The Structure of a Coaching Intervention

Coaching is an act of leadership. The main purpose of coaching a team is to improve the overall effectiveness of that team. Three key dimensions in assessing this are:

• Productive output that meets or exceeds the standards of quality/quantity/timeliness of the consumer
• Social processes the team use that enhance the future capability of the members to work interdependently as a team
• The group experience that contributes positively to the learning and personal wellbeing of the members

There is an additional factor, often classed as crucial to team effectiveness – the quality of personal relationships within the team. However, I’d class any work done with the team that directly addresses problems with personal relationships to be counselling in nature, and isn’t in scope for this post. In my experience, when the delivery effectiveness of a team improves, the morale boost in the team members has a side-effect of improving personal relationships.

The relative importance of these three dimensions will vary over time, but successful teams always make sure that they are all considered and balanced over time, never completely sacrificing one to optimise the other.

The effectiveness of a team at performing a task is influenced by these three key performance factors:

• The effort a team expends
• The appropriateness of the strategies and techniques that the team uses
• The skills and knowledge that the team can bring to bear

Therefore, in order to have any sort of effect on a team’s performance (beyond the Hawthorne Effect), coaching will need to help one or more of these factors.

There are three important factors to consider when delivering a coaching intervention, and all three must be balanced in order for the intervention to be effective:

• Content
• Delivery approach
• Timing

Coaching Content

The messages that are conveyed during a coaching intervention typically conform to one or more of these three main patterns:

• Motivational: coaching that addresses effort, e.g. inspiring team members to increase effort, or minimising freewheeling
• Consultative: coaching that addresses strategy choice, method selection, helps teams determine locally optimised methods
• Educational: coaching that addresses skills and knowledge gaps

It is important to use the right content to address the specific challenges that the team has. For example, if the challenge is a shortfall in specialised skills needed for a task, providing a highly rousing motivational speech isn’t going to help.

Three Main Coaching Approaches (plus a fourth – “eclectic”)

The reality is that most coaching interventions will have aspects that originate from more than one of these three approaches.

• Process Consultation: structured/clinical examination of interactions from a workflow perspective:
  • between the team and external teams/stakeholders/etc
  • internal to the team
• Behavioural Models: feedback on individual and team behaviours, mainly focussing on relationships and how feedback is given and received; often involves operant conditioning
• Development Coaching: identification of areas that need improvement, along with focussed time set aside for learning / training sessions
• Eclectic interventions: ad hoc interventions, with no specific underlying theoretical model; most commonly limited to personal relationships when coaches aren’t familiar with the specifics of the work the team is doing

It is important to use the most appropriate coaching style / approach to suit the context, the audience and the message. For example, when working with an inexperienced team to improve the effectiveness of their in-flight process flow, it is better to use their real work and their real process as opposed to a classroom styled session with an abstract case study.

Intervention Points

Teams go through different phases as part of them starting, working on, and finally finishing, a piece of work. There are several broad model categories that attempt to describe the team and their approach to work temporally (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_development ). Two patterns that I’m broadly aware of are:

• Incremental (or Linear) Models (e.g. Tuckman)
• Punctuated Equilibrium Models (e.g. Gersick)

The interesting thing (for me) is that I’ve seen groups of people becoming teams display characteristics found in both. For example, I see teams regularly using retrospectives, but for the most part, the improvements are relatively narrow and focussed in effect. However, there are usually a small number of seismic shifts in ways of working – usually as a result of a significant “precipice” being felt. The most common precipice is the realisation by the team that they’re halfway through their estimated (or constrained) timeframe. These events are where coaching can deliver the most impactful benefits and are typically found at:

• the beginning,
• the midpoint, and
• the end

A side-effect of teams splitting large blocks of work down into smaller pieces (e.g. Epics, Stories etc.) is that these events occur far more frequently – each user story has a beginning/midpoint/end set that could be used as opportunities for coaching interventions. I’ve rarely seen coaching interventions at user story boundary, but I have seen them at Epic or Feature level.

Other team processes that also create opportunities for beginning/midpoint/ending events to occur include the use of iterative (or sprint) based development, using a delivery lifecycle (such as DAD’s risk/value lifecycle) etc.

Designing a Coaching Intervention

The design and structure of a team has a significant effect on the effectiveness of coaching interventions. “Well designed” teams gain more value from a coaching intervention, even a poorly executed coaching intervention. “Poorly designed” teams can suffer negatively during a poorly executed coaching intervention. I’ll focus on team design in a separate post. For this post, I’ll assume no ability to fundamentally change the structure of a team to better match the workload.

Looking at the three performance factors, what are the underlying constraints? If a team has a constrained “strategy & technique” factor, then any attempts to change the execution strategy is likely to be met with frustration.

Once you have some clarity on the performance factor you can help improve, pay attention to when you introduce the intervention. Teams at the start of a piece of work are generally unwilling (or sometimes even unable) to have an informed discussion about what their optimum delivery strategy should be – it’s usually better to get started and then make an adjustment at the midpoint event (when they have some actual experience to base the decision on).

Target Performance Factor	Effective	Avoid
Effort	– Motivational Coaching – The beginning	– Consultative Coaching – Educational Coaching
Strategy  & Technique	– Consultative Coaching – The midpoint	– The end
Skill & Knowledge	– Educational Coaching – The end	– Motivational Coaching – The beginning

Once you’ve got a sense of the target performance factor, the timing of the coaching intervention and the key messages that needs to be conveyed, the next step is the execution approach. It’s worth investing effort in explicitly designing coaching interventions (not to mention ensure sufficient variety to keep things interesting for you and your team). However, there are some natural alignments between the conceptual approaches and the content to be conveyed which could help get you started.

Coaching Content	Approach
Motivational	Behavioural Coaching – personal motivation, team camaraderie. Developmental Coaching – focussed time set aside for “kick off events” (such as an Inception workshop or a Visioning workshop).
Consultative	Process Coaching – clear understanding on pros and cons of alternative techniques so a mid-flow course correction can be made.
Educational	Development Coaching – periods of reflection and improvement via a team retrospective, knowledge transfer via lunch & learn sessions, skills acquisition sessions using learning katas.