5 Team Coaching Questions to Boost Your Team Performance
Team feeling overwhelmed with low-priority tasks?
Team efforts being duplicated whilst deadlines and quality slip?
How can you lead your team out of unproductive behaviours and get them to perform to their full potential? Could it be as simple as asking them?
5 Team Coaching Questions to Boost Your Team Performance
Leadership Disappointment
Coaching a digital marketing agency owner recently, they expressed their frustration with how their team were underperforming; they found that emails and Slack conversations were distracting their team and hindering their ability to be proactive, leading to their leader feeling disappointed. As they voiced their dissatisfaction, I posed a query; how could you help this team gain greater clarity? The response so often is, ‘I don’t know,’ but after some silence, they responded with; ‘I could ask them.’
What Causes Unproductive Team’s?
The effects of a lack of clarity can be quite profound on teams. As a leadership and team coach, I've found that many teams can find themselves struggling with concentration on their core tasks, and making snap and ineffective decisions that do not align with the goals or add little value to the overall project will lack clarity; direction, strategy, plans, roles etc. Without this information what emerges from team members is a sense of uncertainty, and potential confusion resulting in ineffective conversations, focus and actions.
Human behaviour is often a key factor, not the only one, but specifically as humans we do tend to overestimate and assume without clarifying things for ourselves.
How overestimation showed up with this leader came from great intentions: they’d developed and shared strategy with the organisation, each team had their own planning documents, weekly progress meetings, 1-2-1s, etc. good business practices were in place. However, how team members understood this information, and how they connected with it and owned it, was not fully realised by the leadership team - instead, it was overestimated that everyone understood, but no one checked to see if that was the case.
Case Study of a Team with Unintentional Unproductiveness
Asking the team members their opinion was revealing, and a major theme that emerged was change; shift in the project scope, staffing, unexpected client feedback, etc. resulted in small, but incremental changes to the overall project - that is normal, right? How team members responded to these changes clouded the clarity team members had.
The Client Services team recognised the discontent within the Design team when last-minute changes occurred, it could derail timings quite dramatically. How this team responded though also derailed the team by Client Services keeping changes quiet and updating schedules and plans without discussion. What was missing from these decisions was the essence of why a digital marketing agency existed, to make great work for clients, and their role and responsible for making decision-based they overstepped the types of decisions that they could make.
It became clear that a further theme emerged that challenged clarity relating to on-boarding for new team members. There was a gap in understanding relating to roles and responsibilities, leading to an abundance of hearsay and misinformation, such as displayed by client services.
Although the leadership team was doing a great job of communicating the business vision and strategy to the team during quarterly meetings, and kept them informed of financial targets on a monthly basis, coupled with good business practice for keeping communication fluid during projects, however, it seemed as if there were fundamental issues with the way that this information connected to the team's individual objectives.
Three Focus Areas for High-Performance Teams
When a team is working at its highest level, all members understand their exact role, the steps required to reach the desired goal, and how it all contributes to the overarching strategy. When this level of clarity is present, every team member can be an asset to the collective focus. The example here is what happens when these areas are not present, even when all the best intentions are in place.
A key role for leaders is to create clarity, continuously for the teams - purpose, plan and responsibility:
Clarify purpose: shared understanding of what they are doing what they do and for whom
Clarify plan: collaboratively develop the plan with the people who will deliver the project
Clarify responsibility: share clear definitions of who owns what and the exact expectations
Repeat: Continuously revisiting and revising
How to Ensure Clarity in Team?
With the right focus and structure, any team can achieve their goals and realise their vision. As a leader, it is your responsibility to not only create clarity of direction in the first place but to also be vigilant as time goes on to unearth the ways your team lacks clarity and work with them to improve it. A great way to do that is to ask questions of the team, where in 1-2-1s, team meetings or through surveys, unearth the inconsistency and see them as opportunities to improve.
Questions to Ask When Developing High-Performance Teams
What is the aim of this team?
How can we achieve what we set out to do?
What do we need to collectively do to accomplish it?
As a part of this team, what is your function and who depends on you?
What else do I need to know to do my job even better?
Teams regularly find themselves with polarities in priorities, shifts in directions, and changes to the brief due to unexpected circumstances, as leaders we have o accept clarity will never be perfect, but the more you can create it on your team, the more context people will share in making the hard calls, and the more everyone will keep moving toward a common north star—even if the path is a zigzag.
In a recent article in Brainz Magazine, I shared some complementary questions that would help to keep engaging with your team or, I have a free team workbook, that includes three different exercises you can do to increase your team’s ability to perform collaboratively you can download it here.
