Leaders are tasked with supporting their team by "providing guidance, setting routines and practices, and creating constant opportunities for group learning." Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Sanyin Siang and Michael Canning outline the three most effective team coaching methods to help leaders foster "accelerated learning and successful outcomes."

Sanyin Siang is the executive director of the Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Michael Canning is the former CEO of Duke Corporate Education.

Why leaders should consider a team-based approach to coaching

According to Siang and Canning, "[t]eams are the engine of the corporate machine." In particular, teams with a diverse set of skills are better equipped to streamline problem-solving, innovation, and executive strategy. In a team setting, workers experience culture in real time, generate learning and development opportunities, and share their knowledge and experiences.

Still, many management systems take an individual approach to coaching employees instead of a team-based approach.

While there is nothing wrong with taking a one-on-one approach designed to improve individual performance and job satisfaction, even the most effective employees are on their own in this approach. "[T]hey can only contribute to the real power of the collective if their managers provide them with quality support and coaching as a group," Siang and Canning write.

To close this gap, leaders can implement the practice of team coaching, which emphasizes team performance and collective impact. According to Siang and Canning, a leader's role in this environment "is to support the team as an organic unit, providing support and guidance, setting routines and practices, and creating constant opportunities for group learning."

The team-coaching approach urges team members to take steps to understand each other's strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations. In addition, it "creates an environment of agency and accountability, with a healthy balance between challenges and support," the authors note.

3 methods to help leaders foster 'accelerated learning and successful outcomes'

According to Siang and Canning there are three tools and techniques of team coaching that are the most impactful for "fostering accelerated learning and successful outcomes," including:

1. Take a problem-based approach

While many leaders have a natural inclination to take over when problems and challenges arise, in a team-coaching environment, leaders should treat problems as "opportunities for real-world learning and growth that all team members can — and have to — take advantage of," Siang and Canning write.

According to Siang and Canning, the Osler Internal Medicine training program at Johns Hopkins employs this strategy effectively. In the program, first-year doctors are expected to "own the patient experience" when they make their rounds. Meanwhile, the more-experienced physicians on the team act as guides and coaches for less experienced doctors.

2. Ask questions

In the second method, which is based on the Socratic-method of teaching, team leaders ask questions to encourage and shape how team members understand scenarios and solve problems. This method "takes restraint and practice to learn how to formulate questions that prompt insights and shift thinking," Siang and Canning write, "but when leaders have mastered this skill, it can become a powerful management technique."

When implementing this method, leaders should consider drafting a list of questions to ask. For example:

• "What have you tried thus far?"
• "What's working? What's not?"
• "Is there a different way we could frame the problem?"
• "Do you have all the data?" "
• What assumptions are you bringing to the problem?"
• "Who does this well? What would they do?"

"When team members respond to these questions, leaders often gain immediate and important insights into how well their teams understand the work, and where additional support may be required," the authors note.

3. Learn from successes and failures

According to Siang and Canning, this method "transforms the work dynamic."

"When team members understand that successes and failures are both considered opportunities to learn in a no-blame environment, they become more willing to test the boundaries of what's possible, to challenge assumptions, and to admit when things have gone wrong," they write. When this approach is successfully implemented, it becomes easier for team members to learn and adapt from missteps, ultimately leading to faster and cheaper failures, and greater innovations.

For this approach to be successful, every team member should be given the opportunity to contribute, since some will likely notice details others may have missed. However, it can take time to identify those details and patterns, largely because they are often hidden several levels down in the organization's ingrained thinking and behavior. As a result, another key to this message is to urge team members to regularly ask the question "Why?"

"Teams today are having to learn how to deliver results in shorter cycles with fewer resources. They need leaders who can help them learn collectively from their successes and failures, optimize their performance, and adapt quickly to changing demands," Siang and Canning write. "Leaders who adopt the approaches to team coaching that we've outlined in this article are well positioned to achieve this, and in so doing can successfully differentiate their businesses by drawing on the remarkable power of the collective." (Siang/Canning, Harvard Business Review, 2/23)