"Systemic team coaching is a process by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business." (page 60)
Hawkins's "outside in" method first asks about "who the team is there to serve and what those people need and want from the team" (pg. 34) vs. focusing on the team itself and then later looking at client and other stakeholder perspectives as an afterthought.
Hawkins also describes the unique coaching needs of management teams, project teams, virtual teams, client or customer account teams, and boards. From there he discusses how to find good team coaches and appropriately review their work, and how to develop and supervise team coaches. He ends with a section on method, tools and techniques, including a description of the Team 360 assessment process.All of this is wrapped up in Hawkins's hope that systemic coaching will make a difference in the world:
"In serving the organization I need to ensure that the work with the individual or team is not an end in itself, but is enabling that individual and team to more effectively lead and manage the organization through its next phase of development so that organization can fulfill its potential and make a better contribution to the wider world...the current nature of world challenges demands that all human beings think and act in new ways." (pg. 208)
Leadership Team Coaching is THE book I have wanted to see written in the last few years; It has so much potential to guide team coaching practice. I anticipate that it will become a benchmark guide for this emerging field. It will certainly be my benchmark!
Catherine Carr, CEC, M.Ed., Doctoral candidate in coaching, Middlesex University