Supervising Systemic Team Coaching

In chapter 16 of the 4th edition of my book “Leadership Team Coaching Developing collective transformational leadership.” (Kogan Page 2021), I write about the need for more trained Systemic Team Coaching Supervisors.  This year Dr Catherine Carr and myself, supported by a global faculty, are leading a training for those who want to increase their coaching supervision skills to be able to supervise Systemic Team Coaching.  To book on this course click here.  

“Effective team coaching requires someone who can maintain the difficult boundary position of working closely with the team while remaining relatively independent of the team dynamics and culture, and who can be aware of the systemic dynamics both within the team and between the team and the wider systemic levels that the team is nested within. To be able to sense and make sense of these complex system dynamics is almost impossible if one is working alone, but it becomes possible with good quality supervision. 

What is supervision? 

“Supervision is a joint endeavour in which a practitioner, with the help of a 

supervisor, attends to their clients, themselves, as part of their client–practitioner relationships, and the wider systemic context, and by so doing improves the quality of their work, transforms their client relationships, continuously develops themselves, their practice and the wider profession.” (Hawkins and Smith, 2013: 169) 

Coaching supervision has three elements: 

• qualitative: providing an external perspective to ensure quality of practice; 
• developmental: mentoring the coach on their development in the profession; 
• resourcing: coaching the coach on their coaching practice and work life 

to ensure they are adequately resourcing themselves  

(Hawkins and Smith, 2013: 173–74). 

Coaching and mentoring have been areas of enormous growth in the last 20 years (Jarvis, 2004; Berglas, 2002; Hawkins and Turner, 2017; Hawkins et al, 2019). Despite this, coaching supervision was noticeable by its absence in the first 20 years of this new profession. In the early part of the 21st century very few coaches were receiving supervision (Hawkins and Schwenk, 2006), and those who did so were going to supervisors trained in psychotherapy or counselling. It was not until 2003 that the first specific training was offered for coaching supervisors and 2006 that the first research was published (Hawkins and Schwenk, 2006) and the first book specifically on coaching supervision was published (Hawkins and Smith, 2006). 

In the years since the research, we have seen a significant growth in the practice of coaching supervision (see Hawkins and Turner, 2017; Hawkins and Turner, 2020). All the major professional coaching bodies now recommend supervision as an essential aspect of continuing professional practice and development, and more companies are now requiring supervision for all their internal and external coaches. There has also been growth in the amount of training for coaching supervisors; the UK has led in this field, and such training is now being seen in other countries. However, the growth in specific supervision for team coaching and training for supervisors in this area is still lagging behind, although it is beginning to be available in one or two places. 

Supervision is even more essential for team coaching than it is for individual coaching, as it is nigh on impossible for a coach to be aware of the many levels of the team dynamic as well as the wider systemic context of the team. Additionally, the team coach has often been brought in by the team leader or a sub-section of the team, and may struggle to be accepted by the whole team and the team sponsors in the wider system as someone who can be trusted to work in the interests of the greater whole. For the coach to build and maintain a working alliance with the whole team and in service of all the stakeholders requires constant vigilance. Often, I have found that one can be doing perfectly adequate team coaching but be undone as a coach by unseen team and organizational politics outside of the sessions one is attending. 

I have written elsewhere (Hawkins, 2008, 2010, 2011b, 2011c; Hawkins and Smith, 2006, 2013) of the potential dangers of coaches going to psychologists or psychotherapists for supervision and how this can accentuate the danger of the coaching over-focusing on the individual client and underserving the organizational client. There is now a new challenge, which is that those who are practising team coaching are going for supervision to coach supervisors who are individually oriented, and this accentuates the danger of the coaching over-focusing on the personal and interpersonal dynamics of the team and under-serving the collective aspects of the team in its systemic context. 

There is a shortage of skilled supervisors who are trained not only in coaching and coaching supervision but also in systemic team coaching and the supervision of team coaches. 

From Grumble to Gratitude – four steps to align with life’s agenda

From Grumble to Gratitude – four steps to align with life’s agenda

 I was working with an action learning group of very senior partners in one of the world’s leading professional services firms.  They were all sharing how “Time-poor they were”, how their week was over-filled with meetings and incessant e-mails and messages.  Inside me I could feel a small inner urge to join in the competition of who was the winner in being most time-poor!  However, I soon realised that the conversation was creating a joint downward spiral of helplessness, in privileged leaders who are very senior, powerful and very well paid. so decided I need to intervene.  I said: “I have been sitting here listening and wondering how any of us can be time poor, as far as I know we all have the same number of hours, minutes and seconds every day as everyone other being in the world.  What we are all privileged to have is great range of challenging opportunities, so what would happen if instead of talking about being time-poor, we discussed how we were opportunity rich, privileged to have more possible things to do every day, than we can fit in.”  The energy changed and the dialogue changed to how to make better choices among the multitude of possible activities.

I was delighted when they came back a few months later and told me how they had intervened when their staff had complained about not having enough time and told them they were “Opportunity rich.”.

One of the major ways the energy within a  team is dissipated is through time spent in what I have termed BMWs.  This does not refer to the make of well-known car, but the letters stand for  “Blame, Moan and Whine”.  As problems mount up and challenges get bigger, all of us can fall in feeling victims and hard done by and look for someone to blame.  However, the short-term relief that this may give us, is soon negated and then negatively surpassed, as individual and collective victimhood and helplessness sets in.

Often do I hear the following statements as I  work with many senior leaders and leadership teams around the world:

“Our Board are so unhelpful and restrictive.”

“We just don’t have the time to attend to looking at the really big challenges coming over the horizon.”

“Our CEO is so controlling and never empowers us.”

“We lack the resources to do what is required.”

“Our customers keep making impossible demands.”

“If only I could get rid of X, we would have a great team.”

I am sure there are many examples you could add to this list from your own experience as a coach, or as a leader.  Every minute we listen to a person ‘BMWing’ we are supporting their descent into greater victimhood and feelings of being powerless.  Our job as coaches and team coaches is to help people move to ecological BMWs which stand for “Breath, Move and Wonder”.  To help intervene  supportively in this process I have gradually developed a four-step practice, which I have found very helpful in overcoming both personal and professional difficulties and traumas.

1. Whenever a problem arrives in your life or in another’s story, reframe it not as a problem but as a challenge
   Just play back what you have heard but substituting the word challenge for the word problem
   Example:
   A: My Boss never listens
   B: I hear you have a challenge in finding a way to get heard by your Boss

2. Locate the challenge not in a person, or a part or a system, but in a relationship or connection
   Challenges are always relational, for example between two people, or a person and a task or between two conflicting needs
   Example:
   A:  We can’t make a profit by meeting all the customer’s needs
   B: I hear you have not yet found a way to meet the needs of customers and investors

3. See the challenge as the latest generous lesson that life has sent you, to take your learning and development to the next level
   Challenges take us to the edge of what we know and what we know how to manage or respond to.  This is the learning edge which requires us to expand our repertoire of responses, develop new thinking, new being and new doing
   Example:
   A: I never get heard in meetings
   B: It sounds like life is requiring you to  find new ways of engaging with your team to get your message across

4. Find the gratitude in your heart for being given this lesson, no matter how awful and shocking it maybe at the time
   This is the hardest step of all, particularly when we are faced with a major trauma, difficulty or setback.  But it is very helpful in restoring our equilibrium and resilience
   Example:
   A: As a company we are just recovering from the Covid Pandemic
   B: Perhaps we can explore the gifts, lessons and new opportunities that Covid brought to us

Professor Peter Hawkins  May 2023

Dancing on The Learning Edge

Dancing on The Learning Edge. 

The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”  Ursula Le Guin (1989) 

-All Coaching, Team Coaching, Team Meetings, Conferences are most creative when they quickly travel to the ‘Learning Edge’ and discover how to be creative together at the place where are knowing no longer helps and new answers are required. 

I define the Learning Edge as the place where none of the team members has the answer, where neither the Team Leader or the Team Coach, have the answer, but everyone is clear that life and our stakeholders are requiring us to find and answer. 

What helps us travel quickly to this edge, rather than wasting time trading advice to each other’s problems and sharing pre-cooked thinking, are three processes: 

1. Thinking outside-in: getting team members to discover who their works creates value for and what each of those stakeholders value about them, find difficult and need different going forward  
2. Creating future back: Where does the team need to be in 3-5 years’ time in order to double its beneficial impact in the world and create greater value, with and for all its stakeholders, including the wider ecology we all share?  Visioning what success would look, sound and feel like, once we have achieved that. Then addressing the road-map to get there and what are the main barriers and blockages that need to be overcome. 
3. Turning Problems into Challenges and Challenges into  Opportunities: now we have to reframe the barriers and blockages from being problems to being challenges and opportunities.  The great Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote 

“The impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way” 

One simple practice I have for doing this is when people say,’ but you cannot do x in our organization’, I simply respond with the one word: ‘yet’. 

1. Entering the journey together with Open Mind; Open Heart and Oen Will: These are the three pre-requisites that Otto Scharmer recommends in the early stages of the U shaped journey of transformation. 

You can sense when you arrive at the learning edge, because it starts to feel scary – the excitement and anxiety increase and the road ahead is foggy and unclear.  Often at this stage teams can become desperate and turn to the team leader or team coach and imploring ask, “so what should we do?”  This has to be resisted, as otherwise the moment of discovery is quickly replaced by a moment of dependency.   

The next human reaction to resist the fresh challenge that is facing us, is to quickly search for past solutions that have worked before. Here it is essential to be reminded that “what got us to her, will not get us to there.”  New times and new challenges call for fresh new responses.  Here as team leader or team coach we have to quickly block off the easy exits, that will quickly become cul-de-sacs, and support the team in staying on the foggy cliff edge. 

Here we have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, discover what we have to unlearn to free up the space for new learning to emerge, and facilitate processes for generative dialogue, where we can cocreate an answer that was in nobody’s head before we came together.  A good example of such a process is what I have termed ‘Collective Build’ ( see Hawkins 2021: pp371-372 ) 

If you want to explore both your own learning edge and how to help others learn at the edge, then I am running two summer Advanced Retreats for experienced coaches, consultants and leaders in the beautiful setting of Barrow Castle just outside the historical small city of Bath, UK on June 28th -30th and September 6th-8th 2023. Fore more details visit https://www.renewalassociates.co.uk/events/advanced-retreats/