What Is a Team?

A team is a group of individuals who collaborate to achieve common, challenging, and meaningful goals. According to Douglas K. Smith and Jon Katzenbach, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, a team is “a small number of people with complementary skills, who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

Ideally consisting of 5-8 members, a team can effectively make strategic decisions together. When the group exceeds eight members, it often shifts to sharing information updates and deferring final decisions to the team leader. For a team to operate successfully, its members must be mutually accountable, recognizing that effectively working together requires continuous effort and dedication, much like maintaining a healthy marriage.

A senior team (a team of executives leading a company or heading up a business together) is unique in its collective experience and strategic vision. Its members are responsible for making high-level decisions that align with the organization's long-term goals and overall mission.

Benefits of Prioritizing Team Coach

Team Coaching Vs. Group Coaching

Team coaching focuses on improving the dynamics, performance, and cohesion of a specific team working towards common goals, emphasizing enhanced interactions, trust-building, and alignment with organizational objectives. In contrast, group coaching involves individuals who may not work together regularly but come together to develop through shared experiences, focusing on personal growth, leadership, and skill development within a group context. While team coaching aims to optimize collective team effectiveness, group coaching leverages the diversity of participants to foster individual insights and learning, supporting each person's development within a collaborative environment.

When to Use a Team Coach

There are several proactive reasons to use a team coach. When teams/leaders are experiencing:

• Challenging and vital scope of work that requires a cohesive team
• Organizations that could be far more effective with greater connectivity with peer organization where there are disconnects and/or overlapping responsibilities or handoffs
• Tasked with making change across the organization
• Need to better understand how to work more effectively with their stakeholders
• Lack of productivity, engagement of team members
• Lack of mutual accountability
• Reduced trust or conflict amongst team members

We will take your teams through our proven Team Coaching Model:

Group and Team Coaching Offerings