to reflect on their experiences. The best team leaders pay close attention to the natural rhythms of group work and tailor their coaching activities to them.
2. Generate multiple possible explanations for unexpected, unusual, or unfortunate events. When some team member is misbehaving it is the most natural thing in the world to infer that the person has a problem that needs the leader’s attention. When members get into an interpersonal conflict that is polarizing the group, it is natural to assume that the conflict must be resolved before the group can move ahead. When nobody in the group is working very hard on the task, it is natural to want to exhort the group to greater effort. But each of these difficulties has multiple alternative explanations. Perhaps the individual has been marginalized by other members. Perhaps the conflict reflects a substantive difference rather than an interpersonal problem. Perhaps member loafing stems from a poorly designed team task or excessive team size. The best team coaches, like the best physicians, never take the presenting problem at face value and proceed immediately to fix it. Instead, they generate multiple hypotheses about what may be driving the observed difficulty and seek out whatever data can be obtained to identify the root of the problem. And only then do they take action— which, in many cases, turns out to require attention to the purpose, composition, or structure of the team itself.
3. Let anxiety-arousing patterns of behavior play out for a while before dealing with them. No one likes living with anxiety and uncertainty, including leaders who ultimately will be held accountable for how well their teams perform. Although it is tempting to do whatever one can in real time to resolve uncertainties and reduce anxieties, letting things go for a while can expand opportunities for learning—for the team, certainly, but also for the leader. The best team leaders develop a finely honed sense of when to wait to see what develops, and when to immediately address a problem that may become intractable if not nipped in the bud.
4. Coach in your own, idiosyncratic way. There is no one best style of coaching, no fixed set of coaching rules to follow, no complex decision tree that specifies exactly what a coach should do in different circumstances. The key is to do whatever one can, however one can, to help a team minimize its process losses and exploit emerging opportunities for process gains. The best team leaders know themselves well and coach in ways that draw upon their special strengths, circumvent their limitations, and express their personal stylistic preferences.
5. Actively encourage team members to help. Coaching is not a solo performance. In the most mature intelligence teams, regular members also pitch in—sometimes with one-on-one coaching of fellow team members who may have encountered a problem they do not quite know how to solve, and sometimes with interventions that help the team as a whole get over a hump and move smartly forward. Indeed, as will be seen in the next chapter, fostering peer coaching among team members may be among the highest leverage actions a team leader can take to help his or her team succeed.
